Sources such as competitor websites and press releases describe a competitor in the way that they want to be described. These competitive intelligence sources don’t capture what is happening behind the scenes, within live sales deals, or even within the actual market landscape today. Unfortunately, that’s the intelligence a battlecard truly needs, and public sources aren’t going to be where you can go to produce these insights.
The Gap
Ask most enablement teams where their competitive intelligence comes from, and the list sounds logical.
- A monitoring tool that catches a pricing page update
- A Google News alert
- A Slack channel for people to forward along press releases from competitors
- A once-a-year competitive landscape update project
All of this is valuable and creates the baseline of a broad competitive intelligence program, but it answers a different question than the one a sales rep needs answered before a call.
The issue is that a competitor’s website and a press release are written & controlled by the same people: the competitor’s marketing function. Their job is to describe the version of themselves the market is meant to believe.
However, your sales team needs to know what this competitor is actually doing within the market, not who they are masquerading as.
A buyer who sat through a competitor’s demo last Tuesday and repeated back that rival’s claim is a ten-fold better source of data for your sales team. Live buyer calls and frontline market interactions are your best chance to understand competitors’ actual behaviors.
The gap between what you are leveraging now (what the competitor wants you to see) and what you need to collect (what the competitor is actually doing) can ruin your sales enablement efforts.
A rep is in trouble when they repeat a claim from a battlecard that’s based on a month-old press release, but the buyer heard something different last week from that same competitor. In the buyer’s mind, your rep doesn’t know the market. The sales rep has to earn back credibility and trust from the buyer. The deal stops being about the product and starts being about whether the seller actually knows what they are talking about.
Where Better Competitive Intelligence Sources Live
The rep who lost (or won) a competitive deal last week has more insight depth than a monitoring dashboard. They know what price won, which claim landed with the buyer, and what objection they had trouble answering. A service lead who hears the same complaint about a competitor’s implementation timeline from three new accounts is sitting on valuable intel, even if nobody ever asks them for it.
And that’s the issue.
The insights from your frontline teams’ brains never get documented. Why? Because historically it’s been hard to get it.
- Field intelligence starts decaying within 72 hours. A rep who isn’t asked what happened this week will have half-forgotten it by the time anyone gets around to asking.
- Field teams are busy servicing or selling to customers. A lengthy interview will take up too much of their valuable time.
- It’s expensive for an insights team to have conversations with enough of the field to feel good about the insights they are getting.
Luckily, with AI, you can solve a lot of those problems. Our guide to competitive intelligence for sales enablement goes deeper on how field signal can get captured and validated using modern tools.