Introduction

The Problem with Traditional Competitive Research

Ever wonder why all the detailed competitive research, battlecards, internal slack channels and newsletters don’t seem to make their way into your company’s strategy? You’re not alone.

Traditional competitive research has a problem. It is somehow seen as tactical — often getting pushed down the priority list, while it’s supposed to drive strategy.

There’s a reason it’s one of Porter’s 5 Cs right?

Yet in reality, it’s mostly reduced to “can I get a comparison slide” or battlecards that are rarely being used. And it’s not just a sales issue. Competitive knowledge should inform content and product too.

In this playbook, we’ll show you how to turn competitive intelligence into a strategic advantage. Instead of letting research collect dust in battlecards no one reads, you’ll learn how to map competitive positioning in a way that actually influences marketing, sales, and product decisions.

By the end, you’ll have a framework that ensures competitive insights don’t just sit in a Slack thread—they drive real impact. Let’s get into it.

Meet The Author: Talya Heller

Talya Heller is a seasoned product marketer who believes competitive research should drive strategy and positioning—not get buried in battlecards. As the founder of Down to a T GTM Consulting, Talya partners with B2B marketing leaders to create compelling narratives that help companies stand out in crowded markets and speak to the entire buying committee.

Recognized as PMA’s top 100 PMMs, Exit Five’s top 25 marketers to know, and SalesIntel’s women in revenue, Talya’s work has been featured on PMM Camp, Klue’s Compete Week, and more.

Where to find Talya:

• Linkedin
• Website (additional resources + services)
• Newsletter: Spill the T

More than battlecards

Traditional battlecards are overwhelming. Too much information, too little direction.

You can't see the forest for the trees.

They try to be everything for everyone – product, sales, marketing, customer success – but end up serving no one effectively. It's the classic marketing mistake: when you target everyone, you speak to no one.

Which is why no one's using them. If they were actually helpful, would we constantly struggle with adoption? Nope.

Here's the thing: competitive intelligence shouldn't only live in assets like battlecards.

Introducing: Competitive Positioning Mapping

Competition is a key step in positioning, yet many companies overlook or rush through it.

If positioning is about telling your ideal customers what you do in a way that matters, competitive positioning adds context—helping them compare you to what they already know.

Whether you're in a new or mature category, your audience will instinctively measure you against:

• A similar product
• A different approach
• Doing nothing (ignoring the pain or using a manual workaround)

For example if you're marketing a server-side website optimization tool, your audience’s comparisons might look like this:

The key is leveraging your audience’s existing opinions to highlight how you stand out.

“But won’t this draw attention to competitors?”

In short, no. Your audience already knows about alternatives. Instead, you’re positioning yourself as the better replacement.

Rather than bragging like a bad date, you’re giving them a familiar reference point—making it easier to grasp your differentiation.

The result is a clear Competitive Positioning Blueprint:

This mapping reveals how you win—offering a strategic, high-level view of your key levers. And most importantly, it’s simple enough for marketing, product, and sales teams to apply effectively.

Get your copy of the full Competitive Positioning Workbook here: Competitive Positioning Workbook Competitive Positioning Workbook

The 5-Step Process for Finding Your Competitive Positioning

Really understanding your audience is the foundation of competitive positioning. Without a clear picture of who you're targeting, it's impossible to craft messaging that resonates, or to position against your competitors effectively.

Step 1: know your audience

Nailing your audience matters not just for the positioning (and later, messaging) work itself; it matters to competitive research too.

Creating a rich ideal customer profile with specific firmographics, pains, and triggers will make the next steps of this framework easier. But it should also clarify

• How they’re solving their pains now
• Who they’re looking up to
• What communities or sources they trust

Take a multi-faceted approach to identify your audience:

1. Talk directly with customers and analyze win interviews. This can also be done during events and conferences, CAB meetings, and by listening to sales calls recordings.
2. Gather insights from customer-facing teams across GTM functions
3. Look at the data: expansions, sales velocity, win rates by use case, vertical, tier, and product

Need a step-by-step guide to conducting customer interviews? Check out this playbook 👇🏻 Playbook #7: How To Get Insights From Customer Interviews Playbook #7: How To Get Insights From Customer Interviews Read

Yes, you could do some research about your customer pains and priorities with ChatGPT but I would caution you against stopping at that. However, you can definitely use LLMs to analyze quantitative and qualitative data you gathered during the 3 steps above.

