Competitive Intelligence Terms For Product and Marketing Managers

As product managers (PMs) and product marketing managers (PMMs), you’re probably used to drawing most of your insights from users—their feedback helps shape your product roadmap, marketing strategies, and overall growth. But what if you could learn just as much from your competitors?

Staying ahead in the software world isn’t just about meeting user needs. It’s also about keeping an eye on what the competition is doing. You can learn from their successes, avoid their mistakes, and understand where there are gaps in the market.

In this glossary, we’ve put together key competitive intelligence terms. If you are just getting started, we hope these concepts will help you be more strategic.

A Competitor Battle Card is a concise, tactical tool used primarily by sales teams. These cards highlight strengths, weaknesses, product differentiators, and common objections, giving sales representatives the knowledge they need to respond confidently to prospect concerns.

Battle Cards are most effective when created with input from product and marketing teams. Product managers (PMs) provide insights into product capabilities, while product marketing managers (PMMs) focus on customer pain points and positioning.

👍️ Why it matters

Without Battle Cards, sales teams may struggle to respond to competitors' strengths or address concerns about missing features. These cards provide a clear strategy to differentiate your product, helping sales teams close deals faster and more effectively.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Competitor Battle Cards typically include:

• Strengths and Weaknesses: Key areas where competitors excel or fall short.
• Differentiators: Unique aspects of your product that set it apart.
• Common Objections: Rebuttals for typical concerns prospects may raise.
• Product features and capabilities compared to your own.
• Pricing differences

Example

During a sales call, a prospect brings up Competitor X’s advanced analytics feature—something your product doesn’t offer.

Without a Competitor Battle Card, your sales rep might scramble for a response. But with the card in hand, they can quickly see how to handle the situation: it highlights Competitor X’s focus on complex analytics and contrasts it with your product’s strength—speed and simplicity.

💡 Pro Tip: Use Win/Loss Analysis to enrich your Battle Cards with data from past deals, ensuring they reflect real-world competitive outcomes.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• 🚀️ Win/Loss Analysis
• Hubspot : How to Use Battle Cards in Your Sales Process

Competitor Benchmarking is the practice of comparing your company's products, services, and performance metrics against industry standards or specific competitors to gain insights into where you stand in the market.

👍️ Why it matters

When you live and breathe your product everyday, it is sometimes difficult to understand how your product measures up against competitors. Competitor Benchmarking helps you:

• Identify Gaps: Uncover areas where your product may be lacking features or performance compared to others.
• Address your product weaknesses and consolidate strengths
• Improve Positioning by highlighting your product unique advantages.

By knowing where you excel and where you need improvement, you can make informed decisions that drive product development and marketing strategies.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Product and Features

• Functionality: Compare core features, performance, and innovation.
• User Experience (UX): Evaluate ease of use, interface design, and accessibility.
• Technology Stack: Understand the technologies underpinning their products.

Customer Success and Support

• Support Channels: Assess availability of live chat, email, phone support, and self-service resources.
• Response Times: Measure how quickly competitors address customer inquiries and issues.
• Customer Satisfaction Metrics: Look at Net Promoter Scores (NPS), customer reviews, and retention rates.

Sales Strategies

• Sales Funnel Efficiency: Analyze how competitors nurture leads through the sales cycle.
• Sales Tactics: Examine their use of demos, free trials, and personalized outreach.
• Pricing and Contracts: Review their pricing models, contract flexibility, and discount strategies.

Marketing and Branding

• Messaging and Positioning: Analyze how they communicate their value proposition and differentiate themselves.
• Marketing Channels: Observe their use of content marketing, SEO, social media, webinars, and events.
• Brand Recognition: Assess their market presence and reputation.

Customer Acquisition and Retention

• Onboarding Processes: Ease and effectiveness of their customer onboarding.
• Churn Rates: Estimate how well they retain customers over time.
• Loyalty Programs: Look into incentives for customer loyalty and referrals.

Operational Efficiency

• Scalability: Assess their ability to handle growth and large customer bases.
• Process Automation: Identify how they streamline operations using technology.
• Employee Productivity: Consider their organizational structure and team efficiency.

