Know Your "Enemies" — A Practical Guide to Competitive Intelligence

The Customer-Obsessed BS and Why Competitors Matter

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Oh, man, those quotes are like the bane of my existence. You see, you see these people usually on LinkedIn, and they’ll just be throwing out these Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma quotes. You know, just, oh, we’re. You don’t. You. You don’t need to think about your competitors. You should be customer obsessed. And I think that’s such a grand thing to think about. You know, I think mostly it’s like a. It’s used almost as a. As an excuse to not do. Do something, not to spend resources on something. It’s used almost in a way to make people feel better about them already not spending a bunch of time or energy in a specific topic or function of their business. The reality is, you know, just like so many things in business, you can have both There’s a gray area right there where you can be thinking about customers and you can be thinking about competitive threats. And I would also argue that thinking about competitors is thinking about your customers in such a way. Because right now there are just so many, especially if you’re in the B2B SaaS world like I am, there are so many options out there for buyers regardless of the category that you’re playing. Even if you’re trying to create a new category, there’s always going to be alternatives. And so you always need to be thinking about, okay, if somebody’s not going to be using the solution that I’m selling, what would they be using instead? It could be a direct competitor who does a similar kind of, you know, solves a similar problem to you. It could also just be, you know, like Excel or Google sheets or you know, like whatever kind of like status quo technology that people are using to solve a problem in a really like, rudimentary way. All those things fall under the umbrella of competitive intel. And so whenever I hear people thinking, you know, trying to, you know, quote these big behemoth CEOs, that’s usually the thing I think about. But also something else to consider is that they’re playing a completely different game than most. I would say like 99% of other companies out there, you know, like, these are like trillion dollar companies that are like monopolies. Jack Ma with Alibaba, Jeff Bezos with, with Amazon. And you know, for that it’s just not a remotely similar business as like, you know, CRM or B2B Data Company or accounting software or you know, like, it’s just not. And so, you know, I think it’s okay to kind of, you know, parse through and like take like little bits of information to kind of inspire you. But should that like completely dictate how you run your entire business? Because the Amazon CEO said something? Eh, probably not.

Louis: Is competitive intelligence just for tech B2B SaaS, because obviously there’s a lot of the loudest marketers in the world at the minute are B2B SaaS marketers, right? Fuck you. It’s everywhere. Unlike B2B, SaaS is not the center of the universe. Yes, software is hitting the world. Whatever, whatever. But you know, most people listening, I mean, a lot of people listening wouldn’t be in that industry. So is it helpful for them as well?

Competitive Intelligence Beyond B2B SaaS

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Oh my God, yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. At the end of the day, like we’ve, we’ve slapped a really like, nice label on it. Calling it competitive intelligence. And we’ve made a nice little career out of ourselves. But at the end of the day, most business owners, small business owners too, like, like if I go to like to my local movie theater into just downtown in Vancouver, Washington, I’m sure they’ve done some competitive intelligence on the other movie theaters that are in the area. For example, I just posted this on LinkedIn earlier today. There’s in any kind of like downtown, like metro region, you’re going to have multiple businesses that are fulfilling similar needs for their audiences. So for example, I have two movie theaters that are less than a mile ap from each other. One is Regal Cinema and they’re playing all of the, you know, new releases that you, that you’d get. So like Oppenheimer Barbie, Mission Impossible, like all those big movies they’re going to be playing. There’s also another movie theater, Kiggins Theater, and they play classics, indie movies that don’t typically get like major massive releases. They do film festivals. And so that’s, you know, they see Regal Cinema coming in. They’re like, all right, let’s. I think this is kind of their special specialty. So like, let’s try to niche down and go in a little bit of a different direction. We’ll try to differentiate a bit. Another great example is I have two bookstores that are less than a mile apart from each other. One is kind of similar to that Regal Cinema where they’re all the new popular releases are coming out. You can get them there. There’s really like a no frills. It’s just like you think of a bookstore, this is a bookstore. Then there’s also this other bookstore, it’s called Birdhouse Books, and they sell used books exclusively as well as, you know, they host community like book clubs, that kind of a thing. So they really lean into that area. And I’m sure, you know, when either of them opened up their business and they’re thinking about how they want to go about things, they’re thinking about their competitor, you know, and how can we fulfill a different need for our audience in this area? And so again, you know, it’s I think depending on the business that, that you’re working for and that in the solution that you’re trying to sell, you know, you might not be like a competitive intelligence practitioner, but there so many applications to competitive intel regardless of the business that you are running. And you’re not always a product marketer. When you’re thinking about this, you could be a founder, you could be a product manager. You could be in sales. And so there’s a lot of different applications to the profession of competitive intelligence, not just specific to B2B SaaS.

Louis: So if you had to define in very simple terms competitive intelligence as a discipline to someone who’s a true idiot, right. Five year old IQ like myself, like briefly, how would you define it?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: I would just say it’s understanding who your alternatives are and how you differentiate. That’s it.

Louis: All right, so maybe for what I want to bring you on is kind of a step by step, I’m very curious to know how you do it day to day, but also trying to keep in mind that folks listening might not be in tech, might not have the know how that that we have that you have. So trying to like apply that to folks who might not be in tech. But I’ll make sure of that when I question you. But before that, maybe let’s define key terms because I, I feel like there’s a few that we really need to be clear on. So direct competitors, indirect competitors, alternatives or whatever is the spectrum that you’ll define. So maybe let’s define each.