Note: If you’re selling a horizontal product with multiple use cases, the ideal audience might be different for each of them, and so will the competitors. In that case, you might need to repeat this process for each of the main use cases you’re positioning.

Step 2: know the market

Forget feature comparison tables. They're useful, sure, but features are easy to imitate.

Focus instead on what isn't: expertise, vertical knowledge, distribution channels, brand strength, and thought leadership. These will tell you their GTM strategy and will make it easier to predict where they’re headed, not just what they did until now.

Ask the real questions:

• Who's their ideal customer profile? Both the one they aim for and their actual one because often these aren’t identical
• Who's the villain in their story? Who or what are they positioning against?
• What channels are they leveraging? (UGC vs. in-person events vs. community meetups, for example)
• Where are they investing? M&A activity, funding, partnerships, hiring trends, sales/marketing/engineering/support ratios

Step 3: know where to focus

Now that you have the lay of the land you can hone in on who they’re targeting:

• Who they say they're talking to: featured logos, use cases, content partnerships
• Who's actually purchasing: filter review sites by firmographics, monitor social listening to see who's generating content about competitors

There's often a gap. That gap is your opportunity.

If your competitors’ core customers are different than your ideal audience, it often means they can’t serve them effectively (think regulations or compliance, support, migration, implementation and other barriers). You’d be surprised how many companies focus their enablement efforts on competitors their ICP would never actually consider.

Step 4: know your unique winning factors

This is where your customer research from step 1 becomes useful again.

When you know your ideal audience well, you also know why you win. But, "we have a great brand" isn't enough. Break down the distinct capabilities you provide to your ideal customers. Then, translate each to their benefits from having them, the pains each solves, and how it manifests in the product.

Example: "Scale" on its own means nothing. But if your ICP struggles to get company-wide adoption to whatever they’re using your product for, and your product integrates with tools they already use plus offers SCIM integration with granular permissions – now you're telling a different story:

That is specific. And, is a great capability to position against “purpose-built” tools.

Step 5: Competitive positioning mapping

Each distinct capability becomes a potential differentiator.

Compare each capability against the alternatives your ICP actually considers:

• Status quo (manual processes, spreadsheets)
• Competitive approaches
• Specific companies regularly appearing in ICP deals

Any capability that competitors can't match gives you edge. Add them up and you’ve got a clear roadmap to win in a simple format.

Driving cross-functional alignment

This approach intentionally prioritizes clarity. It’s visually simple, unlike a collection of 10 (or more) battlecards, or a long positioning document that only makes sense to product marketers, but isn’t actionable to anyone else.

The idea is that if it can be easily consumed by your colleagues across teams, it is more likely to be used.

And if messaging is repeating the same message in 100 different ways and across 100 different channels… this is a must, since product marketers aren’t creating every single peace of spoken or written content. If we want the message to get across, we have to be able to enable internal teams first.

The distinct capabilities or levers (and their benefits) are now something everyone at the company can understand in relation to the market. We are giving every team something they can interpret rather than reinventing the wheel and coming up with siloed version of what they think they should focus on.

This can take many forms through each team’s work:

Marketing:

• Messaging development: what every brief should be based on, from web copy, to ads, landing pages, and videos
• Content pillars: the main themes we want to emphasize in every piece of content
• Thought leadership: the narrative and POV your exec team and SMEs will carry through podcast appearances, interviews, keynote sessions
• Sales assets: how you create urgency throughout the sales motion

Product

• Roadmap prioritization: what areas are truly differentiated and which are table stakes, UX
• Future investment: where to invest further to deepen functionality that aligns with the existing market position
• Sunsetting: what functionality is not aligned with the differentiated value or market needs

Sales

• Outreach: what levers to pull and what are useful areas to research target accounts
• Discovery: shaping discovery to solidify (or disqualify) prospects’ pains and perceived value around the differentiators
• Objection handling: addressing potential objections before they arise by reframing them around differentiators
• Product demo: highlighting the differentiated value head on rather than starting with table stakes functionality

Practical Applications

How do you put it into action? Here are a few ideas:

Note: You don’t have to own each of these plays. And, even when you do, expect to collaborate with your counterparts in sales engineering, sales enablement, growth and content marketing, revops and product.