Financial Performance

• Revenue Growth: Analyze available financial data for insights into their growth trajectory.
• Funding and Investments: Consider their financial backing, investors, and resource allocation.
• Profitability: If data is available, assess their financial health and sustainability.

Company Culture and Employee Engagement

• Talent Acquisition and Retention: Observe their hiring trends and how they attract top talent.
• Employee Satisfaction: Check reviews on platforms like Glassdoor for insights into their workplace environment.
• Leadership and Vision: Understand their executive team's direction and influence on company culture.

Innovation and Development

• Research and Development (R&D): Evaluate their investment in new technologies and features.
• Patents and Intellectual Property: Consider any proprietary technologies they may hold.
• Time-to-Market: Assess how quickly they bring new features or products to market.

Competitor Analysis is the process of evaluating your competitors’ products, marketing strategies, and overall market positioning to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

This in-depth assessment helps you understand where your product stands in relation to competitors and informs strategic decisions.

👍️ Why it matters

For PMs and PMMs in startup and smaller software companies, Competitor Analysis can often feel like a daunting task—there’s never enough time, and information can become outdated quickly.

Despite these challenges, understanding your competitors is crucial for identifying gaps in the market, avoiding costly mistakes, and staying competitive.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Competitor Analysis typically involves collecting data from a variety of sources like competitor websites, press releases, product reviews, and customer feedback. You'll analyze:

• Product features and capabilities compared to your own.
• Competitor messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategies.
• Pricing

Example:

If you find that a competitor’s messaging heavily emphasizes their product’s speed of deployment, while your product is more feature-rich but takes longer to implement, this insight can guide how you position your product against them. Highlight the depth of your feature set to target customers who to customize their solution completely.

💡️Pro tip: Don't just monitor direct competitors—keep an eye on adjacent industries or companies offering complementary products. They can reveal emerging trends and features that might soon become important in your space, giving you a first-mover advantage.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• SVPG - Competition
• 🚀️ The Ultimate Guide to Competitor Dashboards

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is the process of gathering, analyzing, and acting on information about competitors and industry trends to inform strategic decision-making.

CI helps product managers (PMs), product marketing managers (PMMs), and other teams like sales enablement and executives stay informed about competitor moves, emerging technologies, and market shifts.

👍️ Why it matters

While large enterprises usually have dedicated CI teams, in smaller companies, competitive intelligence is often fragmented and inconsistent, with data scattered across different teams and no clear ownership.

However, every company can benefit by identifying opportunities to differentiate your product, avoid costly mistakes, and uncover market gaps that your competitors haven’t filled. It allows you to pivot quickly when your competitors make strategic moves or introduce new features that could impact your position in the market.

Example:

Your product team is about to prioritize a new feature that has been highly requested internally, but before moving forward, you check on a competitor. You discover they've just launched a similar feature, but early customer feedback shows it’s confusing and hard to use.

By learning from their missteps, you can design your feature to focus on simplicity and ease of use, avoiding their mistakes and potentially gaining a competitive advantage by offering a better solution to the same problem.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Competitive intelligence doesn’t have to be a full-time job—it’s about developing a mindset of staying informed and dedicating focused time to it. Here’s how it works for product teams:

• Set up monitoring systems: Use automated tools or platforms to track competitor websites, press releases, and feature launches. This allows you to stay updated without manually searching for information.
• Leverage internal insights: Salespeople often have direct insights from prospects about what competitors are doing. Make it a habit to gather this feedback regularly.
• Schedule focused research: Spend 1-2 hours a month conducting structured competitive analysis. Focus on understanding key differentiators, product updates, and emerging trends.

A Competitor Database is a centralized repository where companies track, monitor, and analyze key information about their competitors.

This includes data on competitor products, features, pricing, messaging, and overall market positioning. By continuously updating this information, product and marketing teams can stay informed about competitors’ moves and use the insights to guide product development and marketing strategies.

