Going founder mode for competitive intel

Or, how I ended up fêted with wine and cheese by our biggest competitor, watched their 3-year partner roadmap presentation and sat in a classroom full of their most frustrated users.

Everyone says you should ignore your competitors and focus on your customers. I disagree.

Yes, focus on your customers religiously. But there is tremendous value in understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

In the early days of Constructor, we lost a couple big customers to a larger legacy vendor called Bloomreach. Most painful was a Fortune 500 grocery chain – one of the bigger customers for our initial autosuggest product offering.

We resolved to never lose another customer to Bloomreach and to beat them 2:1 in new business (a goal we far eclipsed in my later years!)

How did we do it?

Some effective product management, good salesmanship and a whole lot of amazing work from our talented engineering team to build a search engine from scratch that would deliver faster results at higher quality than existing tools.

But one fun piece of the puzzle were our adventures in competitive intelligence :)

Top Secret Partner Roadmap

When Bloomreach threw their partner conference in SF, I planned a trip to attend.

Helpfully, they provided a public EventBrite registration link for their keynote partner briefing and training. I signed up (with my own name and email: no subterfuge required!) and enjoyed some wine and cheese on their behalf before I sat down with giddy anticipation for our biggest competitor’s preview of the next 3 years of their product roadmap.

What did we learn?

• It was a tense crowd as their CEO tried to win over skeptical agency and vendor partners.
• It turned out the content and experience platform they acquired after struggling as an SEO and search tool was losing in the market.
• The CEO joked nervously about companies delivering a dump-truck full of cash to Adobe HQ for an inferior product.
• It became clear to us that Adobe was the 800 pound gorilla, Bloomreach was struggling to compete in content management and neither search nor eCommerce were their focus.

You often imagine your competitors are highly competent and focused.

The conference made it clear they were anything but. They had pivoted from one uncompetitive product to the next and were more vulnerable than we imagined.

This reinforced our decision to focus on search for eCommerce.

We noted the competitive dynamics with Adobe. Bloomreach had to convince customers to replace everything, we just replaced Adobe's weaker search solution. We spotlighted customers running Adobe’s experience manager (AEM) alongside our search solution when relevant. We also identified AEM customers as ideal matches for our search technology due to Adobe’s lack of focus there.

The roadmap also mentioned upcoming support for Docker and a new Java version.

It feels silly to admit it now, but we were ignorant to the fact that Bloomreach was still mostly an on-prem solution and was a headache to administer!

We assumed all of our competitors were cloud SaaS vendors like us. Once we realized this wasn’t the case, we made a point to highlight that we were cloud native. This also differentiated us from Algolia which had started as an on-device mobile search library and had moved to a server reservation model for their enterprise offering.

We could not only pitch less admin hassle, but took end-to-end ownership for result quality, performance and uptime.

No reserving a certain number of machines year-round just to handle Black Friday traffic as for Algolia’s enterprise offering or managing those machines yourself as for Bloomreach.

And no worrying about your service dying when the data center caught on fire and there was no failover logic because that was an expensive upgrade (real examples from both!).

Product Frustration Classroom

My favorite event of all was the in-depth training in Bloomreach’s software we enrolled in for the low price of $1,000!

Talking to your customers is critical. But it’s also amazing to learn about the market by attending a class run by your competitor where all of their customers discuss the biggest product deficiencies.

We learned that the manual overrides necessary to return decent results had led to unmaintainable tangles of dated, stale and counterproductive rules. Personalization was unworkable and filters were a nightmare. This fed into valuable product, marketing and sales insights.

Competitor DevRel as Product Research

Algolia was a more open solution, so it wasn’t as much of a headache to research, but we did attend several Algolia developer relations events. That made it clear how singular their focus was on speed (good!) and how little they thought about AI or eCommerce capabilities (bad!).

We knew they made no attempt at ML or automated reranking, but we were shocked to learn there was no ML anywhere on the 3-year roadmap. We continued to hammer on this gap for years until an executive shake-up shifted their marketing and product priorities.

Most helpfully in the near term for us: The voice offering they developed at great cost during the Alexa craze was a speculative bet without real usage, which gave us confidence to limit our investments in the space.

Conclusion

To succeed as a B2B startup you have to master product, but you also have to master product marketing and sales enablement. Competitive intelligence is a critical component for both.

It’s important to note: None of this required any subterfuge or ethically ambiguous espionage!

Just sign up and go! You’ll be surprised what you find out.

These are vivid anecdotes, but the best B2B startups build a competitive intelligence system.

Winning with a Competitive Intelligence System

Here are some approaches I’ve seen companies leverage successfully:

• Counterintuitively, develop empathy for your competitor. Put yourself in their shoes. What constraints are they operating within? What would be frustrating about their position? Why would you choose to say what they’re saying?
• Prospect discovery can become a valuable tool for competitive intelligence. Can you show me in your current tool what is frustrating for you? What screens and capabilities do you love? Hate?
• If you win or lose a deal, don’t just ask why. What almost made you choose another solution? What was most exciting about the other solution? What concerned them about your solution? How did they know yours was the right/wrong solution?
• Do your part to increase attendance at your competitors’ events… by attending yourself! Since incentives are to increase event attendance, you can often get in under the radar. These events are as valuable for competitive intelligence as they are for customer prospecting.
• Develop personal relationships with agencies, SIs and consultants. They typically have the greatest understanding of the market. Be careful though, because what you share with them can end up with your competitors.
• We sometimes worked with former employees of our competitors in new contexts as partners and – while being conscientious to not encourage breaking NDAs – would often get a visceral sense of our competitors’ weaknesses.
• Ask an agent to run through wayback machine checkpoints to identify how their marketing changed over time. What were their first logos? What logos have they lost? How has their positioning evolved? How has their documentation evolved?
• See a testimonial? If it was more than a year old the contact has probably moved to another company. Track them down and chat.
• Intelligence analysts at the CIA or NSA never build a story from one piece of intel. Learn to triangulate patterns between G2 Crowd reviews, sales decks, reddit, hiring patterns, customer conversations, and yes, partner roadmap presentations.

Good luck and happy hunting :)