Ep #12: The 3 Missing Tactics Companies Need In Their Competitive Intelligence Process with Hubspot’s Sam Rinaldo

Speaker 1: 0:02

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In the company or launching a new product in a highly competitive tech spaces, like going to war, knowing your enemy's imperative with the pace at which technology is evolving, the need to keep a pulse on new players and solutions has never been creative, but scaling competitive analysis and measuring its success continues to remain a challenge for most beautifully technology companies, sales product, and marketing leaders to mean misalign announcing the most fundamental question. Why us, how can we fix that? Let's hear what the experts say.

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Hey guys, this is your host Asheesh Jain. And you're listening to the alignment podcast where we aim to expose the day to day misalignments between product marketing and sales activities and discuss practical solutions to end this longstanding paradigm. In today's episode, we talk with Sam Ronaldo, HubSpot's competitive intelligence analysts about the incredible power of competitive intelligence and how only some companies manage to get, see right, Sam Samsung as an intelligence officer in the us Marine Corps for nine years before entering the B2B tech world as a Marine deployed in Afghanistan, he developed his passion for intelligence by leading and managing an organization of 300 plus military and intelligence personnel. I bet having a B2B competitive intelligence unit is rather simple compared to that. I'm hoping today's conversation uncover some new tactics that help you bake away from legacy tools to develop the three 60 degree view of the competition and identify what matters to win the deal. Thanks Sam, for your service and for joining us today, I'm excited to explore with you these challenges and tactics of running a successful competitive intelligence program.

Speaker 1: 1:43

Welcome, thank you so much for having me on today. I definitely am looking forward to discussing all of this, um, and also very much looking forward to talking about how I brought some of that, you know, less traditional, uh, experience into this competitive intelligence role, because I think there's so much that we can learn from different mental methods of looking at problems and big complex issues, specifically like competitive intelligence, where the technology market can be so vast and expansive that it's simply just becomes a huge challenge to figure out where to start.

Speaker 2: 2:25

No, very well said. I was reading a report that says on average, a company has anywhere from 25 to 35 countries.

Speaker 1: 2:36

Yeah, I think, I think that's enough to overwhelm anyone. I know personally at HubSpot, you know, we have, we have many different products and so we actually look at a core group of, of more than 50 competitors ourselves. Uh, and I know that there's dozens more that, you know, we just have to put a pin in it and hope that we can get to them later.

Speaker 3: 3:02

Yeah. That's, that's pretty overwhelming. I've been in the product marketing myself, and this was one of the biggest nightmares of our entire team. How do we, how do we keep up to it and how do we know what's going on in every competitors landscape and how do we bring that information and value in the form of an intelligence that we can make it more actionable and guide our own efforts internally and, and guide our sales teams on how to react to customer questions and how to windows in those battles. So we'll, we'll talk about the B2B tech in a minute, but I want to get your perspective on you. You were running the, the intelligence program and Marines, right? So how is that similar or different than what you're doing now?

Speaker 1: 3:54

So it's amazing the amount of similarities that there are between, you know, running a portion of a national intelligence apparatus, and then coming here and working with sales productivity, and product development and working in this open and transparent flat organization. But one thing that's a constant throughout all of it, as technology changes as processes change, and as people change it's that there are certain core elements of the intelligence cycle and the intelligence gathering method that remain constant, no matter what kind of problem you're trying to solve.

Speaker 3: 4:37

Okay. You can throw some more light on like, what are those examples? Yeah,

Speaker 1: 4:41

Absolutely. So I use a five step intelligence process when I'm doing competitive intelligence and, you know, most, most people's intelligence cycles look pretty similar. There's some element of setting the conditions, getting the information and then turning it into insights for whoever's going to be examining the intelligence. I think there's more or less, very little debate around some of those topics. What I do that I see a little bit different from peers and colleagues and in competitive intelligence are two steps. The first being at the very front. And then finally, as I'm ending the competitive intelligence cycle, the first step that I do is setting the conditions with very robust problem framing and getting to the core of the question that's being asked at the end. I always cycle back through utilization and feedback as a deliberate part of the entire intelligence process.