👍️ Why it matters

For product managers (PMs) and product marketing managers (PMMs), competitor research can often feel scattered and uncoordinated. Without a Competitor Database, teams may work in silos, conducting redundant research or—worse—not monitoring competitors at all.

A well-maintained Competitor Database ensures that everyone in the organization has access to the same insights, enabling more informed decision-making and fostering collaboration across teams. It also provides a starting point for innovation by revealing gaps in competitors’ offerings that can inspire new product features or improvements.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

A Competitor Database involves adding competitors you want to track and setting up systems to automatically update their profiles with relevant data. This data can come from multiple sources, such as:

• Product and Feature Sets: Track the capabilities of your competitors' products and how they compare to yours.
• Pricing: Understand where your competitors position themselves in the market, and which pricing tiers include specific features.
• Messaging and Positioning: Keep an eye on how your competitors are marketing their products and how they describe their value propositions.
• Market Presence: Monitor competitor strengths, weaknesses, and overall brand perception.
• etc, etc

💡️Pro tip: A good Competitor Database doesn’t just store information—it evolves. Use it as a living resource that’s regularly updated with competitor changes, product launches, and market shifts.

Example:

Imagine a scenario where your customers have been asking for an electronic signature feature. With a Competitor Database, you can quickly check which of your competitors already offer this feature, which pricing plans it’s included in, and which customer segments they target. You might also discover if they’ve partnered with a particular technology provider, giving you a head start on your research and helping you make informed decisions about whether to prioritize this feature.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• 🚀️ Competitor Database with Notion Integration
  

Competitor Insight refers to the actionable intelligence gathered by analyzing competitors' activities, including their product updates, website changes, marketing strategies, and even limited-release materials such as product collateral given to prospects.

👍️ Why it matters

Competitor Insights helps companies stay ahead by uncovering trends, spotting gaps in the market, and identifying strengths and weaknesses in competitors’ offerings.

By understanding how competitors are evolving their products and positioning, teams can:

• Refine product strategies to stay competitive.
• Adjust marketing messaging to better differentiate their offerings.
• Identify potential gaps or opportunities in the market that can be exploited.

🔧 How It Works in Practice:
There are several types of insights you can gather from competitors, each offering unique benefits:

• Product Insights: Analyzing competitors' product updates and feature launches can highlight where your product stands in comparison. It helps you prioritize which features to develop based on market demand or gaps in competitor offerings.
  Use case: If a competitor releases a new feature that resonates with your target audience, you may prioritize its development or enhance an existing feature to maintain your competitive edge.

• Marketing Insights: Keeping track of competitors' marketing campaigns, content, and messaging gives you a sense of how they are positioning their products and engaging with customers. This insight helps refine your own marketing strategy to stand out in a crowded marketplace.
  Use case: If a competitor’s blog or social posts start focusing on a new industry trend, consider how your product might also align with this trend, or use it as a chance to differentiate.

• Sales Insights: Gathering limited-release materials like sales collateral used in prospecting can provide a behind-the-scenes look at how competitors present their products. This can inform both your product positioning and sales strategies.
  Use case: By acquiring a competitor’s sales collateral, you gain insights into their pricing structure or key features they emphasize, which helps refine your own pitch and value proposition.

💡️Pro tip: The most valuable insights often come from a combination of sources. Don’t rely on one channel—analyzing product updates alongside marketing strategies or customer feedback offers a more complete picture of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• 🚀️ AI Competitor Analysis : Generate Insights from multiple sources
  

The Competitive Landscape refers to the overall market environment in which your product or service operates, including all direct and indirect competitors. It encompasses the strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and market positions of these competitors, as well as industry trends and customer preferences.

👍️ Why it matters

As a Product Manager (PM), it's easy to get engrossed in day-to-day tasks like feature development, sprint planning, and user feedback.