Defining Competitors and Threat Assessment

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: It’s funny too. I think language is important, but at the end of the day I think it, what’s most important is just let’s, let’s start with just like the foundation, which is competitors. I think that we use language in a lot of cases to downplay who our alternatives are. Right. But in most cases a competitor is a competitor. A competitor is somebody that, or something that somebody can use instead of you. They can essentially replace you or they can take business away from you or, or you can replace them. You know, that’s kind of the dynamic that I’m thinking about. And of course you can go significantly deeper. You can think about, okay, who are our most direct competitors? The people who are most impacting our business or impacting revenue on an annual basis. Who are we running into the most? Who are the people that most associate with us? Those are like direct competitors. Then you know, if you’re really thinking more deeply about it, then you can go into tiering your competitors. And when I talk about tiering, it’s really just talking about again, assessing like the level of threat for all of these different entities. And so direct competitors, again, that, that’s probably like tier one. And so they have the most, the most impact on revenue. If you have a tier two, that could be even smaller competitors, right. That don’t have as much impact or it could be competitors that are larger. But you’re just, and you’re not quite there yet. So, you know, maybe you’re a CRM, you’re a specialty CRM for, I don’t know, idiots. For idiots. Exactly. You’re a CRM for idiots. That’s your target audience. There’s another CRM for morons. They’re your direct competitor, Salesforce. Even though they’re the biggest, you know, most.

Louis: Well, morons actually,

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: even though Salesforce, even though Salesforce is the most well known CRM, they might not be your direct competitor. You know, it might be this CRM for morons is actually your direct. And you. And you hear about them the most. I think that’s one of the biggest misconceptions is just because somebody has the biggest presence or market awareness within a specific category, they are your most direct competitor. And that’s not the case. The most. What’s, what’s really important is again how often your customers or your target audience are associating a specific competitor with you. So that’s, that’s one way to kind of think about competitors. Yeah.

Louis: Okay, so let’s pause here because it’s a lot of interesting stuff. So. So you like to tier. Tier them into like. Yeah, different tiers. Tier one, tier two. And you talk about the threat, right. Which is a very warlike type of words. Right. In vocabulary, which I fucking hate. I’m not saying it’s your fault or anything. I understand exactly why you’re saying this, but just let me just step on my soapbox for just a second to complain about it and say that business is not that fucking serious and that, you know, there’s some real fucking worlds out there that are way more threatening than the little shit we do every day like CRM. But anyway, I know you agree. I’m not, it’s not about you at all. I’m just, I just wanted to complain because I like to do that. So going back to what you said, so tier one, tier two, tier three, et cetera, et cetera, you said how you classified them based on how often customers are associating them with you. So how do you find that out?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Different ways you can do that. If you have budget and you have a sales team, which all of the companies that I work for have had both of those things, then you can usually get some kind of like a call recorder tool or in most cases they already have something like that installed. And so I think the most like well known brand for this is Gong. But there’s a lot of other tools for this at this point. I think the call recording kind of software has definitely spread out quite a bit. There’s a lot of other companies that can offer this at a more affordable rate. And so if you’re a startup, I definitely think that that’s something that you should look into. But with a lot of these tools you can create. Oh, go ahead.

Louis: No, no. But if we remove the tech part of it, if we boil it down to the basics, which it’s basically when your sales team are talking to people, how often are other competitors in the vague sense of the world are mentioned?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Exactly, exactly. It usually is pretty straight up and transparent too. People will just ask you straight out the gate, hey, so like how are you different from so and so? And the reason they ask that is because usually a lot of companies aren’t very good at differentiating or calling out their competitors directly. A lot of companies think. I think the advice that you would typically see is don’t talk about competitors because it just gives them unnecessary attention over you and the solution that you’re selling. And that is such a backwards way of looking at things. Especially now when everybody has access to essentially infinite knowledge with just like a Google search and nobody is just going to go out and spend money without double checking and doing some kind of research about you. The category alternatives like that is something that everybody does. There was some kind of, there was a research study that I think it was G2 shared it recently. They’re a mark, a software marketplace review platform. And they said something along the lines of how the average buyer, they’re evaluating three to four solutions for every buying decision. And so it’s never just you that somebody is evaluating. They’re evaluating you, they’re evaluating then two or three additional platforms. And so if you can go out there and you can address head on why you’re different from some of these competitors, you can actually help shape the narrative and shape the opinion of the buyer right out the gate. And that’s definitely a position that you can be in. You can actually, people don’t know this, but you can position your competitors. You don’t have to wait until your competitors can go out and position themselves. You can actually have a say in shaping that opinion or that narrative. And so that’s definitely a big piece. If you can go out there and do that correctly, then you have a huge advantage over any other alternative.

Louis: Okay, so to go back to like how often they are associating us, you categorize how many times clients have mentioned that and all of it. Now when you have a sales team, it’s easy Ish. Right. Easier. Easier if you don’t have a sales team. Let’s say, you know, if we get out of tech. You mentioned bookstores and cinemas and stuff like that. How do you know? Well, what are the threads out there?

