Competing Products: Best Practices for Analysis and Action

Part One of RAMP UP: A Competitive Intelligence Framework for Strategic Advantage

Understanding, anticipating, and outmaneuvering rivals creates a sustainable competitive advantage for growth. Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of collecting and analyzing data about rivals’ competing products to inform strategic decision-making and planning. Done well, it helps organizations see what competitors are doing, why they’re doing it, and what they might do next.**

Rivals is the first phase of the RAMP UP framework. It focuses on research and strategic analysis of competing products and companies. While other phases focus on customers, markets, and opportunities, Rivals is about understanding the players in your space and how they operate, identifying their strengths and weaknesses. It enables you to identify threats and respond more quickly.

** This is not to be confused with corporate espionage, which is acquiring unapproved access to information which is proprietary (IP, trade secrets), confidential, and has safeguards in place to protect it. Corporate espionage is illegal and unethical. Effective competitor research is completely legal and ethical, when conducted appropriate, and uncovers what competitors are doing, why they are doing it, and what they might do next.

At its core, Rivals draws on two fundamental types of research to best analyze competitors and their products:

Primary research involves direct engagement with people who have first-hand knowledge of a competitor’s operations, usually this means talking to former employees, partners, customers, and others close to the business.
Secondary research uses publicly available sources like financial filings, press releases, job boards, and social media to track moves, messaging, and momentum.

Sedulo Group has 20 years of experience conducting competitive product reviews for firms ranging from Startups to Fortune 100 conglomerates. This experience identified a framework that uses rigorous, ethical, and comprehensive research to achieve a meaningful strategic advantage over your rivals.

How to Deliver Competitive Analysis That Drives Action

RAMP UP’s Rivals phase is built on a simple principle: you can’t build a winning strategy without understanding who you’re up against. That’s why the best approach blends primary and secondary research to create a complete, accurate, and actionable view of the competitive landscape.

Start with secondary research to map the landscape. It is fast, scalable, and directional. This phase allows you to identify key players, track recent moves, and surface early signals that may warrant deeper investigation. It also guides you to form hypotheses and shape the right questions before engaging in more time-intensive primary research.

From there, move into primary research to validate, challenge, or deepen those hypotheses. Through interviews with former employees, partners, and customers, you will uncover what is happening behind the scenes. This includes how decisions are made, what is working, and where cracks are starting to show.

What makes RAMP UP different is how these two streams of research are layered and connected. Secondary research provides speed and context. Primary research adds critical depth and accuracy. Together, they allow you to triangulate insights, reduce blind spots, and provide a more comprehensive picture of the entire competitive landscape.

Competitive Product Analysis Begins with Secondary Research

Secondary research is the best starting point for reviewing and understanding competing products. It provides fast, scalable insight into how competitors are positioning themselves, where they are investing, and how they are evolving. While it does not offer the depth of primary research, it delivers valuable context and early signals that shape smarter questions and sharper strategy.

RAMP UP’s secondary research draws from a wide range of open and commercially available sources, including:

Regulatory filings (10-K, 10-Q, S-1): Reveal financial health, risk factors, and strategic priorities
Press releases: Announce product launches, leadership changes, and partnerships
News coverage: Offers third-party analysis and real-time developments
Patent filings: Signal innovation trends and R&D focus
Social media and forums: Reflect brand tone, customer sentiment, and campaign performance
Industry reports: Provide benchmarking, forecasts, and market sizing
Job postings: Indicate hiring priorities, team structure, and geographic expansion
Review sites: Surface customer feedback on product quality and service experience

By following a structured process of four steps, these sources allow you to build a baseline understanding of each competitor’s strategy, momentum, and market perception:

Systematic Monitoring – Use tools like Google Alerts, AlphaSense, PitchBook, and Crunchbase to track competitor activity across channels. This allows you to stay current on product updates, leadership moves, and market shifts.
Prompt-Driven Analysis – AI-assisted prompts help accelerate early-stage research. For example:
1. “Summarize the latest news and press releases from [Competitor Name] over the past 6 months.”
2. “List the key partnerships, acquisitions, or product launches by [Competitor Name] since [Year].”
3. “Analyze [Competitor Name]’s hiring trends and job postings to infer strategic priorities.”
4. “Compare [Competitor Name]’s messaging with its top competitors.”
Cross-Referencing and Triangulation – Never rely on a single source. Key findings are validated across multiple data points. For example, a hiring spike on LinkedIn is confirmed with job board data and internal chatter. If you need more guidance, Sedulo Group offers a proprietary confidence scoring methodology to support and measure this triangulation process.
Synthesis and Insight Development – Organize findings into profiles, matrices, and timelines that highlight trends in product strategy, pricing, partnerships, and positioning. These outputs feed directly into strategic planning, sales enablement, and executive decision-making.