Speaker 3: 5:49

So requests, you know, that sounds very interesting and give an example of how this comes to play in life. Yeah. So,

Speaker 1: 5:58

You know, in, in the real world framing, framing, the problem with your stakeholders is absolutely critical. And I think everyone accepts that, but it's very difficult to do in practice. You know, the best option that you have really is sitting down and having a conversation to figure out what's the real question that needs to be answered a lot of times. And I know, I know any analyst can testify to this fact, you get a very vague question from leaders in your organization. Something like, you know, what is competitor X position relative to us, or what competitors are going to rise out of nowhere and, and threaten our position, right? And the team then has to sit around and start chasing down the answers to these questions. And many analysts will take these more or less on face value. It's what the CEO said he wanted. So that must be what we need to go out and find. But what I've found is quite different. Often you need to reframe the question to get the heart of the issue. You know, what, what did they really mean when they said, what are our low end disruptors going to look like in the next two to five years? And I spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on those questions. And I usually will go through some sort of deliberate structured brainstorming to try and get at the actual questions that we want answered. And so if you take that initial question, you know, for example, give me everything you have about competitor X and you take it, you narrow the focus, say what is competitor X going to do in the next three to six months that could threaten our revenue generation? That's a much more clear understanding or much more clearly answerable question than something so broad. You can also reverse it, take it, take the question and turn it inside out, and then start looking at other questions related to that main, broad initial question posed by the stakeholder. And you'll often find some more interesting insights that really when you bring it back to that, stakeholder are going to be much more getting at the core of what they need to make a good decision moving forward. And that can be for anyone at your organization that can be for the CEO asking that big, huge, broad question, or that can be for that individual sales rep who just needs a couple of competitive points so that they can close it deal.

Speaker 3: 8:45

Wow. Okay. Now this is, uh, I'm taking a pause to no process process. What you just said. And what I hear you say is, is defined the outcome first before you get into it.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Absolutely. So by asking the right question, you can focus your efforts just on those things that matter. So you're not trying to wrap your arms around a giant set of data that's out there. I think, I think this isn't even unique to competitive intelligence or being an analyst in the business space at all. This just has to do with any time you're trying to solve a big complex issue, breaking it down into its constituent parts and focusing specifically on something that's discreet and answerable just makes it so much easier and more streamlined to align your objectives across multiple disparate programs or multiple different people working on elements of the same project.

Speaker 3: 9:48

You're absolutely right. I mean, I always, um, say that, okay, you, when you're writing your messaging, you've got to start with your FAQ or the questions you're trying to answer and for who exactly right. And, um, competitive intelligence or messaging framework or collateral writing. I mean, they all fall in the same kind of category of what questions are you trying to answer? And the question that you have to answer in basically one F one frame of that, you know, one phase of that question in competitive intelligence is you're trying to answer why us, right? Why, why should I select you versus over anyone else? And that cushion itself, right? When, when a customer asks, you know, we talk about the executives and the internal stakeholders, but there's, you know, ever perplexing question that, you know, the customer shop all the time and why you, or you'd go to a job interview, you try to win a deal. And no matter what facet is, will try to in a propose a proposal call friend, uh, that cushion of why you is, is just ever daunting cushion. Right. And you got to understand how you answer that and, and you have to understand what is that scope of? What is that domain of that, that you're trying to compare yourself with? So how do you do that? Right? I mean, 30 plus competitors. And how do you narrow it down to say, okay, what, what does it really matter for us if it's still a broad level of let's? And you're trying to answer this question, not when somebody asks, we try to answer that question at a strategic level on a day to day basis that you just, you need to be prepared all the time. How do you narrow that down to, you know, what matters?

Speaker 1: 11:30

Right. Cause that's such a big question, right? You know, why, why us, why should you pick a given, you know, product or competitor or individual for a position over someone else or something else you can think of any time that, you know, you've put yourself in the other person's shoes, you know, the last piece, the last major purchase that you made, you were probably weighing all sorts of different criteria and you were also probably taking some mental shortcuts and saying, well, you know, I really know, and respect this brand name, or even something as simple as this sales rep seems really pushy. And you know what, I don't think I'm going to buy this product because the other sales rep that I talked to at the competitor, you know, made me feel a lot more comfortable. And I, they even have to sell on the phone with them for two and a half hours to get there. Right. So as you look at this, you're weighing all sorts of different factors. If all you're ever looking at is feature comparisons and data on buying statistics, or even, you know, qualitative information from survey, you're leaving out a lot of that human aspect. You're not incorporating all of the psychological and emotional factors that go into that buying decision and, and ultimately shape the entire experience for that buyer, that prospect or that customer.