How to Find Your Real Competition

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, just Google whatever your category is, whatever near me. If it’s, if it’s a local business. That’s what I mean. You have to put yourself into the shoes of your ideal customer. And so what are they doing to kind of find. What would they do to find you if you don’t have a sales team, if you’re not like just selling tech or whatever, then you can just Google whatever category it is and see what comes up. This is exactly what your, your customers are doing and, or you could just do again, similar searches. That’s, this is what, you know, SEO is completely based off of. You know, it’s about coming up when people are searching for terms that are related to your business or the things that you sell. So do that. Put yourself in the shoes of a customer. What are they doing when they’re looking for the thing that you sell. And once you do that, then you can kind of start to see, oh, okay, this is coming up. Which it looks like they sell. Also a similar thing to the thing that I sell. Oh, this is coming up now they, it’s a little bit more of a indirect thing. I don’t know if there would be an actual threat there, but I mean you can get pretty like, it’s not like a crazy technical exercise. You can just. Again, I think putting yourself in the position of your ideal buyer is the best kind of situation that you can do.

Louis: Okay, so I’m searching for cinemas near me, right. I live in Dublin, Ireland, just for context. So we are still 20 years behind in terms of everything. So Google just arrived last year. So very lucky to have electricity on Google since, since last year. But when I’m googling cinemas near me. So imagine, let’s imagine that I own cineworld Dublin, which is in the city center of Dublin, right? Dublin 1. So really in the city center, downtown as you say, on the other side of the pound. And I just googled cinemas near me. And now I see, okay, there is like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, around 20 that shows up on Google. And if I look at the map, they are all within, let me just tell you roughly, I would say 2 miles radius, right? So that’s the obvious thing, right? We compete against. Those are direct competitors, right. So how do I assess whether some of them are more threatening?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Than others from this one thing you could do. If I were, if I were googling stuff, I would then go to see Google reviews or just try to figure out a way. Like if you can figure out what people are saying then about their experience with those other movie theaters or whatever the competitor is that you’re looking into, that’s the next piece. Okay. Like, so. So you can. The first step is finding out, okay, what makes sense to look into next, right? Like, what are people naturally getting pointed to, but then, like, what are people actually? What do they think about this place? You could find that. Okay, yeah, they’re playing all the same movies, all the new release. But, oh, wow, the staff really sucks. It sounds like they’re, you know, they don’t really move very quickly. They’re only hiring like the teenagers from like the local high school. They don’t know what they’re doing or whole, hey, hey, maybe the prices for the movie theaters are really great, but actually like the concession stance, oh my, I can’t buy like a drink or a popcorn for less than like $30. You know, like, then you can start to kind of get a sense for strengths and weaknesses. When you actually start to read into some of like the customer feedback or if there’s no customer feedback, that’s another thing. All on its own, it means. Okay, got. So that tells me if there’s a movie theater in downtown Dublin, Ireland that has no reviews, nobody’s talking about it, then, okay, they’re probably not going to be a massive threat. Probably still keep them on your radar, but that’s probably not going to be something that you need to be too concerned with if nobody’s talking about it or has an experience with it. Right?

Louis: So when you talk about the radar to keep on your radar, obviously it’s a way of analogy or whatever in the fucking, oh, I have a radar.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: I have handheld radar in my back pocket right now. And anytime a competitor breathes and I get a little buzz and I know about it, don’t you worry about that

Louis: might vibrate a lot. So in that context, and what is a good radar system for it, how do you keep an eye on other cinema around your other movie theaters around you, for example?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: This totally depends on the individual, you know, Like, I think again, if we’re going to keep with this like whole cinema kind of scenario, then we’ll move on soon. Or can we move on from the cinema? So, yeah, there’s a couple of different ways, right. I think that if you are the type of person who you Regularly, like you have your ear to the ground, you are on all this like the social media websites, you’re regularly talking to customers, then you don’t, you probably don’t need as much of a quote unquote radar, right. Because you’re in it already. You’re talking with people, you’re where your customers are. You see what people are talking about. You’re in communities of where your customers are hanging out. You already kind of understand what’s going on. And so when somebody talks about your competitors, you’re going to see it. There’s also people out there who, it’s not really their thing. They don’t really want to be like out like on LinkedIn all day or like trolling different communities like where people like that’s just like not their, their thing. There are tools that are out there that can help aggregate different, you know, like updates to your competitors website, like to specific domain websites where they can share different posts from your competitors or advertisements and they can put it up in a specific feed for you. So there’s tools out there you can buy for that. There’s also free options out there that you can configure it to a way that works for you. Like Google Alerts is one way that you can do that for free. You might get a lot of noise at first and so you’ll need to tweak it over time to make sure that it’s actually relevant for you. But that’s the other piece too. You have to understand that just because like your competitor does one thing, it’s not every movement is valuable. You know, there is a lot of noise out there. This kind of concept is, you know, it all is based on, you know, this idea that anything that your competitors do are valuable is valuable or it’s right. And so that’s the other thing to keep in mind when you are looking at what your competitors are doing. They’re just like any other business out there. They are going to make a ton of mistakes. They’re going to do some things right, but they’re going to do a lot of things wrong. And so that’s, I think that’s the big takeaway too. Just because you’re paying attention to like what your competitors are doing doesn’t mean that you should go out and do the exact same thing or that you should even spend another second thinking about the fact that they did a certain thing. And so having that kind of frame and is really, really important when you’re actually keeping an eye on your competitors.