There are a handful of key tools that assist in collecting this data quickly & efficiently.

AI-powered analytics to process large datasets
Web scrapers for dynamic content tracking
Social listening platforms for real-time sentiment analysis

Modern intelligence firms, such as Sedulo Group, use these tools selectively, based on client objectives and data accessibility, striking the correct balance between automation and human judgment.

Limitations of Secondary Research for Competing Product Insights

Secondary research is powerful, but not perfect. Here are a few of the core limitations and some advice on how to address the issues you may face with a Secondary-only approach:

Data Staleness: Much secondary data is historical; mitigate this by pairing with recent interviews.
Lack of Context: Headlines and filings may omit critical nuance; these need to be validated with insider perspectives from primary sources.
Bias: Public-facing materials are curated; triangulate with third-party reports or qualitative insights. Documents like government filings are not biased and are typically the most reliable source of information for public companies or private companies that have government contracts.

When Sedulo Group executes Rivals’ competitive research efforts, we integrate advanced OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) tools to extract, correlate, and assess open data with high precision. Our analysts utilize proprietary frameworks to assess signal quality and relevance, transforming public domain data into strategic foresight.

Primary Research: The Foundation of Actionable Competitive Intelligence

Primary research offers depth, accuracy, and strategic clarity by directly engaging with knowledgeable individuals, such as former employees, partners, and customers. Unlike passive data collection, it enables the collection of specific questions and provides faster insights into competitors. Using specially trained resources ensures ethical and legal interviewing, avoiding confidential or proprietary information.

RAMP UP defines primary research as any effort where you actively reach out to a source to gather intelligence. This includes:

One-on-one interviews with former employees or partners
Buy-side research and mystery shopping
Surveys and interview panels
Trade show conversations and product teardowns

While these efforts may seem daunting, the results are well worth the effort. Primary research is often the only way to gain:

Insight into internal company culture, morale, and leadership dynamics that can help shape competitive material utilized by sales teams to understand which competitor customers are best to target. An insights report that includes information about low competitor morale can energize employees.
Early warnings on product launches, strategic pivots, or organizational changes that can keep your product team one step ahead with their development and keep your differentiators truly unique.
Clarity on decision-making processes, pricing strategy, and go-to-market approaches that can shape battlecards & market strategy insights.
Detailed pricing information given the type of research utilized (see below) that is extremely helpful in sales collateral (e.g., battlecards) to position your product as a more affordable option or explain a ‘premium’ price model.

Guidelines for Ethical Primary Research for Competing Products

RAMP UP’s Rivals competitor product research recommends a tried-and-true process to ensure ethical guidelines and laws are followed while still ensuring the highest likelihood of success:

Target Identification: Use platforms like professional networks, LinkedIn, alum databases, and industry forums to identify individuals with relevant experience at the target company.
Prioritization: Focus on those with recent or strategic roles (e.g., product managers, sales leaders, engineers), and triangulate with secondary data to confirm relevance. You’ll need to be sure they have worked at the company / interfaced with them in a relevant period (someone who worked at a target 10+ years ago won’t be a valuable interview)
Outreach and Engagement:

Federal law requires that you do not misrepresent yourself during these interviews. Sedulo Group removes the burden of the sensitive and competitive intelligence aspect for our clients by conducting these interviews ourselves. We contact individuals without establishing a connection to our client, ensuring their activities stay confidential.
We are transparent about the purpose: seeking market insight, not confidential trade secrets.
Utilize the ‘hourglass’ model, where you build rapport and foster trust before diving into sensitive topics.

Integrate Primary and Secondary Research for Product Insights

Primary and secondary research each offer distinct advantages, but when integrated, they create a more complete, accurate, and actionable view of the competitive landscape.

Secondary research is fast, scalable, and directional. It helps identify gaps, form hypotheses, and surface early signals.
Primary research is slower but more precise. It validates or challenges those hypotheses with firsthand insight from people closest to the competitor.

Together, they provide both breadth and depth, allowing teams to triangulate findings, reduce blind spots, and move with greater confidence.