However, understanding the broader competitive landscape is crucial for making strategic decisions that align with market realities. It helps you anticipate shifts, identify opportunities, and position your product effectively against competitors.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

• Map Out Competitors: Create a comprehensive list of direct and indirect competitors. Include not just those who offer similar products but also those addressing the same customer needs in different ways.
• Analyze Market Trends: Stay informed about industry developments, emerging technologies, and regulatory changes that could affect your market.
• Assess Competitor Strategies: Examine how competitors position themselves, their go-to-market strategies, and target customer segments.
• Identify Gaps and Opportunities: Look for unmet customer needs, underserved markets, or areas where competitors are underperforming.
• Align Internally: Share insights with your team to ensure that everyone understands the external factors influencing your product decisions.

💡️Pro tip: Schedule regular "strategic thinking" sessions away from daily operational duties. Use this time to review the competitive landscape, brainstorm with other teams, and adjust your product roadmap as needed.

Competitor Monitoring is the ongoing process of tracking competitors’ activities, from website updates to social media posts, email campaigns, and product launches.

This practice is less about deep analysis and more about keeping an eye on what’s happening in real time, so you can react quickly and spot trends over time.

👍️ Why it matters

Monitoring competitors consistently ensures that you’re not caught off-guard by their moves. It helps PMs spot emerging product trends, identify new features being rolled out, and understand where competitors are focusing their development efforts.

For PMMs, it provides real-time insight into competitor messaging, positioning, and marketing strategies, allowing you to differentiate your own product more effectively.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Competitor Monitoring involves setting up tracking systems to follow competitor activities across multiple platforms. Here’s how to start:

• Website Change Tracking: Monitor competitors’ websites for new product updates, feature launches, and blog content.
• Email Monitoring: Subscribe to competitors' email newsletters and product updates to stay informed on their latest offers and campaigns.
• Alerts and Automation: Set up alerts to notify you of competitor mentions in news articles, press releases, or social platforms, keeping you informed in real time.

💡️Pro tip: Instead of sticking to rigid frameworks like SWOT, focus on agile, ongoing analysis. Competitor insights can quickly become obsolete, so make it a continuous process rather than a one-time exercise.

Example:

You notice a competitor has launched a feature your customers have been asking for a long time. Before, your users had no alternative, but now the competitor offers a solution, putting your business at risk. By spotting this quickly, you can prioritize that feature, adjust your messaging, and keep your customers from switching.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• Competitor Monitoring: The Complete Guide
• Monitoring Competitor Emails
  

Market Research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data about a market, including information about target customers, competitors, and industry trends.

For software companies, this involves understanding user needs, market opportunities, and competitive positioning.

👍️ Why it matters

For Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers, Market Research is a critical tool for making informed product decisions, refining positioning, and identifying opportunities for new products and features.

It helps teams stay grounded in real-world data, rather than relying on assumptions or internal biases. In fast-moving industries like SaaS, where customer needs and market conditions can shift quickly, continuous Market Research is key to staying relevant and competitive.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Market Research typically involves two approaches:

• Primary Research: It involves collecting first-hand data directly from users through methods like interviews, surveys, and A/B testing.
  This is where most PMs, PMMs, and designers focus their efforts. While these methods provide invaluable insights into user needs and preferences, they can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

• Secondary Research: Secondary research involves analyzing existing data. It can include:
  • Competitor Analysis: Regularly review competitors' websites, blogs, press releases, and product updates. This helps you understand their positioning, new features, and strategic shifts.
  • Industry Reports and Publications: Access reports from industry analysts, research firms, and market surveys. These resources provide data on market size, growth projections, and emerging technologies.
  • Online Tools and Databases: Utilize platforms like Google Trends, Statista, or industry-specific databases to gather quantitative data on market dynamics and customer interests.
  • Social Listening: Monitor social media platforms, forums, and online communities where your target audience discusses industry-related topics. This can reveal unmet needs and pain points.
  • Customer Reviews and Testimonials: Read reviews on sites like G2, Capterra, or even app stores to understand how customers perceive existing solutions, including competitors'.
  • Academic and Government Resources: Sometimes universities or government agencies publish research that can offer valuable industry insights.

💡️ Pro Tip: Use secondary research to inform and prioritize your primary research efforts. This ensures you're asking the right questions to the right people, making your primary research more effective.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• 🚀️ Monitor Competitor Content and Industry Blogs
  

Product Positioning is the strategic process of defining how your product fits into the market and how it should be perceived by your target customers. It involves identifying your product's unique value proposition and differentiators to create a compelling narrative that resonates with your audience.