Louis: Yeah, especially around pricing and stuff. But. So let’s go back to a world you’re more familiar with, right? Which is tech, B2B, SaaS, SaaS, software, whatever the fuck you want to call it. You’ve done that thing a few times. And by thing, I mean you’ve started at a company and you’ve basically built the competitive intelligence kind of team or stack or process or whatever you want to call it, program from scratch. So what I’d like to do with you right now is basically try to understand how you do it. If you were to start over again in a company that doesn’t have this type of knowledge really well set out and laid out and whatnot, what should people do in a very lean way, like the Most effective, the 80, 20 type of actions, starting with the first thing you do, right? Like what is you come in, what is the first thing you do or that you would recommend folks inside those companies to do?

Building Your First Competitive Intelligence Program

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, great question. So the way that you would start out a competitive intel program, or if you’re getting hired as a competitive intel practitioner, it’s not that different from, you know, starting out in any other role. You want to talk to a lot of different people and try to understand from their perspective, like, where’s the category moving in your opinion that we’re playing in? Where do you see it? Like in the next three, five years, some people that you’re talking to aren’t going to really have as much of a, an opinion on that. You know, if you talk to like a, just like a, an account executive, they won’t care as much or have as much of an opinion. But you know, the VP of product, the VP of sales, you know, the founder, CEO, like they’ll have big opinions on that. And that’s going to be really important for you as you are navigating and trying to understand what your competitors are actually doing and how you’re moving and weaving your way through the landscape.

Louis: So what’s your favorite question to ask them? Let’s say you talk to folks internally or whatever or, or externally. Like, what’s your number one question?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: I just like to ask them, who do you think our biggest competitors are? And then them answering that will, you’ll start to understand, you know, after you speak with like, you know, seven, eight, nine people, then you’ll start to get kind of like a recurring level of a recurring number of, you know, competitors or familiar names are going to start popping up and then you’ll be like, okay, like, well, there’s something about this that I’M going to need to like, look at, look into and, and try to make sure that these people that, you know, we have our eye on these people. But in either case, once you do those things, you start talking to your colleagues. The one thing here, let me back up a little bit and just say that I think that everyone is doing their own kind of competitive intel before you even get there, right? Like this is just kind of a naturally a thing that people do. They compare themselves with something else that’s out there, even if it’s not a super formal, like you know, a butterfly quotes like competitive intelligence. They’re looking and they’re like aware of like who their competitors are and who they’re being compared to. And so the important thing that you do as a competitive intel, as a formal competitive intel practitioner, the thing that you should do is try to consolidate that conversation. Instead of the product management team, you know, conducting their own competitive intelligence and coming up with their own conclusions by themselves, you know, separate from the sales team, separate from the marketing team. Again, everybody is conducting these types of analyses on their own in an informal way. And so your first job is to consolidate all of that so that there are legitimate truths that you can then agree on, align on, and then move forward with. And so that’s, I would say the biggest task first is understanding what’s already been researched, how are they researching it and then making sure that every, everybody is on the same page moving forward after you’ve been hired. You know, I think the, the consistent thing that I’m hearing from competitive intel practitioners is that most people think when they are hired that they are going to own all of the research when they get hired and they’re going to be the person who knows everything about every competitor. And that’s just not the case. Everybody is going to still do their own research. They’re going to be interested in comparing in their own way. And that’s still really important. But then it’s your job as the competitive intel practitioner, then bring that information, that insight, whatever, back into the fold so that everybody knows, you know, what’s been researched and what the actual truths are. So I think that would be the big, you know, first big initiative as a competitive intel practitioner is consolidating that conversation.

Louis: When you ask someone internally, what do you think are our biggest competitors? And they say nothing, because there’s no one or nothing. Nothing does what we do. What do you say?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Well, usually people don’t say that when I feel like that’s one of those things where like Again, people will front online, they’ll say one thing, but then when you’re actually talking to them about their business, they say a completely other thing. And so that’s. Honestly, I’ve never heard that internally like, that, oh, we don’t have competitors. They might get fluffy with language like you kind of already talked about and be like, oh, well, we don’t have competitors, but, you know, we do have alternatives. I’m like, dude, that’s the same. That’s the same thing. Like, you know what I’m talking about. But to be honest, like, really, like, everybody knows that there are other options out there. And so that’s the recurring thing for sure.

Louis: What’s your favorite format to start consolidating all of that research? Like, if you had to pick your. Go to one pager or whatever you want to call it, to start consolidating, to start showing some wins internally and say, you know, making sense of all of this, what would it be?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: That’s a good question. You’re looking for like a, like an asset or like some kind of like a deliverable or something like that.

Louis: Yeah.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Okay. I mean, at the end of the day, like, I think that the first thing that you should do is to create some kind of like a map of your landscape that addresses and kind of categorizes all of the different threats and explains why they’re threats and to what degree they’re threats and just kind of like lays them all out and almost like a profile kind of way. This is, this isn’t as much, you know, I think that typically the competitive intel, it’s usually simplified to like delivering battle cards, which is like a term that’s like an asset just for sellers. So they understand, okay, here’s how I can compete against a certain company. Here’s like our positioning, messaging, strengths, weaknesses, whatever. And I’m not talking about battle cards here. I’m talking about like a profile where you can kind of lay out, like I said, all of these kind of fundamental details about your different competitors, their strengths, their weaknesses. And it’s more of like a high level kind of an overview. And then you have recommendations based off of how you believe that you should compete against them. It could be like from a product perspective, it could be from community perspective from like, you can just simply outspend them if you have a ton of budget. And so that’s typically how I would advise starting things out, because then once you have a good understanding of how, you know, your entire competitive landscape is laid out and everybody also agrees that’s the important piece that everybody agrees and sees, like your logic, then you can move forward and actually start putting a lot of your recommendations into action.

