Competitive intelligence: foundations & core concepts

--- KEY SUB-CONCEPTS EVERY CMO MUST OWN ---

SUB-CONCEPT 1: PRIMARY VS. SECONDARY INTELLIGENCE

Secondary intelligence uses existing published sources: competitor websites, press releases, G2 and Gartner Peer Insights reviews, LinkedIn job postings, SEC filings, and patent applications. This is your baseline and it costs almost nothing.

Primary intelligence comes from direct human sources: win/loss interviews with actual buyers, conversations your sales team has in the field, interviews with recently churned customers, and even conversations with competitor employees at industry conferences. Salesforce built a formal win/loss program in the early 2010s that surfaced one critical insight: buyers were not choosing Siebel because of features, they were choosing Siebel because of perceived implementation risk. That primary intelligence directly shaped Salesforce's messaging around simplicity and speed-to-value, which became a cornerstone of their growth narrative.

SUB-CONCEPT 2: THE COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE PYRAMID

Not all intelligence is equal. The pyramid has three layers. At the bottom is raw data: a competitor's new homepage copy, a job listing for a VPVPA clear statement of the benefits your product delivers, the problems it solves and why customers should choose you over alternatives.View full definition → of Enterprise Sales, a price change on their website. In the middle is analysis: what does that job listing tell you about their go-to-marketgo-to-marketThe strategy defining how you'll launch a product: target segments, channels, value proposition and coordinated action plan.View full definition → shift? At the top is insight: a specific, actionable conclusion such as your competitor is moving upmarket and will start targeting your top 50 enterprise accounts within six months. Most CI programs collect mountains of data at the bottom and never reachreachThe number of unique people exposed to your message in a given period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person once, no matter how often they see it.View full definition → the top. The CMO's job is to build a process that converts data into insight reliably.

SUB-CONCEPT 3: BATTLECARDS AND ENABLING THE SALES TEAM

A battlecard is a one-to-two page document that gives a sales rep exactly what they need to win against a specific competitor in a live deal. It covers: the competitor's core claims, the holes in those claims, your winning proof points, the three questions to ask to shift the conversation, and the landmines to avoid. Klue, a CI platform used by companies like Shopify and Tableau, found in their 2022 data that sales reps who use battlecards consistently close 35% more competitive deals than reps who do not. The battlecard is the delivery mechanism that turns CI from an internal document into revenue impact.

SUB-CONCEPT 4: MONITORING CADENCE AND TRIGGER EVENTS

CI is not a quarterly report. It runs on two tracks. The first is a regular weekly or biweekly digest that summarizes competitor activity across defined categories. The second is a trigger-based alert system: when a competitor files a new patent, publishes a major product announcement, or gets a significant funding round, that is a trigger event that demands immediate analysis and a response within 48 hours. When Notion raised its $275 million Series C at a $10 billion valuation in October 2021, every serious CI team at Atlassian, Coda, and Microsoft should have had an urgent meeting within the week to reassess competitive positioningpositioningThe mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.View full definition → and sales messaging.

--- REAL-WORLD CASES WITH NAMED RESULTS ---

CASE 1: HubSpot vs. Salesforce

HubSpot's product marketing team built a dedicated competitive intelligence function around 2015 as Salesforce began pushing down-market with Salesforce Essentials. HubSpot systematically tracked Salesforce's pricing page changes, monitored G2 reviews for complaints about complexity, and ran quarterly win/loss interviews. The insight they extracted was precise: SMB buyers found Salesforce implementations took 3 to 6 months and required a dedicated admin. HubSpot repositioned with the specific claim "up and running in days, not months" backed by customer case studies with named setup timelines. By 2019, HubSpot's revenue had grown to $675 million, with SMB displacement of Salesforce consistently cited in analyst coverage as a key growth driver.

CASE 2: Zoom vs. Webex and Microsoft Teams

Zoom's CI operation during 2019 and 2020 identified a critical gap in Webex's NPSNPSNet Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend a brand, then subtracting detractors from promoters.View full definition → scores specifically around mobile experience. Zoom's product marketing team, led at the time by Janine Pelosi as CMO, leaned into head-to-head comparison content that highlighted mobile reliability. When COVID hit in March 2020 and usage exploded, Zoom had pre-built comparison landing pages, battlecards for IT buyer conversations, and a clear narrative. Zoom went from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to 300 million by April 2020, and CI-informed positioningpositioningThe mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.View full definition → around simplicity and reliability was a material part of that adoption story.

CASE 3: Figma vs. Adobe XD

Figma's team tracked Adobe XD's customer reviews on G2 obsessively through 2018 and 2019. The pattern was consistent: designers loved the tool but hated the collaboration experience. Figma built its entire positioningpositioningThe mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.View full definition → around "design in the browser, collaborate in real time" and ran comparison ads targeting Adobe XD users directly on design communities like Dribbble and Behance. The result was that when Adobe acquired Figma in 2022 for $20 billion, Figma had already captured the majority of collaborative design workflows in mid-market tech companies, a direct product of CI-driven positioningpositioningThe mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.View full definition →.

--- CMO ACTION ITEMS ---

• Assign one person in product marketing the explicit title or responsibility of Competitive Intelligence Owner, give them a defined budget for tools like Klue or Crayon, and require them to publish a weekly one-page digest that goes directly to the sales leadership team.
• Run a win/loss interview program quarterly with a minimum of 20 interviews per cycle, split evenly between deals won and deals lost, and require the output to feed directly into updated battlecards and your next positioningpositioningThe mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.View full definition → review.
• Create a trigger event protocol: define the 10 competitor events that require a same-week response, assign who owns the analysis, and set a 48-hour SLA for distributing updated talking points to sales.

--- COMMON MISTAKES THAT KILL RESULTS ---

MISTAKE 1: BUILDING CI FOR INTERNAL CONSUMPTION ONLY

Many CI programs produce beautifully formatted reports that sit in a shared drive and nobody reads. If your CI output does not change what a sales rep says on a call this week or what headline appears on your homepage this month, your CI program is a vanity exercise. Tie every CI output to a named decision or a named deliverable.

MISTAKE 2: FOCUSING ONLY ON DIRECT COMPETITORS

The biggest competitive threats are often not your direct category competitors, they are the adjacent solutions your buyers consider instead of you. Slack's real competition in 2016 was not Hipchat, it was email. If your CI program only watches category peers, you miss the substitution threats that can collapse a market. MapMapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition → your full competitive landscape including the "do nothing" option buyers choose when they keep their current workflow.

MISTAKE 3: LETTING CI BECOME REACTIVE INSTEAD OF PREDICTIVE

Tracking what competitors did last month is useful. Predicting what they will do next quarter is what creates competitive advantagecompetitive advantageA lasting edge over competitors: a resource, capability or position they cannot easily replicate, letting a firm earn above-average returns over time.View full definition →. Use leading indicators: hiring patterns, patent filings, conference speaking topics, and partnership announcements to build a forward-looking view. When a competitor starts hiring ten enterprise account executives in a geography where they had zero presence, that is a six-month warning signal, not a surprise.