Speaker 3: 12:58

Well, two questions. One is how do you capture that? It's a very difficult thing, right? It's very personal. Every time you go to a different person and you know, the customer you're talking to personalities may vary and all there is a concept of buyer persona, right. Which kind of helps you get to a certain framework in terms of, okay, what do we think that the buyer needs are, but generally when it comes to human factor, how do you account that in and how do you capture that and competitive intelligence? And the second related question to that is what, according to you, whether you were in Marines or now you're in B to B tech are some of the critical aspects that must be covered within the competitive intelligence, you know, besides the feature comparison that we all know.

Speaker 1: 13:44

Yeah, that's, that's definitely, you know, everybody's process will be unique, but the way that I try to break it down or the way that is most comfortable for my mental frameworks and the way that I work is to intensely focus on a couple of specific factors so that you're not trying to just overwhelm and weigh all of this information at the same time, the way I focus, how I'm evaluating and what areas that I'm focusing on is by looking at, you know, the centers of gravity and then the critical vulnerabilities. And so that, that phrase for anybody who's listening that may have been working in the national intelligence space will probably sound very familiar. And it's definitely a holdover from my time doing military intelligence and being in the Marines and very competitor centric. So when you break down the center of gravity and the critical vulnerability of a competitor, you can look at what is the element that you really need to avoid. So this is the major advantage that the product might have over yours and is really going to convince a buyer or prospect to go with that competitor instead of you. But oftentimes there's also an underlying critical vulnerability, a weak spot, a shortfall, or some area that has been, has received lower investment, lower focus from the competitor, so that they could focus on bolstering that center of gravity, identifying that you can, you can develop your sales pitch, or you can develop your product to fill that gap and really differentiate yourself from that competitor in the most crucial way possible that is going to set you up as a distinct entity from your competitors.

Speaker 3: 15:47

Yeah, that's really interesting too. You know, when you say need to do identify the center of gravity and the vulnerability of your competitor, you know, that's something, uh, very different than the very unique way of approaching it in terms of what are their gaps, right. Basically we're trying to identify what are their gaps or we call it, you know, there's a, there's a term FUD fear, uncertainty to death. It's been an age old term that I have heard. Well, wouldn't know what again. Okay. What kind of, you know, fear that you can insert in the customer's mind about your competitor? What kind of uncertainty that you can, you know, share that they might have with their competitor, but at the same time, I've also seen, you know, executives in a boat with many customers and I some sometime hear them, they take an approach and I've taken that approach is, you know, don't worry competitors respect them. You know, they're, they're a good product, focus on your own strengths and articulate them in a way that aligns more or better with what the customer needs are versus trying to defend yourself. What's, what's your take on that? Two approaches. One is, you know, defend one another is in a position.

Speaker 1: 17:08

I think you can, you can really make a great case for not focusing on competitive intelligence. I think that there's circles in a bunch of different industries that say, don't worry about competition, um, worry about your customer's needs and your own needs. And that's totally valid. And the center of gravity and critical vulnerability analysis are both intensely competitor focused. You know, you're looking slightly retrospectively at yourself and you're weighing market factors, but ultimately you're looking at the competitor. And so in practice, you need to that by looking at your customers and your prospective buyers, because you're not trying to sell the competitors and you're not trying to beat competitors. You're trying to provide a solution that customers are going to utilize and realize benefit from, and eventually, you know, come back and stay your customer over time as well. And so it's absolutely critical to keep a customer facing eyes. You're doing competitive intelligence, and you can do that in a couple of different ways. The first way is by focusing on your competitors, chances are, if they have a competitive product in there and they're coming up against you, they're probably also looking at the customers, trying to figure out what their pain points are and solving for it. Otherwise they probably wouldn't be a very good competitor and you won't be worried about them in the first place, looking at your competitors with a focus on the customer, allows you to flip the tables a little bit and get a completely different perspective on how to solve for that customer. So you're already just incorporating that competitor's position and all of the work that they've done to try and understand the customer and the market by looking at what they're.