Louis: So to give you a real example of a few years ago, when I was working at hotjar, I was essentially. I started as a content marketer, and then I essentially became a product marketer, even though I didn’t like the term, still don’t like it, but that’s another topic, right? And one thing, the biggest thing I’ve been involved in was repositioning hotjar and really making sure that we picked the right threats and all of that. So when we did, you know, some market share analysis, what we found out was that we were, by a long mile, number one in the category, right? So by a long mile, twice as many users, way more paying customers than anyone else. And what we found was our biggest competitor in general was only using Google Analytics, right? So that was the biggest finding was that like, basically there was no massive threat from behind us in terms of the actual category. That was like behavior analytics or whatever you want to call it. The biggest thing was only solely relying on this web analytics, simple web analytics stuff without seeing what people were doing on the website, right? So essentially we did that stuff. Now, we were leaders, and it was way I found it, competitive intel was very easy because of that, right? We were leaders, and so it was kind of easy to follow what was going on and whatever. Now let’s take the scenario of we are not leaders, right? And even if we like to invent a new category, subcategory, whatever the fuck, let’s be objective. Well, not leaders, right? Let’s say there’s bigger players and it is the way it is. So we create a map of the landscape. How does it look like? Obviously this is a podcast, so it’s difficult to show things, people listening, you know, if they have to close their eyes and visualize how this map looks like. How does it look like?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, that’s a good question. So let me think from like, I mean, you plot it in like kind of a grid kind of a form. That’s how I’ve done it in the past. I mean, if you think of like a G2 grid, that’s typically how I replicated it in the past. You have some kind of, like a product kind of access, which is, okay, how mature is the competitor’s product compared to ours? Again, assuming that we’re playing in the same category. If, like, what was hotjar’s category?

Creating a Competitive Landscape Map

Louis: Well, that was it. Like, that’s a Bad example, in a sense that the category was consolidating, was very messy, was heatmaps at first, right. But then everyone started to add more than the heat maps. But at first, heat maps, let’s just. Heat maps. Let’s just say heat maps.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, yeah. So then you’d be like, okay, all of the. In the heat maps category, you know, on one axis you’d have just product complexity, let’s say. And you know, so the most basic one would have like a. Would be on like a 0 or 1 2. You know, that’s kind of like a very minimal kind of product in the heat map category. Then you have the other ones that are really, really well known, very in depth. It’s for like the heat map experts, right? So that’s like the 8, 9, 10. And you can, you know, a lot goes into, you know, figuring out exactly where you align on that. You’d have to put together some kind of like, feature comparison to figure out, okay, like, what is it that, like, in order to be a heat map tool, what are the fundamental features that you need to have? And then what are some of the extras like, that would get you even a bit further ahead? Like, again, talking to the heat map experts, right? The people who really know their stuff, the customers that are really advocating for this category, what are like the bells and whistles that they love that they need to have in order to really excel within this category? Okay, the products that have that is going to be an 8, 9 or 10. And then outside of that, you also have a different axis that’s probably like around like the way G2 calls it is market presence. And I think that’s a fair way of calling it. But like, a lot goes into this. It’s the number of employees, it’s how many followers they have on different social media websites. It’s how often they’re coming up with different. Coming up like first in specific search terms. It is how much funding they have. That is like, it’s like, it’s almost like share of voice. If you’re thinking of like heat map, you know, there’s only a specific, you know, the conversation can only get so big. And if we’re talking about heat maps, then like, what percentage of time are we talking about this specific company versus others? Again, some companies are, they’re not even going to really be mentioned in the conversation of heat map software even though they offer something, even though they offer a product. Whereas there’s other companies that, you know, that, you mentioned heat map software, you’re going to mention this company. It’s like Salesforce with CRM, Right? Going back to that analogy. And so that’d be the other piece. And then when you’re done plotting that along, then you’re going to have a pretty good understanding of, okay, these are the companies that are getting mentioned a lot. They also have pretty solid product capabilities. They’re probably going to be our biggest threats versus these other ones. You know, maybe they don’t have as much funding, maybe they don’t have as much of a complex or advanced product, and probably not something that we need to pay close attention to. But then again, there’s a lot of gray area that you have to pay attention to as well. And so it’s not all super, super clear, but that should get you a good start.

