Map competitors across positioning, product, pricing, proof, and weaknesses, then turn the research into sales-ready battlecards with an update cadence. Use when someone asks "what are our competitors doing", "build a battlecard", "how do we compare to X", "why are we losing deals to X", or before a pricing or positioning decision. Do NOT use for designing long-term defensibility strategy - use competitive-moat instead; for a public comparison landing page use comparison-page-builder; for rep-facing objection scripts beyond the battlecard use objection-handler.
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name: Competitive Intelligence
description: Map competitors across positioning, product, pricing, proof, and weaknesses, then turn the research into sales-ready battlecards with an update cadence. Use when someone asks "what are our competitors doing", "build a battlecard", "how do we compare to X", "why are we losing deals to X", or before a pricing or positioning decision. Do NOT use for designing long-term defensibility strategy - use competitive-moat instead; for a public comparison landing page use comparison-page-builder; for rep-facing objection scripts beyond the battlecard use objection-handler.
---
# Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence turns scattered impressions of rivals into artifacts sales and product can act on. The costly mistake it prevents is losing winnable deals to a competitor pitch nobody prepared for - or worse, repositioning the whole product around a competitor claim that was never verified. Everything below runs on one discipline: separate fact from inference, and date every claim.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather inputs
1. The 3-5 competitors that actually show up in deals (ask sales; if pre-sales, the ones prospects mention). Default: cap at 3 - depth beats coverage.
2. Which deals or segments each appears in.
3. Existing win/loss notes, lost-deal reasons, sales call recordings if available.
4. The decision this research feeds: sales enablement, pricing move, roadmap, or positioning. This sets how deep each dimension goes.
### Step 2: Work the source ladder, primary first
Collect in this order and cite each claim's source:
1. Their own properties: homepage, pricing page, docs, changelog/release notes, security page. These yield positioning, features, pricing, and shipping velocity as fact.
2. Review sites (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius): filter to reviews from your ICP's segment; the "dislikes" sections are the closest thing to free win/loss data.
3. Job postings and team pages: what they're hiring for is what they'll ship in two quarters - label this inference.… install to load the full skill