Rethinking Competitive Intelligence: From Reactive to Proactive

What if a true competitive program has nothing to do with outdoing the competition, releasing similar features to “catch up”, keeping tabs on website changes, buying the latest state-of-the-art competitive intelligence platform, and everything to do with becoming obsessed with understanding our customer's pains and needs?

Rethinking Competitive Intelligence

Think about it - customers don't buy products because they stack up better on the -endless feature checklist that we do as SaaS organizations. They buy specific solutions to solve their current problems. They're not TRULY interested in how we match up to Competitor X or Y. It might come off this way, or this question may come up. But in reality, they want to know we understand their pain points and can solve their problems. All while providing an exceptional customer experience that builds trust. That's it.

The companies that are winning long-term, and are truly providing strategic value, are the ones that have tunnel vision on becoming experts in customer needs - their goals, frustrations, and desired outcomes. Not just experts in their products, but experts in the core problems their products need to solve. When you nail that product-market fit by delivering a laser-focused solution to a real customer headache, you automatically create the differentiation everyone strives for. Any comparisons to other products become irrelevant because you're miles ahead in truly understanding and serving your customers' needs and solving problems. This may all sound so obvious, but the reality is, many organizations aren’t doing this.

Let me illustrate with an example. Imagine you're a project management software company. You could spend all your time obsessing over competitors’ positioning on their websites, matching or one-upping the small features of competitors like Asana or Monday. Or you could go deeper - discovering that customers need a more effortless way to collaborate and share updates in real-time, without endless back-and-forth emails and meetings. By becoming hyper-focused on solving that core customer workflow problem, you could create a new experience for solving this customer pain point. This type of thinking allows you to move proactively instead of reactively.

This kind of customer obsession requires an intense, company-wide commitment. It's more than just paying lip service to the "customer first" - it's ingrained in everything you do. It means hiring people who have a natural curiosity about understanding users. It means your executive team is highly engaged and advocates for staying hyper-focused on customer needs, instead of chasing the market and competitors. It means systematically capturing and amplifying the voice of your customers through robust research programs and keeping continuous feedback loops across every team. This isn’t just a one-time ordeal where you as a product marketer drive this strategy. It’s an organizational-wide culture shift that everyone participates in, helps cultivate, and reaps the benefits of.

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The Power of Customer-Led Focus

It is certainly not easy, but operationalizing an intense focus on customer needs can pay massive dividends. You create transcendent products and experiences that customers can't live without. When you create these types of products, the cultivated, customer-led focus becomes evident. Another fact at play: customer retention is easier than getting new customers. According to Forbes, “Businesses have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer, while the probability is only 5-20% for a net new customer. A transcendent product experience makes everyone’s lives easier. So, once we’ve created value, it’s time to INCREASE our value to that customer by digging even deeper into these problem sets.

When customer success does well, the product becomes indispensable. Marketing can run campaigns that resonate with your ICP. Sales closes more high-value deals due to a highly targeted and refined pipeline. Most importantly, you build an enduring, defensible competitive edge that can't be matched by driving value in its truest form for your customer base.

So many organizations get distracted, constantly adjusting and reallocating resources to chase the next shiny new competitor, feature, or integration. But truly visionary organizations have the confidence and discipline to stay firmly rooted in delivering exceptional value to the customer needs they understand so intimately. They know their strength comes from customer intimacy, not reacting to every competitive threat or pivot.

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Apple: A Case Study of Customer Obsession

Take Apple as an example. While direct and indirect competitors seemingly released new products, features, and functionality daily around Generative AI, they’ve taken the past 18 months to 2 years and have perfected their product market fit. With their recent announcements in June at WWDC24 , they unveiled highly impactful updates around all things Generative AI in their products. Instead of chasing, they sat back, dug deep, and answered, “What do our customers REALLY want?”. They used this time to develop key partnerships with organizations like OpenAI and perfect the rollout of how they plan to integrate Generative AI directly into Apple’s Operating system and users’ everyday workflow with Apple Intelligence (Which can be beautifully shortened to ‘AI’, another phenomenal branding play by the way). ?

Apple’s reputation of deep customer obsession created a defensible market position that has put itself in a league of its own for the last 20+ years. They will continue to position itself for success as we enter into this transformative era of AI.

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Implementing Customer Obsession in Your Organization

Making this philosophical shift requires meaningful changes across your organization. Things like embedding curiosity about customer needs into your core values and hiring practices and implementing rigorous voice-of-customer research programs that fuel your strategy and roadmaps. Tearing down silos and functional boundaries to enable seamless, end-to-end focus on full customer journeys, injecting customer-centric practices like design thinking into your DNA.

It also requires an executive team that personifies and champions this customer obsession. Leaders who get into the weeds of understanding customer needs, rather than being insulated in meetings or boardrooms. Leaders who celebrate stories of employees going above and beyond to empathize with customers. Leaders who reinforce key metrics and goals centered on achieving key customer needs and outcomes over vanity product milestones.

It's a transformation that isn't easy, but the payoff is invaluable. When you uniquely understand your buyers' needs and can deliver tailored, impactful solutions in ways competitors can't touch, you achieve product/market dominance without playing the game of “chase” as I like to call it. Your offerings become indispensable and irreplaceable to customers because you serve them best.?

In today's crowded markets, simply being a "me too" product that checks certain feature boxes is a commodity play. To truly rise above and create profitable, sustainable growth, you must be singularly focused on deeply understanding important customer needs and fulfilling them better than anyone else. That's how you earn customer obsession and loyalty. That's the real competitive advantage.

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The Balancing Act: Traditional CI v. True Customer Focus

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for competitive technology, tracking competitor releases, alerts, and other forms of intelligence. It’s that those focuses should be secondary to driving the solution of customer problems. As product marketers, our focus has been completely mixed up by the noise from both internal and external sources. A lot of PMMs may say “We’re completely customer-focused”, but truly are not. ?

So put down those competitive intel reports for a minute and stop obsessing over minuscule details that changed on your top five competitor websites. Instead of chasing the competition, chase fulfilling core customer needs in ways only you can. Crack that code of intimate customer understanding and deliver insanely great experiences tailored to their problems. You'll have an unstoppable product revolution on your hands and will achieve a competitive position that's incredibly hard for others to take. This is the new battleground - may the most customer-obsessed company win.