Louis: So I’m glad you mentioned share of voice as a metric, because there’s a few scientific research that are valid in the marketing world in general, and one of them is the fact that the higher your share voice, the higher your market share. Your share, your market share will follow. Right? So it’s a lagging indicator, but it’s usually the case if you want to increase your market share, you need to have an excess share of voice. That means you need to be seen and noticed by more people. That means you need to show up in search, as you mentioned, you can do ads and shit like that. So it’s usually a very good indicator that things are going well. So I like that. So just to summarize what you described about this map, you basically have on one axis the complexity, which is like the feature set and how complete is the solution that answers the category needs. And then on the other axis you’ll have the, basically the share of voice, the presence, whatever you want to call it, which is like the size of the thread, the presence, the weight that they have, which is probably another law of marketing that has been proven, which is the fact that, that the higher a competitor’s market share, the more likely the more light buyers they’ll have and the less churn they will have compared to others. So the bigger they are, the more threatening they are. They are exponentially more threatening than those who have a very, very small market share compared to you, for example.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, exactly. And they’re also much harder to take over or topple. Right. Because again, you could do like a takeout campaign for a specific competitor and if it’s against another startup and they, you know, you poach 100 customers from them or something like that, that could be like, you know, 50% of their revenue, you know. But if you poach 100 customers again from like your category leader, it could be like a blip. They hardly even notice. And so it really just, it depends again, like you can, I think that’s the biggest piece too of a big piece of business that a lot of competitive intel practitioners are trying to move us towards is again, because there are so many other options out there. It’s not just about finding customers who haven’t invested in any of these tools yet. It’s about finding customers who have already invested. They see the value, but you actually just do it a lot better than your competitors and you can prove it. That’s where a lot of companies are getting the majority of their business is, it’s from other competitors.

Louis: So how do you then assess the maturity of a category? Because that’s what we’re talking about here in terms of like for example, for heatmaps still today, the heat mapping category, you don’t have close to 100% market share. Like you still have in the grand scheme of things, very few web analytics users that will also use heatmaps. Right? So like, does, is your work, does your work change, does your approach change depending on the maturity of a category? To take an example, on the other side of the, you know, tech, as you mentioned, like, what is a very mature category in tech? Just to give an example, like a very mature one.

Mature vs Immature Categories

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, CRM. Let’s keep on going on that one. Like, there’s so many, like if you go to, if you go to any kind of landscape map of CRM, there’s like 300 different icons like, you know, trying to fight for some like, hey, hey, I’m over here, you know, like waving their, waving their hand and in a sea of a bunch of other logos. So yeah, CRM.

Louis: And even, even if you take CRM as a category, if you look at, you know, alternatives, not direct, direct competitors, but like almost everyone, almost every single business owners out there will have some sort of a CRM, whether they, they call it CRM or not, right? They use Google Sheet, Excel, they use fucking Notepad. They would have a fucking way to track clients, customers, right? So, okay, so that’s a good, you know, so how is going back to the step by step we’re trying to put together here. How is your approach changing? If you go in a company that has like, you know, category CRM, extremely mature versus heat mapping, that is like, or behavior analytics in general, that is not really super mature at all.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, I think, you know, if it’s in a more mature category, then it’s a bit more clear who your more direct competitors are because you know, the conversation you’re having more frequent conversations, like people are talking about CRMs all the time, everywhere. And so you have a good understanding of like really like what’s going on in your landscape. If it’s an immature category, then there isn’t as much conversation happening and you have to do a little bit more research into just like the status quo or how people have kind of approached the problem that you’re trying to solve before. And so there aren’t going to be as many straightforward competitors. There’s still going to be threats and there’s still going to be things that people are using, but it’s not as much like a, you know, there’s not going to be an abundance of different logos that are trying to solve the problem because again, usually the category hasn’t found product market fit yet and there isn’t like a huge need yet. But there’s like this vision for, okay, yeah, like this, there’s, it’s going to be in the future, there’s going to be a need. And so that’s like really what the company is kind of banking on. But yeah, to your point, it’s funny because some of these categories, you know, you think that they’re almost tapped just based on how many players are like CRM, email marketing or email automation. That’s another one where it’s great. There are so many email marketing tools and to be honest, a lot of them are doing really, really well because you know, you can do really well in a crowded category if you, number one, like if you have a lean team, if you’re really efficient and you carve a really nice niche, like you can run a really successful business. You don’t need to be number one, two or three. But if you have, if you have a very specific audience that you’re catering to, they know who you are. Yeah, like there’s, there’s no reason why you can’t still succeed in running a business in a crowded category.

Louis: So a lot of people are afraid of that, you know, credit category. We shouldn’t go there. But in fact, it’s just a sign that is, there is money flowing, right. And there is huge needs there. So if you, if you find a need that is unmet and focused on a group of people segment that is craving for that need to be met that is not solved by others, then you can have a lot of fun and make a lot of money. Right, yeah. And email marketing CRM is a great example of that. So we mentioned basically step one, where you start talking about talking to stakeholders internally. Ask them, who do you think are our biggest competitors? You basically consolidate the research. Instead of trying to like become the know it all, you’re more like of the facilitator. You’re trying to like basically digest everything, make sense of everything, so that, so that there’s one source of truth in a sense. But you can’t stop people from doing their own research. I like that a lot. Second, you’d create a map of the landscape and you’d have like the two axes, the computer complexity side of it, how much do they match, Kind of the feature set of the category and then the sheer voice presence, the weight of that competitor. What do you do next?