Develop market POV and narrative

Best against: all competitors | Goal: brand differentiation | Complexity: High

Now that you have an over-arching mapping of your reasons to win, it’s easier to start seeing the forrest for the trees. Find the common theme use it to reframe your POV on the market.

Example: at a previous company selling knowledge management software, we positioned the market challenge from gathering the knowledge to getting employees to use it. The market, including all our competitors were focused on creating the artifacts. Our take was that these don’t matter when those systems are infamous for never being referenced or used by anyone.

We did that because our product, unlike many use-case specific products, could be used across the entire company. Because we delivered value around crowdsourcing answers, governance and deep search within different file types (note this was years before LLMs were accessible to every person with internet access), and we had strong implementation team of knowledge management experts, our adoption numbers were through the roof.

Decide who’s the villain:

A challenger brand might want to align the company’s positioning strategy against status quo; a more established brand might want to position against a specific competitor if they compete on almost every deal.

Note: more tactical plays might have a different villain, for example a win-back campaign

Example: Beehiiv took direct aim at Kit with this clever competitive campaign. While Kit was talking about their rebrand, Beehiiv claims they stayed heads down, shipping new features and helping creators grow. They're now offering a "Convert to Beehiiv Kit" that makes it easy for Kit customers to switch platforms.

Messaging:

The differentiators you mapped should be tied into your messaging. Whether you’re working on it from scratch or updating existing messaging, make sure you touch on all your distinct capabilities.

Remember, messaging is repeating the same thing 100 different times. Website copy, sales decks, ad copy should all reinforce the same thing.

Content Pillars

Best against: all competitors | Goal: higher conversion, GTM alignment | Complexity: High

• Use the mapping to pick a specific capability you win in most cases, or pick a specific alternative approach.
• Align your content strategy around the pain this capability solves. The more the content is geared towards audience who is already familiar with you, the more the content can lean into the benefit
• For content geared towards in-market buyers, use the same distinct capabilities you mapped to tie the problem←→benefit back to your product

Examples:

• Drift: long-form article for choosing Drift over Intercom
• Refine Labs: free GTM frameworks that subtly disqualified HubSpot for complex B2B (”the old playbook isn’t working anymore”)

Competitive Campaigns:

Competitive campaigns are focused efforts to convert competitor customers. A win-back campaign targets closed-lost deals, checking in when pain points resurface. A rip-and-replace campaign actively goes after unhappy competitor customers, using targeted outreach and migration incentives. Done right, these campaigns can boost revenue by capitalizing on competitive weaknesses.

1. Win-back campaign

Best against: top closed-lost revenue | Goal: recover lost deals | Complexity: Med

1. Shortlist closed-lost deals of ICP prospects
2. Segment by lost to (competitor vs. status quo)
3. Create an outreach cadence to start 6-9 months after closed-lost date (depending on the length of the sales cycle), asking directly about pains those competitors fall short (the green boxes)
• Be as specific as possible—this is why segmentation matters here
4. Add information on what your company improved since
5. Consider testing incentive

2. Rip and replace campaign

Best against: direct competitors | Goal: capture competitor revenue and market share | Complexity: High

1. Build target account list based on unhappy competitor customers (mining review sites and other social networks)
2. Create outreach highlighting your differentiation compared to that competitor (the green boxes)
• Channels could include email, retargeting ads, gifting
3. Since you have no information on their contract terms, consider offering migration packages, added services, or exclusive training

Example:

• ClickUp: Watch their direct response ads attacking Jira’s complexity. This video ad is so good!

Sales Enablement

Proper sales enablement ensures reps can confidently position your product against competitors. Use a competitive playbook to align them on why and how you win, objection handling to equip them with structured responses to expected questions, discovery questions to expose competitor weaknesses, and demo planning to highlight differentiation. The goal: better conversations, faster sales cycles, and higher win rates.

1. Competitive playbook

Best against: all competitors | Goal: increase rep adoption | Complexity: Med

1. Start with the context:

The competitive positioning mapping provides alignment on

1. Why you win: the main levers
2. How you win: which is relevant in what situation
2. Take it a step forward and provide similar competitive mapping for their territories, customer segments, and around product use cases.

Even if a rep don’t read a single word of the more detailed battlecard, this should help them develop better understanding of the market and improve their discovery process.
2. Objection handling

Best against: all competitors | Goal: improve win rates | Complexity: Med

1. Identify top objections for status quo, each competing approach, and direct competitors
2. Draft responses using the competitive positioning mapping
3. Look for examples in sales calls for how top reps are responding to each of these objections. In theory they should be using the same levers you identified as distinct capabilities.



