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Strategic Competitive Analysis: Techniques for Product Marketing Success
This post provides practical recommendations to systematically gather and evaluate critical insights about competitors and rank them by threat level. This can help focus your product, sales, and marketing resources where they matter most. Whether you’re facing new market entrants or reevaluating your competitive landscape, these approaches can help you stay ahead.
Read MoreIdentifying the Best Win/Loss Approach for Your Company
What is the best win/loss approach for your firm’s needs and objectives? Like advertising, there are many flavors of win/loss research. This article provides guidance on how to approach win/loss research based on your objectives, who is driving the research, and the nature of your deals.
Read MoreRedefining Losses: How Accurate Classification Transforms Sales Insights
This post addresses the challenge of accurately identifying true losses in your Win / Loss program. It outlines how misclassifications can occur—such as buyers in early research stages, predetermined decisions, or misaligned buyer segments—and the impact these inaccuracies have on your interpretation of the data.
Read More12 Tips for Better DIY Win/Loss Interviews
If conducted and analyzed with a structured approach, win/loss interviews can identify trends and identify opportunities to improve win rates. If you conduct your own win/loss interviews these tips will help you ask the right questions, set up calls with those elusive lost deals, conduct a better interview, and produce an objective analysis.
Read MoreCompetitor Sorting: Ignore, Monitor, or Threat
Competitive intelligence delivers both short-term and long-term benefits by helping Sales close more deals, informing product messaging, and as an input to the product roadmap. B2B marketers need a simple, yet systematic, process to identify which competitors they can safely ignore, and which warrant ongoing focus and attention. One approach is to split competitive intelligence activities into two categories: High-Level Market Scanning and Competitor Profiling.
Read MoreBlueprint for cost-effective competitive intelligence
A cost-effective approach is to gather individual pieces of data from a disparate range of publicly available sources, connect the dots, and build an overall profile of the competitor. You can find information about competitors in financial databases, directories, social media, industry associations, competitor websites, job postings, press releases, publicly available contracts, trade journals, analyst reports, and online reviews. Thoughtful analysis of these sources produces competitive insight that, while not perfect, is typically enough to guide decisions about which competitors to pay attention to, and which to ignore.
Read MoreWin/Loss Analysis – Triangulating on the truth
Understanding why deals are won or lost can seem like a game of telephone or “He said, she said”: The Buyer gives one side of the story, Sales has another, and Marketing brings its point of view too. Who is right? Everyone’s partly right and partly wrong. In our experience, the best process combines all available information streams to triangulate on the truth.
Read More5 Questions to add to your Win/Loss analysis
Many companies conduct win/loss analysis on a formal or informal basis. These efforts often focus on product features, pricing and the performance of the sales reps which are critical to understanding the sales process.
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