A few months ago, I started getting more requests about using reviewflowz to build competitive battlecards, benchmarks, and the catch-all phrase “AI analysis of our competitive landscape”.
I was curious about the use-case, so I reached out to Asia Orangio from Demand Maven (PLG growth agency), and asked her how they do competitive analysis, and how they use review data in that effort.
Long story short, they definitely use it, but consider it a heavily biased source of information.
She did however give me a great deal of detail on how they run those analyses, what they look for, and sort of how they structure the process.
Saying I used her insights to build this post wouldn’t do justice to her insights that were much deeper than whatever I wrote here, but I used some of her knowledge and some of my own experience as a SaaS marketer / founder to build this map.
The objective is to help you navigate the topic, and build a process that suits your requirements best.
One thing to keep in mind before you dig in, is that competitive analysis, like most analyses, is a two step process in which you start by diverging, and you converge later. But diverging doesn’t mean you should look at everything, or else you’ll never be able to converge, especially when dealing with ultra-wide topics like competitive analysis.
At every step of the process, make sure you can tie what you’re doing back to your objective.
#1 Start from the objectives
Typically, if you’re running a competitive analysis, you’ll fall into one of the following three buckets:
- You’re drafting sales battlecards: Battlecards are useful when faced with competitor objections of course, but they’re also incredibly powerful to orient the discussion once you know what solution a prospect is currently using.
- You’re working on messaging and positioning: Understanding your actual position in the market is a must-have for impactful communication & marketing.
- You’re working on a new feature or improving key features: from a product perspective, understanding how others solve a job to be done is usually a time-saver, although it’s important to stay agnostic to the solutions, and gain a deep understanding of the problem first. And understanding how others solve a problem, and how your product solves that same problem is basically the job description for every product marketer.
Before you dive into frameworks and spreadsheets and templates, it’s important to take a step back and understand what output you’re looking for.Are you going to use this to build convictions and draft a feature?Are you going to communicate the output of your analysis? If so, in what format? Battlecards? Benchmarks? Landing pages? Ad copy? Feature roll-out plan?Start from the objective, and figure out what analysis you’ll need then.
#2 What competitors you should look at
This ties back to your objectives, but it’s still important to figure out what companies you should evaluate, and in what order.For example, if you’re working on battlecards, you’ll want to analyze the companies you find yourself losing deals to most often.
If you’re working on a feature, you might want to expand the scope a lot, including into other industries. For example if you’re working on the experience surrounding importing contacts, you might look at direct competitors, but you could also look at companies for which importing contacts is critical. In the email marketing industry, or in the CRM industry.
And if you’re trying to get a better understanding of your positioning on the market, it’s fundamental that you analyze a sample that’s representative of the market. So you’d probably want to mix up high-touch and low-touch companies, established players and newcomers.
Most newcomers would probably play mostly in one or two sub-categories, while established players will probably have some presence in every sub-category.Software review platforms like G2 & Capterra can help get the categories right. They do a lot of work to figure out what people search and how best to define software categories based on feature-sets.Using our g2 rank tracker, you can access a comprehensive list of any software’s categories.
For example, Slack is listed in 9 categories, and competing against solutions like Zoom, Google Workspace, etc. It's not just Microsoft Teams.
On G2 specifically, comparing two or three software products from the same category will get you to a table with a list of all the features comparing them against each other.
This is a great starting point to define the must-haves in a given categoryWhen running a competitor analysis, I strongly recommend starting with a small subset of 3 or 4 competitors.
Don’t start with a single competitor as you’ll end up missing out on patterns, and don’t start with too many either at the risk of considerably slowing down the analysis.
Generally speaking, it’s interesting to analyze competitors in groups of 3 or 4 players at a time, in my experience.
#3 The different types of data
If you’re evaluating competitors, there just aren’t that many data points you can use.
Feature & pricing information
You can use your competitors’ marketing sites to gather insights on the solutions they offer, in what order, and how they price them.In the SaaS industry, pricing pages say a lot about a business and its customers if you know where to look.The first and obvious thing to look at are price-ranges.Does the company have a self-service motion or more of a high-touch motion? Try to identify the lowest price point, and the highest price point for both high-touch and low-touch motions.Once you have an idea of the range, you can usually estimate the average ARPA around 60 or 70% of the range.This will give you all sorts of insights into their acquisition strategy, sales cycles, etc.Another key component to look at is what features are gated, and how they’re gated.This will tell you a lot about what requirements signal high willingness to pay. Or at least, what your competitors think signals high willingness to pay.It’s also interesting to see how often your competitors’ pricing changes. While every SaaS company should constantly be testing pricing optimizations, if it changes significantly often, it might indicate they’re working extensively on positioning and haven’t really nailed it down.
Messaging & Positioning
This one is probably the hardest to nail down.Here are a few things to consider.
- Pay attention to the order in which things are said at least as much as to how it’s said. Whatever’s first is the most important, and what comes in the middle is usually least important.
- Dig deep into feature pages: marketing teams often work on those pages significantly less often, and would typically work on all feature pages as a batch sort of process. This is where the gold is at, and certainly not in the homepage opening statement which changes every couple of months based on the CMO’s mood.
- Look into extra content: help center, blog posts, social posts – the tone and degree of detail in tutorials is usually a strong signal of a company’s customers’ maturity. If you’ve ever seen a video tutorial of how to click on a button, you know what I mean. Take this with a grain of salt though, since “immature” customers are obviously the most demanding in customer support, they bias any company’s understanding of their customer base.
Product philosophy and effectiveness
There is one shortcut here, which is customer reviews.Short of that, you’ll have to set up trial accounts and play around to get an understanding of how your competitors are solving their customers’ problems, and how good a job they’re doing at that.With reviewflowz, you can export (all) past reviews to a clean CSV file to run a more advanced analysis, or use our GPT assistant directly to ask it specific questions.This is also a solid way to gather the actual voice of the customer – what words they’re using, how they call certain features, etc.
Acquisition strategy
If you’ve done the work on the pricing page, you should have a sense of the possible CAC range your competitors might accept, which would help understand what channels they can’t leverage.SimilarWeb is a famous solution that comes to mind when looking for traffic sources, but keep in mind that traffic does not equate to leads and / or customers.You can also have a look at SEO software like Ahrefs to get a sense of what organic & paid search traffic your competitors are getting.Spyfu is a cool solution to get an overview of affiliate links pointing to a specific website with really impressive coverage.Following the 2016 US elections, Facebook now gives public access to the ads any page is running, so that’s also an interesting way of getting access to your competitors’ material. This works on Linkedin too.A final one: I like Owletter to keep an eye on your competitors’ email campaigns. Not exactly acquisition to be fair, but still interesting marketing material.
