Keeping on top of your competitors’ every move is a full-time job in itself and let’s be honest, no product marketer has the time for that as well as all the other aspects of their role. Enter competitive intel tools. They feed you with the info needed to be in the know - all the time - without the man-hours required to get there.
So, to help speed up your shortlisting process, we got out there, spoke to 100s of product marketers and asked them which tools they recommend. Here’s what they said.
Klue
Klue tracks external news and data and combines it with internal sources to improve your competitive intelligence, takes the stress out of battlecard versioning and collaboration, and arms sales teams with pitch strategies that give your win/loss ratio the upper hand.
Website: klue.com
Cost: not available online.
"Klue is our active hub for competitive intelligence. It's a great way to curate internal and external intel and store it for sales, marketing, and customer success. There are some people who don't use battlecards but love the weekly, emailed intel digests. I definitely recommend taking the 15 minutes or so to prepare those."
- Lisa Kalner Williams, Product Marketing Director at Agorapulse
Crayon
Crayon tracks more than 100 data types across 300m+ sources to give you an unbelievably robust view of your competitors’ every move. On top of that, it organises and prioritises updates and hand-delivers the insights you need to enable sales, inform decisions and optimise campaigns.
Website: crayon.co
Cost: not available online.
“Our competitive landscape makes staying on top of CI difficult, but having Crayon from the beginning has given me peace of mind that we are staying one step ahead of our competition. Our competitive win rates have increased as much as 59% since rolling out Crayon Battlecards.”
- Mike Greene, Product Marketing Manager at Klaviyo
Kompyte
Kompyte keeps you hot on the pulse of your competitors’ every move by automating the repetitive parts of the research process (like keywords, promotions, price and feature changes) and compiling all the findings into one, easy-to-analyse place. After that, sharing the insights, incorporating them into your plans and measuring KPIs is painless.
Website: kompyte.com
Cost: not available online.
“The multiple ways of accessing info has helped adoption of competitive intel for us. After a couple of months of deploying Kompyte, the number of requests for "Do you have info on competitor Z?" decreased since the answer was always "Have you checked Kompyte?" Once the sales team got into the habit they became pretty self sufficient.”
- James Allgood, Product Marketing Lead at Brightidea
CompleteIQ
CompleteIQ comes with AI-lead intel and personalised and actionable battlecards that deliver dynamic comparisons between competitors (plus the option to filter by feature). It also integrates a win/loss survey into your opportunities so no info’s lost and everyone’s up-to-date. And more, of course.
Website: competeiq.io
Cost: not available online.
Clozd
Customisable programmes, probing questions, savvy processes (including interview scheduling, transcription, incentivisation and analysis) and robust reporting are just some of the tactics Clozd uses to delve into the detail needed to win more and lose less.
Website: clozd.com
Cost: not available online.
External Insights
External Insights provide both market (MI) and competitive (CI) intelligence to help you come to critical decisions with confidence. Their MI service includes market sizing, market landscape analysis and market value chain analysis, and their CI offering encompasses a competitor deep dive and analysis, customer analysis and merger and acquisition screening.
Website: externalinsights.com
Cost: not available online.
IntentData.io
IntentData.io helps your sales teams focus their efforts on active buyers by providing contact-level™ intent data that goes beyond just names, contact details and titles, and untapping important info like competitor engagement, industry conference, company size, new products, funding, and more.
Website: intentdata.io
Cost: not available online.
Inovis
Specialising in the life sciences, digital health and IT/telco sectors, Inovis uncovers competitive insights through things like market intelligence, due diligence investigations, new product concept development, competitive benchmarking, and more.
Website: inovis.global
Cost: not available online.
Fletcher/CSI
Fletcher/CSI conducts research and analysis to help you stay on top of your game and unlock new opportunities. Their services include primary research, strategy workshops, tradeshow intelligence, win/loss analysis and market intelligence.
Website: fletchercsi.com
Cost: not available online.
Principled Technologies
Principled Technologies’ marketing service proves the benefits of your product throughout every stage of the customer journey. Whether it’s a whitepaper focussed on hands-on testing or interactive content to help prospects digest complex info, they provide the fact-backed marketing collateral you need to “shine”.
Website: principledtechnologies.com
Cost: not available online.
Wide Narrow
This one’s all about analytical collaboration. Wide Narrow aggregates data from multiple services and sources, organises it into categories, combines any data that ties together into summaries, and then enables you and your colleagues to annotate your interpretations. And finally, it comes with pre-made report templates to make design and distribution as simple as possible.
