The Art of a Winning Competitive Marketing Strategy

A strong competitive marketing strategy is not just about reacting to what your rivals are doing; it's about proactively influencing your own business and staying ahead of the game. A competitive marketing approach should be strategic, aligned with your business's interests, and focused on enabling your teams to win.

Competitive Marketing in Practice

A successful competitive marketing approach evolves as the company grows and the market changes. From my past career I worked in competitive marketing for a tech software giant, who started as a disruptor, the journey involved two key phases:

• Phase 1: The Fledgling Business Unit (circa 2010)

  In its early days, competitive efforts were highly tactical and technical. The focus was on deep technical analysis, primarily led by engineering teams, to understand the competition. Competitive marketing at this stage was also crucial for providing field sales support and covering a handful of key products.

• Phase 2: The Beginning of the Cloud Era

  As the business expanded with the rise of cloud computing, a new approach to competitive marketing was required. The focus shifted from just features and functions to a more strategic role, including win/loss analysis. Competitive marketing became more integral to the overall business strategy.

Putting Competitive Marketing into Action

To implement an effective competitive marketing strategy, you must align your competitive activities with your business's goals. This includes a range of activities that go beyond simple product comparisons:

• Field Training and Enablement: Equip your sales team with the knowledge and tools they need to sell competitively. This includes developing content like competitive snapshots, battle cards, and sales playbooks.

• Deal Support: Provide high-touch support to help close deals against the competition. You should quantify the impact of these efforts by tracking the revenue influenced by your competitive work.

• Content Development and Market Research: Create impactful collateral that helps the field team and conduct research to stay ahead. Use win/loss analysis to understand why you win or lose deals and identify competitive feature gaps.

• Product Roadmap and Strategy: Use competitive intelligence to influence product direction. A competitive feature gap analysis can help you prioritize which features to build based on their financial cost and perceived product inferiority.

Three Steps for Competitive Selling

When a competitor emerges in a sales opportunity, a simple, three-step process can help your team respond effectively.

1. Identify the Competition: Uncover your competitor early in the sales cycle. Ask customers directly, "Are you considering other vendors?" and listen for "triggers" in their conversations, such as mentioning the need for "automation and workload balancing" or "containers".

2. Understand Why Them: Dig deeper to understand the nature of the competitive threat. Is it a technical advantage, a perceived advantage, or are they using it as leverage for a better price? It's also important to determine if higher-level decision makers are aligned with the competitor or if the competitor is addressing a strategic initiative of the customer.

3. Stay Alert: Be aware of "late entrants" and be prepared to launch a swift counter-attack. Know your competitor's unique value proposition and have a defense ready.

By taking a proactive and strategic approach to competitive marketing, you can move beyond just reacting to the market and instead, become a leader that influences it.

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