👍️ Why it matters

Effective Product Positioning is crucial for both building and marketing your product.

For Product Managers (PMs), it provides clarity on what features to prioritize based on the value they deliver to customers. For Product Marketing Managers (PMMs), it guides the development of messaging and campaigns that highlight the product's strengths and appeal to the target audience.

In crowded markets, especially in B2B SaaS, clear positioning helps your product stand out. It ensures that both your team and your customers understand the unique benefits your product offers compared to competitors.

Example

You're a PM at a SaaS company offering an analytics platform in a crowded market. Competitors focus on complex, enterprise-level solutions. Through research, you discover that small to mid-sized e-commerce businesses feel overwhelmed by these complicated tools and desire straightforward insights.

You decide to position your product as the "simple yet powerful analytics tool for growing e-commerce businesses."

• Product Development: Prioritize ease-of-use features like intuitive dashboards and one-click reports.
• Marketing: Craft messaging that emphasizes simplicity and immediate value to resonate with non-technical business owners.
• Outcome: This clear positioning attracts your target audience, differentiates you from competitors, and aligns your team's efforts.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

• Understand Your Audience: Identify the specific needs, pain points, and desires of your target customers.
• Analyze Competitors: Assess how competitors position their products to find gaps or opportunities in the market.
• Define Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP): Determine what sets your product apart. This could be a unique feature, superior user experience, better integration capabilities, or specialized industry focus.
• Craft a Positioning Statement: Create a concise statement that encapsulates your product's unique value for a specific audience.
• Align Internally: Ensure that all teams—product development, marketing, sales, and customer support—understand and embrace the positioning to maintain consistency.
• Communicate Externally: Reflect your positioning in all customer-facing materials, including your website, marketing campaigns, sales pitches, and customer onboarding.
  

💡 Pro Tip: Regularly revisit and refine your product positioning. As the market evolves and customer needs change, your positioning should adapt accordingly. Use insights from competitor analysis and customer feedback to keep your positioning relevant and impactful.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• HubSpot's Guide to Successful Brand Positioning: Strategies and examples for refining your approach.
• April Dunford's "Obviously Awesome": A guide to crafting product positioning
• Aakash Gupta on Position-Market fit
  
  

A Product Roadmap is a strategic plan that outlines the vision, direction, and progress of a product over time. It serves as a guiding document that communicates the "why" and "what" behind what you're building. The roadmap aligns teams, prioritizes features, and keeps stakeholders informed about where the product is headed.

👍️ Why it matters

A well-crafted product roadmap is essential for several reasons:

• Alignment: Ensures all teams are working towards the same goals.
• Prioritization: Helps decide which features to build first based on customer needs and business value.
• Communication: Provides a clear vision to stakeholders, investors, and team members.
  

💡️ Pro Tip Keep your roadmap customer-centric. While it's important to be aware of competitor activities, your primary focus should be on solving your customers' problems.

Sales Enablement is the process of providing sales teams with the resources, tools, and information they need to sell your product effectively. This includes training, content, and data that help sales reps engage buyers throughout the customer journey.

👍️ Why it matters

By empowering the sales team with the right information and tools, PMs and PMMs can ensure that the product's value proposition is clearly communicated to potential customers.

This collaboration helps in:

• Accelerating Sales Cycles: Well-informed sales reps can address customer questions promptly.
• Improving Win Rates: Equipped with competitive insights, sales teams can better position the product against competitors.
• Aligning Teams: Ensures that product development, marketing, and sales are all on the same page regarding product features and messaging.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Provide Comprehensive Product Data

PMs and PMMs can conduct training sessions to educate sales reps on new features, use cases, and benefits. Share detailed product roadmaps to give sales teams insight into upcoming enhancements.

Share Competitive Intelligence

Supply sales teams with competitor analysis reports and battle cards.Highlight your product's unique selling points and how it addresses customer pain points better than alternatives.

