Blog

The following was written by Dan Gentile, Senior Product Manager at Mavrck. Dan Gentile is a Boston based product manager who has built and launched products at a number of Boston's fastest growing startups. His experience working on both B2B and B2C technologies, combined with his past life at Bain Capital, has given him a unique perspective on taking new products to market across all industries. You can find Dan on LinkedIn.

Most product launches tend to have similar goals: product adoption, consumer satisfaction, and long-term repeat customers. Oftentimes, resources to support a launch to achieve these goals are limited and require some creativity to get the most bang for your marketing buck. That’s why it is so important to arm yourself with as much industry knowledge as possible to ensure you’re maximizing your efforts when entering a market.

But where to start? Gathering targeted, useful competitive intelligence can be a daunting task because there are countless roads to explore. By starting with the following key areas, you’ll be able to acquire a strong base from which you can begin to build a targeted strategy to support your launch.

Competitor battlecards are one of the most common sales enablement tools businesses create today. Battlecards are one of the key ways that a business can translate competitive intelligence into strategies for a sales team to win more deals and bring in more revenue. Battlecards provide an overview of a specific competitor’s company, products, and services, and provide guidelines on how to win a deal against that competitor.

The speed of competition has never been faster. Over the last decade, innovations like Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing have allowed companies to improve their products, change their positioning, and find new verticals to sell into at an incredible rate. Unfortunately, product marketing and sales enablement professionals still lack the tools to keep their sales team up to date with relevant information. Today, we’re aiming to change that with the release of Crayon Battlecards.

Nailing messaging and positioning is one of the toughest tasks for product marketers. Hours of countless market research, talking with the sales team, big (and sometimes expensive) branding exercises—all in an effort to craft the Most Perfect Messaging Ever. Unfortunately, once you have your Most Perfect Messaging Ever, it often does not resonate with your market in the way you expected. What gives?