Quick Wins with Sales Teams

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: So I’ve mentioned sales before. I know that again, not every company has a sales team, but most companies in the B2B world do. And it’s a big, again, that’s a, that’s a big piece of my experience. And so I really want to mention how important it is to create a great relationship with your sales team or at least your customer facing teams. There’s usually some kind of team that is talking to customers routinely. And so if you can create a great relationship with them, if you can show that you can be a resource and you can help them and you can be brought into the loop on what they’re thinking and what they’re seeing, that would be easily my next biggest tip. And so again, like typically what I do, and honestly this comes for each of the companies that I’ve worked for. This has come even before putting together like the big like landscape map that we talked about before. Because usually you come in and people already have, at least from the executive perspective, they already have a pretty good idea of who their biggest competitors are. You know, they’re usually seeing it and they’re like dead set on it. That’s why they’re trying to hire a competitive intel person. So that’s like kind of where the budget came from. So it’s not like they’re flying blind. Right. And one of the biggest first wins you can do is say like, okay, I hear you. Here’s like the competitors that you’re talking about. I’m going to do some research, I’m going to do a deep dive and then I’m also going to share some of my findings with the sales team or the customer facing team so that they know how to address the competitors when they do come up because it sounds like they’re coming up quite a bit. And if you do that, you know that can typically what a presentation like that would look like is like a five minute overview of the business. Okay, like what, when were they founded? Who, like what’s their kind of category? Like what, what are their strengths and weaknesses? High level. But then you go into some of the bigger product specific differentiators. So if you can do like a top three differentiator for you, top three for them. If you can also do like a hey, when, like how are they positioning against us? Okay. Knowing that here’s how we should position against them. If you can give like kind of a high level of that with the sales team, you can show up for them, then they’re going to be like, okay, wow, this is, this is awesome. We have this resource now that’s going to help us with winning against competitors. They’re going to help me make money because I’m usually comped on winning deals. Then if you, if you can create that great relationship out the gate, that’s a nice quick win for you to then continue to work and build out that more robust landscape and build out that more like strategic plan. And so that’s typically what I see you, you have like kind of like a tactical win where you can just go out and solve a quick problem just like this. Again, just like any role. Right. I really want to stress the fact that competitive intel isn’t that different from, from your typical marketing sales job. Like anything like that. You go out and you prove yourself as, you know, being someone who can like get their hands dirty, get tactical and help somebody solve a specific problem and then you can work on the more strategic things now that you’ve gained trust and you’ve actually delivered something.

Louis: So you mentioned the top three differentiator for you. The top three differentiator from their perspective, what is your number one tip or insight on how to find those out? Because correct me if I’m wrong, I bet that this is probably perhaps the trickiest bit of info to actually pull out in an objective fashion.

Finding Real Differentiators

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, I think that what you would probably need to do, there’s a couple of different ways that you can go about this. There’s the product specific differentiator which is like, hey, we have these features and they don’t. And this helps you do XYZ or like realize ABC benefits that you wouldn’t otherwise see from the competitor. So you have that. You can also have, you know, pricing or packaging specific differentiators where it’s like yeah, obviously you could be cheaper, more affordable, but it could also be. No, well, we actually have the, these different tiers that make you make us more accessible to, to compared to competitors or, or just like the way that you’re going to market. A big thing that we’re seeing right now is the rise of plg, right? So product led growth where people can just jump in, they can start using your product, they don’t have to talk to a salesperson. And a lot of companies that are going out right now are using that as a competitive advantage versus the companies where you have to talk to sales in order to start using the product. Or you have to go through a demo and then it’s like a four week long process. People are getting tired of that and they prefer if we could just like click a button and start using it for free and then like if it works, then I’ll start paying for it. So that can be another differentiator. And so I think that’s a big piece. It’s not as much about like, you know, features, of course it can be as long as it’s super beneficial and can speak to a broad use case that you’re selling off of. But really start to think about, you should really start to think about other ways that are speaking. Like what, what are speaking to our users the most? Is it our accessibility? Is it the way that we’re conducting business? Is it our price? Once you can really nail that down and figure out the thing that resonates the most with your target audience, then that’s what you should really be like, okay, we’re going to take that and we’re going to run with it and we’re going to try to expand on that.

Louis: How do you find out what resonates the most with your customers?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, this is the piece where I think it’s super important to have that great relationship with your sales team or understanding, okay, what are our customers saying? Try to get yourself in the shoes of the customer and understand like, okay, from our ideal customer profile, like perspective, what are the things that matter the most to them? Or what are they really frustrated by? Like the most? Like what are they really pissed off? Like when, if somebody’s speaking negatively about this category or this or these types of tools or whatever, like what are they typically like annoyed with? Can we solve that? It’s, you know, it’s a very simple kind of, you know, exercise. It’s not rocket science. It’s just really like making sure that you’re in tune with what Your customers

Louis: are thinking, trust me, it seems like rocket science for a lot of people. But what I found is that when you are in a non leading position in a category that exists, again, we’re talking about a real thing that people acknowledge in the market that exists. I found it incredibly difficult to find any meaningful differentiator that don’t feel like you’re actually a business exaggerating or whatever. Like it almost always look like everyone is the same. Like you’re just picking at, you know, at straws. I don’t remember the expression, but you know what I mean.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Absolutely.