Step-by-Step Workflow for Integrating Primary and Secondary Market Research

Define KIQs and Build a Research Plan – Start by identifying the Key Intelligence Questions (KIQs) that matter most. Prioritize them into “Must Have,” “Nice to Have,” and “Incremental Asks.” Then, build a research plan that outlines how both primary and secondary research will contribute to answering these questions.
Landscape Mapping (Secondary) – Use secondary sources to understand the competitive environment by identifying key players, recent moves, and strategic positioning. This helps form hypotheses and identify areas for improvement.
Targeted Primary Research – Conduct interviews, buy-side research, or surveys to validate or challenge your hypotheses. Use elicitation techniques to surface insights that are not publicly available.
Centralize and Tag Insights – Store all findings in a shared insight repository. Tag them by source, theme, and KIQ to enable traceability and synthesis.
Revisit and Refine – Reassess your KIQs. Which have been answered? Which needs more depth? Use this checkpoint to guide follow-up research or adjust your focus.
Cross-Validate and Synthesize – Compare findings across sources. Where do they align? Where do they diverge? You can use this triangulation to build confidence in your conclusions.
Translate Insights into Action – Move from insight to impact. What does this mean for your client’s strategy, positioning, or roadmap? Every insight should lead to a clear implication.

By going through this robust combination of both Secondary and Primary research, your team can reveal nuances such as:

Internal perceptions of leadership and strategic direction
Hiring patterns and talent retention issues
Competitor sales tactics and messaging effectiveness
Challenges in scaling operations or delivering customer value

These insights often serve as leading indicators of performance and can guide strategy. For example, if a press release announces a competitor entering a new market, secondary research confirms new hires and increased ad spend. Interviews with former employees may uncover concerns, allowing the company to differentiate or counter-position early. Sedulo Group excels at this integration, using layered intelligence streams, open-source intelligence, and proprietary analytics to deliver strategic insights.

How to Build a Competitive Product Strategy with RAMP UP

Not every organization needs a full-time competitive intelligence team. Still, every organization needs a reliable way to understand what their competitors are doing, why they’re doing it, and what they might do next. Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining an existing capability, here’s how to build a system that’s structured, repeatable, and aligned with your strategic goals.

Define Your Focus: Start by identifying your Key Intelligence Questions (KIQs) and prioritizing them into either Must Haves or Nice to Haves.
Build Your Plan: Outline what sources you have access to, what methodology you’ll leverage, and who will be doing the work.
Leverage Your Current Data: Before launching new research, look inward. Many early indicators of competitive shifts already exist within your organization through Win/Loss CRM Notes, Customer Support Tickets, Marketing Engagement Trends, and Product Sales.
Build Your Stack: Assemble a lightweight monitoring stack with basic tools like Google Alerts, LinkedIn, and review platforms to track competitors. If you need any more help, you should consider AlphaSense, PitchBook, or Crunchbase.
Maximize Primary Research Effectiveness: Knowing when and how to conduct primary research is crucial. Use it to validate hypotheses, challenge assumptions, explore new markets, or prepare for significant strategic investments. When conducting internal interviews, ensure that your team is trained in both ethical elicitation and legal compliance. If not, consider partnering with a third-party provider, such as Sedulo, to handle outreach, protect confidentiality, and deliver high-quality insights.
Centralize and Tag Your Insights: Create a shared repository for all research findings. Tag the insights by the source, methodology (secondary, primary, internal), theme, KIQ, competitor, market, product, etc. This makes it easier to synthesize findings, revisit assumptions, and build institutional knowledge over time.
Establish a Reporting Cadence: Competitive intelligence is not a one-time effort. Find a rhythm that fits your organization. Monthly email updates, quarterly battlecard refresh, annual strategic landscape reviews, etc. Even a lightweight cadence can dramatically improve awareness and alignment across teams.
Know When to Bring in a Partner: Some efforts are best handled externally. Sedulo has a long history of assisting with buy-side research, mystery shopping, interviews with direct competitors, studying new markets and/or competitors, conducting product teardowns, building out competitor landscape pricing audits, and gathering hard-to-find data required to make large-scale and high-stakes strategic decisions. A partner like Sedulo brings neutrality, access, and experience, which ensures insights are gathered ethically, analyzed rigorously, and delivered with strategic clarity.

How Does Competitor Product Research Change by Industry?

Creating insights for customers varies drastically depending on the industry that they are in. To gain insights that meet your customers’ needs, it is often necessary to change how that information is gathered. This will all impact what endpoints you target, who you speak to, and what level of importance is placed on specific sources. Some customers value secondary research higher than primary, and want to see a faster turnover, while others will want to see almost exclusively primary research. Industry plays a key role in that choice.

Competing Products in Technology

Conduct direct interviews with customers, prospects, and partners to grasp their evolving needs and frustrations related to products and services.

Engage in technical deep-dives by talking with R&D leads, solution architects, and pre-sales teams, along with hands-on testing of available SaaS products, to provide customers with a more educated and nuanced analysis of functionality.

Monitor venture capital funding trends and hiring patterns by speaking with investors and industry insiders, as well as reviewing funding websites.