Speaker 3: 19:09

Yeah, and I think there's no question that one needs to study their competitor. And I use the word study because a lot of time people only view competitive intelligence, competitive analysis from a perspective of, you know, positioning and, you know, having a point when you go in and a lot of time, it's just a, it's an approach of how you leverage that information. Whether you take that front right and center in your messaging and start with this competitor, doesn't do that. Or you focus on your, your own strands. I think that becomes a messaging strategy, but there is no doubt, you know, you absolutely need to study what is happening in the space. And a lot of time people don't realize that your competitors are not necessarily, um, another vendor who has a similar product. It's also another way to solve a problem. And you just need to understand, you know, at the end of the day, you're trying to solve a problem for your customer and what are the options and choices they have and how do you fit in their decision making of how you are solving that problem better than anyone else. And I think that's, that's the crux of, you know, the competitive intelligence, but I think from a process perspective, right, being in product marketing myself or Goodwill for 15 years and, and playing a role of sales enablement as well. So in my experience, um, there's been always some level of misalignment between sales and product marketing when it comes to the competitive information, how do you gather it? What matters and on and on and on what have you seen your experience, whether you were in a Marine or now in BDB tech and how have you solved that misalignment?

Speaker 1: 20:55

Yeah, absolutely. So misalignment can be a huge problem. It can result in bad assessments, inefficient processes, and overall just the misuse of resources that suck away all of the efficiency of, you know, even the best laid processes and procedures. And that happens because everybody has an opinion on many of these subjects. So, you know, the sales rep has tons of experience in competitively, positioning your product against most of the big names in whatever your industry or specific market might be. And so you don't want to discount their opinions and their insights, but they're going to have a different set of objectives and priorities from the competitive intelligence team and sometimes even from the larger business goals. And so you can align based on priorities, if you're collecting all of the stakeholder input and also measuring the utilization and impact on at the end of the creation cycle for a given piece of intelligence.

Speaker 3: 22:15

So let me ask, so what are some of the most important attributes, or you can say competitive attributes that the sales team look for to have to other vendor deal, to have, you know, convince a customer, have a, have a dialogue with customer. What do you most frequently get from the sales team to say, okay, can you give me this about competitor X or Y or C whatever they are the time of the day and star?

Speaker 1: 22:45

Yeah. I certainly have a large volume of requests to draw upon to answer that question. Um, yeah, like any competitive intelligence analyst, I'm getting tons of requests from the sales team for, for support in any number of different ways. What I most commonly see are questions around specific pricing models or specific features and, you know, whether or not competitor X has a feature compared to us, and they want to really break those things down and then present them in a way that's quickly shareable externally out to that prospect so that they can take a look at and then formulate their own opinion based off of that, because that's hugely a hugely powerful psychological device when someone is viewing a piece of content on their own, and then they draw the conclusion, they feel like they own that decision and they don't feel like they were tricked into it or guided it by a sales rep, even, even in the best of situations. There's always going to be some level of mistrust or, you know, a belief that the sales rep is going to be biased in that situation. And so arming reps with something that is quick, concise and digestible by customers is, is what I hear the most often being requested.

Speaker 3: 24:10

Yeah, that's a that's to me as well, very important. And I think the concept of battle cards or one is for internal second is for external. And I think that becomes an overwhelming task by itself to create mint and create and maintain the information in so many different ways. That one is for internally training sales team and externally sharing with the customers. So how often do you update competitive data data points?

Speaker 1: 24:37

That's one that we've wrestled with a bit when we were starting our program, um, at, at my current company, because I was coming in as a single competitive intelligence analyst to handle the entire scope and breadth of, of all our, of our competitors. And so, you know, very early on, I realized, obviously, you know, this isn't something that we can just run through and update ad hoc because things are going to fall through the cracks, of course. And so I prioritize our competitors into four different tiers, and then I have a rolling updates cycle for 30, 60, 90, and then as needed update cycles based off of the priority of that competitor. And then I evaluate the priority of that competitor every 60 days.

Speaker 3: 25:31

Interesting. Okay. The number one challenge as a product marketer myself, when I was looking at competitive intelligence and I still do actually for a lot of my clients, the part that gets overwhelming is getting attached to the competitor. And I'll explain what I mean by that is the moment I started looking into them through vendors. I wanna, I want to look at, you know, where, what they're doing on their website, where they're doing on their social, on what are they doing, you know, all sorts of different tricks that I, that I look for to get any information I can on the competitor I'm researching. And if I try to scale that and I try to handle all the requests that I'm getting it very quickly becomes a daunting task. Right. So what I should say, growth hacking techniques or the hacking techniques, have you developed over the period of time to get the right information the right way in a quick manner?