Note: This is a good opportunity to validate that you didn’t miss anything!

4. Develop 3 altitudes for each talk track:
• The one liner: aka the quick dismiss. Think of it as your reaction when you’re having a casual conversation at an event and this comes up
• The two-liner. Imagine they said “Oh, interesting. What do you mean by that?” Here’s when you can go into a little more detail, perhaps give an example.
• The email response: This is a short paragraph reps can use in emails if they’re asked about it. Often comes up as “My boss wants to know…”. Here you can go into more details on current customers who switched from said competitor.

3. Discovery

Best against: competing approach, direct competitors | Goal: improve sales velocity | Complexity: Low

1. For every green box in the mapping (distinct capability), identify discovery questions that expose the competitive approaches’ relative weakness
2. Workshop with sales and enforce with role play to train and increase their confidence
3. Add customer proof points and relevant data points

1. Demo planning

Best against: all competitors | Goal: improve sales velocity and win rates | Complexity: Low

1. For every column in the competitive mapping table (status quo, competing approach, direct competitor), prioritize the green boxes (your unique capabilities) by level of importance.
2. For each, write up modified demo flows to highlight the unique distinct capabilities first, relatively to each alternative (this is a good time to look at the capability-feature mapping you completed in step 4 of the framework).

Product Strategy

Product strategy is where you can help turn competitive insights into real action. Focus on proof points to back up differentiation with data, roadmap prioritization to strengthen your edge, and monetization to maximize revenue from defensible features. Aligning product decisions with competitive advantages ensures you win more deals and grow strategically.

1. Differentiation proof points

Best against: all competitors | Goal: improve sales velocity and win rates | Complexity: Med-High

1. Identify the distinct capabilities you win against most competitive approaches (the ones with the most green boxes)
2. Map them to product analytics you currently have
• Find market or industry benchmarks
• Track said analytics and treat it as a KPI
• Collaborate with CS to find additional qualitative proof points from customers around the same capabilities
• Publish data to be used in marketing, and train CS and Sales on using this proof in deals
3. If needed, set up additional product analytics to expand your proof points over time
2. Roadmap prioritization

Best against: all competitors | Goal: Deepen market position | Complexity: Med

1. Map roadmap/backlog features into the distinct capabilities you mapped
2. Prioritize features that are mapped into the most capabilities, strengthening your most defensible capability, or your position against your ultimate villain
3. Future developments:
• When considering adding a new capability to expand use cases or market segment, run first similar mapping to identify how potential competitors show
• Use that mapping similarly to prioritize and even deciding on major investments
3. Monetization strategy

Best against: all competitors | Goal: increase revenue | Complexity: High

1. Identify your most defensible distinct capabilities
• Are not easy to imitate
• Valued most by your ideal customers
2. Consider different monetization strategies, whether at a premium tier or as an add-on, or bundled with other high value features (for example SCIM integration bundled with more enterprise-grade features for Enterprise tier)
3. Test through a paid beta or willingness to pay survey

Conclusion

Competitive positioning isn’t just about knowing who you compete with—it’s about making it easy for all your audiences to see why you’re the right choice. By mapping alternatives, understanding your distinct capabilities, and aligning teams around a clear strategy, you create a foundation that’s simple to interpret and apply across the whole org.

When done right you get a unified, consistent message that doesn’t just tell people what you do—but positions you as the obvious solution in a crowded market.

Resources

• Competitive Positioning Workbook Competitive Positioning Workbook

Where to find Talya

Where to find Talya:

• Linkedin
• Website (additional resources + services)
• Newsletter: Spill the T

• Introduction
• The Problem with Traditional Competitive Research
• Meet The Author: Talya Heller
• More than battlecards
• Introducing: Competitive Positioning Mapping
• The 5-Step Process for Finding Your Competitive Positioning
• Step 1: know your audience
• Step 2: know the market
• Step 3: know where to focus
• Step 4: know your unique winning factors
• Step 5: Competitive positioning mapping
• Driving cross-functional alignment
• Practical Applications
• Develop market POV and narrative
• Decide who’s the villain:
• Messaging:
• Content Pillars
• Competitive Campaigns:
• Sales Enablement
• Product Strategy
• Conclusion
• Resources
• Where to find Talya