Focus: Speed and relevance—understanding emerging needs, disruptive technologies, product features, and fast-moving competitive changes. Technology industry research often focuses on product-market fit, feature gaps, and optimal go-to-market timing. It is a mix of mostly primary, with supplementary secondary research.

Key Difference: The Technology industry requires faster cycles of primary research, often conducted at a feature level for specific products, because market leadership often changes every quarter.

Competing Products in Consumer Goods

Prioritize shopper interviews and in-store visits to gather feedback on packaging, pricing, and positioning. Buy-side research, also known as mystery shopping, provides valuable pricing insights. Conversations with retail employees reveal shelf behavior, promotions, and SKU performance, key indicators of what is moving or not. Social media offers consumer sentiment as a source of secondary intelligence. Conducting surveys to identify emerging trends is also considered best practice in the consumer goods industry.

Focus: Understanding shifts in consumer behavior, brand perceptions, and channel disruptions (especially between online and retail channels). Primary research is far more valuable than secondary research here, as your customer likely has access to all the secondary research you will be able to produce. Emphasis on “why” consumers behave a certain way, not just “what” they buy.

Key Difference: Consumer goods firms like to hone in on customer emotions, centered on primary research with not just industry experts and employees, but end consumers. Thankfully, end consumers are easier to identify and approach for consumer goods.

Competing Products in Manufacturing

Focus on conversations with procurement officers, supply chain leads, and production engineers for primary research. If possible, conduct site visits and factory audits to assess competitors; however, this may be challenging without established inside connections. Trade shows offer firsthand insights and competitive FUD on competitors’ activities and messaging. Interviews with suppliers and distributors can reveal shifts in demand, capabilities, or changes in loyalty.

Focus: Focused on capacity, processes, supply chain shifts, and capital investments. These changes take years to implement properly, so competitors will be vetting their options and trialing out solutions well ahead of time. There is a strong emphasis on predicting future investments by rivals and adjusting operations accordingly.

Key Difference: Intelligence is slower-moving and more operational, concerned with structural market changes rather than fast consumer shifts.

Competing Products in Professional Services

These projects need extensive client interviews to identify unmet needs, satisfaction levels, and priorities. Feedback from past proposals or RFPs reveals competitor positioning, especially with public companies. Interviews with consultants, partners, and BD teams provide crucial behind-the-scenes insights to uncover the real story.

Focus: Understanding reputation, differentiators, and future service demand (e.g., AI advisory, ESG consulting). There is a strong emphasis on relationship intelligence—why clients choose or remain with a firm.

Key Difference: Success depends on qualitative nuance: tone, trust, reputation. Intelligence efforts often require understanding unspoken dynamics from high-trust client relationships.

RAMP UP Your Competitive Products Intelligence and Strategy

Beating your rivals requires the right insights that reveals intent, not just tracking actions. Primary research provides depth; secondary research offers speed and context. Combined, they provide a more comprehensive picture. Ethics are vital, and small teams can develop strong skills with proper questions, tools, and routines. For high-stakes or neutral cases, partnering with Sedulo enhances both access and quality of the insights provided.

Competitor research is vital in fast markets. RAMP UP’s Rivals phase helps organizations anticipate threats and take clear action by combining research and strategy. Whether built internally or partnered externally, the goal is to turn observation into insight and insight into action.

Frequently Asked Questions about Competing Products, RIVALS, and the RAMP UP Framework

What is competing products intelligence, and how does the RAMP UP Framework improve it?

Competitive intelligence (CI) involves gathering and analyzing competitor product data for strategic decisions. The RAMP UP framework enhances CI by providing structure, depth, and consistency, allowing companies to identify threats early and make informed decisions.

What does the ‘R’ in RAMP UP stand for, and why does it matter?

The “R” in RAMP UP stands for Rivals, the first phase in the framework. It involves understanding competitors, their operations, and vulnerabilities through primary and secondary research. This step sharpens strategy, reduces blind spots, and enables quick responses to competitors.

How is RAMP UP different from other methods to track competing products?

RAMP UP is a strategic framework that integrates CI into decision-making, emphasizing cross-functional alignment, layered research, and insights. It turns competitive intelligence into a system, not a silo.

Can companies use RAMP UP on their own?

RAMP UP’s strengths include its modularity and scalability. Teams in marketing, product, strategy, or revenue operations can use it to improve competitor tracking and insights, even without a formal CI function. Focus on repeatable practices, such as structured competitor tracking, interviews, and internal signals.

Where can I find the complete RAMP UP framework and related resources?

This page is part of a series on the RAMP UP framework. Explore each phase—Rivals, Avenues (customer research and insights), Market Shifts (Market gaps and trends), Potential, and Understanding & Planning—through our links. For a complete overview, visit the RAMP UP resource hub.