Speaker 1: 26:29

Yeah. And so that's, that's the real, the real, a$1 million question, right? You know, how do you, how do you break down a large volume of knowledge and then transfer that knowledge into someone else's brain? So they have the same level of understanding and proficiency that you do. And I think, you know, if we could, if we could crack that nut a hundred percent of the time, then we would probably have a lot more solutions for a lot more industries. The way that the way that I look at it for competitive intelligence is through revision cycles. So your first pass at a battle card or a comparison page on your website is going to be based off of your intelligence process and wherever analytic framework that you have in place to accomplish that task. But that's only the first version. So I said earlier that, you know, my final step in the intelligence cycle is looking at utilization and feedback, which can be difficult to capture, but it's so worth it for figuring out, you know, how well that knowledge is transferring to the end user. What I mean by utilization and feedback is that any time your competitive intelligence program produces a deliverable, beat up, be it a battle card or something else I need to track not only how much it's being utilized and, um, who is utilizing it, but how so specifically, if it's a battle card, you know, how are reps actually utilizing the content? Are they taking the information and reading some of these positioning statements verbatim out on sales calls? Are they using it as a study guide before they ever get on a call with a prospect or, you know, maybe they've come up with some new novel way of utilizing that information in their decision making process, but understanding that aspect of your intelligence products helps you shape the way that you're presenting the information there. For example, you can go into incredible detail on the technical aspects of different features of a piece of software. So you can, you can dive very deeply into the access controls and the reporting and analytics and different things like that that you might have in a given piece of software. But at the end of the day, this is, this is information that, you know, the customer prospect probably already has, or has probably already read over once or twice. And so, you know, it's not even if they're asking for it and they want to hear about it. They're probably doing that because it's one of their buyers, it was one of their buyer criteria. Uh, it's part of their evaluation process. They want to break down the features, what you really need to show them is something that they're not expecting. And so you need to bring that in a much more concise and focused way that drops the answer that they didn't even know they were looking for directly into their lab. And so if you understand what pieces of knowledge are being transferred from you to the battlecard, to the sales rep, and then finally onto the customer, you can understand what kind of changes you need to make in your revision cycle. And that's a very hands off way of looking at the utilization patterns passively. And then of course, feedback would be the active component of that. How are people actually utilizing the battlecard versus what do they say that they want changed or say that they need to add?

Speaker 3: 30:28

No feedback loop is important, right? To just need to understand how, what information resonates and what information doesn't and what pushbacks do you get from customers? You know, we do our best effort to come up with, uh, you know, the qualifying questions to ask and how do you position yourself and, you know, how do you handle the objections? And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And that feedback loop from, from the field is important to refine that message on an ongoing basis. Well, this is, this has been a great conversation. Sam just want to wrap it up and any final words on key tactics that you want to just tell customers just two or three things as to summarize on what they should do to improve their competitive nets in the market.

Speaker 1: 31:19

So I would say that there's, there's definitely three things that I think are, are of critical importance that I don't hear a lot of, um, companies doing in their competitive intelligence program. The first is a really robust, structured analytic process when it comes to framing questions. And that was why I walked through, you know, earlier in the podcast. The second piece that I would recommend folks incorporate is a deliberate utilization step within their intelligence process. Something that signals to the analyst and the program to look for ways that their intelligence is being utilized by the end user or the person actually viewing their product. And then the third thing that I would say that I think is the most important is to keep your process human. And what I mean by that is that more than 80% of the techniques and steps that we talked about today could be done with a piece of paper or a white board upon a wall, maybe with just yourself or, you know, one or two other people. It doesn't take a massive budget for technology and video conferencing tools and, and brainstorming software and things like that, or, or a whole team of analysts to come up with good insights. It just takes good sound, analytic processes and good analytic integrity to create actionable intelligence that helps you win.

Speaker 2: 32:58

That's a really good suggestion, Sam. I really appreciate. And, uh, the last one is a keeper. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 33:06

Thank you so much for having me on to talk today. I really enjoyed, you know, kind of breaking down some of these processes. I find that when I talk with other professionals in the industry that I always come away, they're learning something from somebody else, or just learning something about myself by discussing some of my processes and measures. So thank you so much for having me on today.

Speaker 2: 33:29

Thanks a lot. Thanks Sam, for sharing your five step approach to keep everyone focused on the desired outcome. When answering a broad competitive question from sales, executive and customers in the world that is moving to AI and automation, keeping our process. Human is a piece of great advice. Thanks everyone for listening. I hope you liked this episode. Don't forget to subscribe to the alignment podcast on your favorite platform. Reach out to me at Asheesh dot Jane at[inaudible] dot com with feedback and suggestions, or look me up on LinkedIn until next time, stay safe and get aligned.