Website: widenarrow.com
Cost: not available online.
Satrix Solutions
From Net Promoter Scores, customer advisory boards and win-loss analysis to customer perceptions audits, onboarding and customer satisfaction surveys - and more, Satrix Solutions digs into important data to deliver rich insights and actionable recommendations that improve, differentiate and scale your product.
Website: satrixsolutions.com
Cost: not available online.
Guru
Guru gathers all your organisation’s data - from the brains of your sales team to the words on your pages to the data in your platforms, unifies it, serves it up when people need it, and uses its learnings to continually refine who, where, what and when to deliver intelligence. That means less time looking for it, more time acting on it.
Website: getguru.com
Cost: all prices are based on annual billing (monthly isn’t available).
“Guru’s my favorite tool on the market for knowledge management. It not only documents the information, but it focuses on the easiest ways to share info both internally and externally. Guru integrates nicely with Slack and has a feature called a “knowledge alert” — so whenever new info’s created (e.g. release notes, blogs, new messaging, etc.) that we want lots of eyes on, we can use a knowledge alert to have Guru send everyone a DM in Slack letting them know. Then, you can also use Guru as an accountability tool to make sure people are actually using this info.”
- Farhan Manjiyani, Product Specialist at Qu POS
Bloomfire
Bloomfire makes it easier for everyone in your business to access the information they need - product marketing, sales, customer support, finance, marketing, the lot. How? By centralising everything into one spot so people can self-sufficiently find the knowledge they need - when they need it, all the while maintaining company-wide alignment, reducing time spent searching and preventing knowledge loss.
Website: bloomfire.com
Cost:
“We actually used Bloomfire primarily as a content repository for a span. It worked well for searchability (parsing full PDF text, etc.) but required someone to manage it and keep it up to date. It’s a pretty good all-in-one-place option for a small team supporting a larger sales team.”
- Alec Pinkham, Director of Product Marketing at AppNeta
Highspot
Highspot makes it easier for your sellers to find the content they need - when they need it, guides them through how to best use said assets, keeps them connected and up-to-date, facilitates interactive training and guidance, and helps reps stay up-to-speed with today’s fast-moving buyer climate. All so you can get the most out of every customer conversation.
Website: highspot.com
Cost: not available online.
“Highspot’s smart pages are a great way to create product kits centralizing all product-related materials and messaging and are especially helpful for companies with large portfolios.”
- Karen Cohen, Director of Product Marketing at Appsflyer
Competitors App
From website amends, social updates and keyword rankings to new blogs, ad performance and email changes, Competitors App monitors all your rivals’ marketing moves. So, instead of trawling through all their pages, profiles and channels yourself, all you have to do is sit back and wait for an email to land in your box.
Website: competitors.app
Cost:
Cipher Knowledge 360
Knowledge 360 identifies new opportunities, centralises market intelligence and automates competitor research by alerting you to updates and news in your industry, pulling internal and external insights into one place, and providing you and your teams with pre-loaded battlecards, side-by-side competitor analysis, and so much more.
Website: cipher-sys.com/software/competitive-intelligence-platform
Cost: not available online.
SimilarWeb
From uncovering winning content strategies and understanding your audience’s behaviour to generating the insights needed to perfect sales pitches and mapping emerging market trends, SimilarWeb offer lots of market intelligence tools to help you make more informed decisions.
Website: similarweb.com
Cost: not available online.
Owler
Owler lets you know what’s going on in the companies you care about by alerting you on 15 trigger events, including things like acquisition, leadership changes, restructuring and product launches. It sends push alerts so you’re always in the know and auto-syncs with your CRM to ensure new accounts are being tracked too.
Website: owler.com
Cost: not available online.
“I use Owler for competitive tracking since it is much more useful than Google Alerts, even though it does the same sort of thing. Owler asks what company you work for and (usually) automatically presents you with the competitors you want to track. You can add or subtract companies to customize it and whenever your competitor releases news, you get notified. Owler only tracks certain types of publications so you don't get spammed with market analysis or irrelevant info that is the majority of my Google Alerts. Their free version is pretty feature packed so give it a shot before paying for the premium service.”
- James Allgood, Product Marketing Lead at Brightidea
For tonnes more recommended tools on everything from sales enablement and messaging to design and roadmapping, check out our Product Marketing Tools of Choice report.