Louis: How do you deal with that?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: I think a lot of that is then just like a marketing issue is. It’s about using language that’s not being used by your competitors. It’s about standing out and creating like an actual brand for yourself and not being afraid to stand. I mean, this is all based on your brand. Stand the fuck out. Right? What are we doing here? Right? It’s about like trying to make sure that you can say things that like your competitors aren’t saying or like approaching your product in a way that your competitors aren’t approaching them. And so it’s about seeing like, okay, here’s where the general consensus, here’s where the category is going. If you go to any kind of competitor’s website in this category, it seems like they’re saying like a lot of the same things. Okay, so what can we say that’s a little bit different from this? What are the problems that we can, how can we frame the problems in a different way? You’re right. In a lot of cases, these solutions, like they’re like 95% the same and then it’s like that extra 5% that people are really like digging into. But it’s really, I think at that point then it’s a really like a marketing problem where you can say like, okay, well like how can we stand out in this specific way? So you have to get a little creative for sure. But then once you understand like the things that really do resonate and the things that you can like plant your flag and like figure out, okay, these are the things that our customers really care about that we can, can speak to, then you should like own it and make it like a massive part of your narrative so that like whenever people think about these specific differentiators, they think about your brand.

Louis: What is the biggest win that you got from like this type of work that you’ve been doing for a few years now?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Biggest win, like biggest deliverable? I would say oh man. The ones that are always like a home run are when I do some kind of like a win loss program. And that’s usually because. So win loss program for people that don’t know. It’s exactly how it sounds. It’s when you try to come up with or try to collect as much data as you can from prospects that chose not to purchase you, they could have done nothing, they could have gone with a competitor, but you collect data from them, you collect data from your customers and understand why they chose you instead of a competitor or instead of doing nothing. And you are also collecting information from churned customers. So people that were buying from you and then chose to leave and go do something else. And it’s a huge undertaking because you usually there’s a qualitative and a quantitative element to this where you have to do some interviews to get some really in depth information, but you also have to do, you know, some like quantitative data collection where you have to do some kind of like a survey and collect a lot of information to really get a sense for what, you know, like really like recurring patterns and whatnot. And I’ve found whenever I, whenever I can execute like a fully blown win loss program, there’s always something interesting that like the executive leadership team, let me

Win-Loss Programs for Strategic Insights

Louis: think like you don’t have to mention the name of the company.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Yeah, yeah. So for example, we at a previous company we were going from one product, like just like one product for one use case to multi product which is a very common thing that a lot of like mature companies. When you start to branch out, it’s you realize, oh, I can have a much bigger total addressable market if I can speak to a bunch of different Personas and we have more products. And so that’s what we were, that was like a big bet for a specific year at a previous employer. And so we went out and we started doing a win loss program for all these different Personas that we were going to potentially build a new product for. And I don’t know if there’s like a specific like takeaway from like one like specific like insight, but it was really like, like oh, we have so many different directions that we can go in to build for this Persona. And when we got done with the Win loss program, it really just helped us prioritize like the things that we knew, like the things that like our customers and our target audience, like we could really understand after this win loss program what they actually cared about and how we should actually prioritize like our product roadmap how we should price it, what people are thinking about, like what other tools they’re using. It was just like a great foundational, deliverable to base like this new multi product roadmap off of. And so that was a big piece. And again I’m going to take this all the way back to the very beginning of this interview because we were just talking about like competitors versus customers and this is the win loss program that’s a huge part and very common for a competitive intel practitioner to own. And it’s largely customer led, like it’s about the customer. And so I just want to reiterate that that’s like a major part of any competitive intel practitioner’s job. It’s talking with customers and making sure that you understand like their needs first and foremost.

Louis: So what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: I think that hopefully if you were on the, on the fence or if you were victim to very vapid LinkedIn posts about not caring about competitors, hopefully in this conversation you’ve seen the light and you’ve realized that everybody has competitors. And that’s not, it’s not a bad thing. I would, in fact I would say that if you have competitors, which most people do, that’s a good thing. That means that there’s a market for the thing that you’re selling. Other people are making money off of it and so don’t look at it as a bad thing. In fact, I’d be very concerned if I really didn’t have competitors. That’d be, I would not want to work for that company, me personally. And so hopefully this gave you a little bit of insight and some opinion on there.

Louis: So yes, let’s plug your shit. I mentioned it at the start, Healthy competition. Co. But talk to me about the community that you created as well.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Sure, yeah. So Healthy competition, like you said, is a community for competitive intel practitioners. And the thing that I realized when I was starting to get into competitive Intel a few years ago is that like nobody’s really talking about it like publicly or with each other. Talking about competitors is already hush hush as it is. People aren’t really, they don’t feel comfortable talking about competitors. And so the competitive intel people, they’re not talking about their profession. And it’s like, like, you know, there’s so many great tactics and workflows and processes that other people are working on that can really help businesses. But again, people aren’t talking about them really with each other and so the competitive, so the healthy competition community is really a place where CI folks, they can come and they can hang out. It’s all, you know, it’s all good. Even if you work for a competitor, it’s all good. Like we accept anybody and we know that at the end of the day it’s just a job. But we know that these people are doing really, really great work. They’re usually working with limited resources and they have great experience. They can get their hands dirty. And so it’s a place where we can all kind of hang out, share tips to help each other grow, get better at our work. And so yeah, check it out if you want healthycompetition co if, if you don’t want to pay for the community because it is a paid community, then you can check out the newsletter that’s free. I send it out every couple weeks and it’s kind of like a, you know, watered down version of what we would talk about in the community. But at the very least it’s, it’s, you know, free and it’s in your inbox every single every couple weeks and hopefully you enjoy it. Hopefully it’s equal parts entertaining as it is informative. But those are my two plugs.

Louis: Well, Andy, thank you so much for today and thank you for allowing me to quiz you like I did.

Andy McCotter-Bicknell: Of course, yeah, thank you. It was a pleasure.

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