Establish Feedback Loops

Encourage sales reps to share insights from customer interactions, and use this feedback to refine product features and marketing messages.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• Sales Enablement: A Master Framework to Engage, Equip, and Empower A World-Class Sales Force
  

SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a classic business tool used to assess both internal and external factors that can impact the success of your product.

While it may be a staple of business school, in the world of SaaS product management, SWOT offers a valuable framework for thinking strategically about your competition.

👍️ Why it matters

Let’s be real: SWOT is often viewed as something you do in a class project rather than a practical tool.

It can feel too broad and unfocused, especially when you're neck-deep in feature development or go-to-market strategies. But as a PM, thinking critically about what makes your competitor’s product strong and where they are vulnerable allows you to become a more strategic decision-maker.

By breaking down your competitors' strengths and weaknesses—whether it's in their features, pricing strategies, or customer service —you can identify ways to improve your product against your competition.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

When conducting a SWOT against a software competitor, focus on specific, actionable insights rather than generic observations. Here's a breakdown of how to apply each part of SWOT effectively:

1. Strengths

• Look at your competitor’s product features, pricing models, and market positioning. Are they better at a particular function? Do they offer a more appealing pricing structure for your audience ?
• Example: If your competitor offers faster deployment times, that could be seen as a strength. However, PeerPanda's feature of tracking competitor reviews and testimonials can help you identify if customers value speed or if they prefer robust features that take longer to deploy.

2. Weaknesses

• Identify areas where your competitor is struggling. Weaknesses might come from negative product reviews, poor customer support, or missing features.
• Example: You notice from win/loss analysis that a competitor’s pricing is consistently seen as too high for small to mid-sized SaaS companies. You could emphasize your own product’s affordability and flexibility in your positioning.

3. Opportunities

• Use market trends and customer feedback to spot potential areas for innovation. Are there features your competitor hasn’t developed yet? Is there a segment of the market they aren’t serving well?
• Example: Competitor monitoring might reveal that a competitor is ignoring mobile in their SaaS platform. If customers are requesting this, it could be an opportunity for you to prioritize this feature and capture dissatisfied users.

4. Threats

• Identify external factors, like new competitors entering the space or existing ones launching new features. It’s important to spot these threats early so you can pivot or adjust your strategy.
• Example: If a competitor announces an AI-powered analytics dashboard and your users start mentioning it in feature requests, that could be a threat. You might need to speed up your development of a similar feature or adjust your messaging to emphasize what makes your product unique (e.g., ease of use vs. complex AI tools).
  

💡 Pro Tip: It's less about the technique, than the mindset of seeing opportunities when looking at your industry. Spot new technologies or features that could set you apart, and be the first to fill those gaps.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• 🚀️ Monitor Competitor Content and Industry Blogs
• Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World - Marco Iansiti
  

Win/Loss Analysis is the process of examining deals that were either won or lost, to identify key factors influencing those outcomes.

This type of analysis focuses on various elements such as product features, pricing, competitor strengths, and sales process to uncover patterns and trends that impact deal success.

👍️ Why it matters

Win/Loss Analysis is an incredible source of product and marketing insights. It helps you understand which features are deal-breakers, and how you can improve your product, messaging, or process to win more deals.

🔧️ How It Works in Practice

Typically, Win/Loss Analysis involves collecting feedback from your sales team, customers, and prospects. The goal is to understand what factors led to a successful deal or why a prospect chose a competitor instead. You'll examine:

• Key product features that influenced the decision.
• Common objections or pain points raised by the prospect.
• Pricing factors that may have tilted the balance.
• Competitive moves, such as new features or pricing strategies, that affected the outcome.

Example

If you notice a pattern where customers consistently choose a competitor because they offer feature X that you don’t, this insight could influence your decision to prioritize building that feature.

On the flip side, if your product wins a lot of deals because of its ease of integration, you can highlight this more in your marketing communications and sales demos.

🎓️ Want to Go Further?

• 🚀️ Win/Loss Analysis for Salesforce and Hubspot
• Pragmatic Institute: Understanding Win/Loss Analysis