Hey, hi, hello,

This has been on my mind lately.

Before hiring for competitive intel, know which team needs it most.

Here’s how to think about it: CI typically serves three key groups, each requiring different activities and skills from the CI lead.

1. Sales and Marketing: This is who I spent the majority of my time serving at ZoomInfo—as such, my activities consisted mostly of enablement, creating battlecards and other competitive collateral to support deals, tracking market leaders, and win-loss analysis.

2. Product: This is primarily who I served at ClickUp. It was a very different role from the one I had at ZoomInfo, despite it having the same job title. A Product audience is more looking for in-depth product benchmarking, and they’re usually more interested in what the innovative disruptors are doing in your space (less so the slower legacy players).

3. Strategy: This group includes executives, finance, legal, and ops—so leadership alignment is a huge element to the role. Tasks here typically involve more project management, reporting, analyst relations, and M&A planning. So you usually need someone with industry clout here, and someone that isn’t afraid to share their opinions to sway stubborn execs.

Most CI programs should start by focusing on just one of those audiences above. Prove out the role and the impact, then move onto helping another team.

In my experience, understanding who you’re building for key when you’re putting together that first CI program.

Q&A 👊

How Relay.app is Taking on Zapier

“Tell me the origin story of Relay.app and the gap that you saw in the market”

I’ve been working on productivity tools my whole career. My first startup was an AI-powered digital calendar called Timeful, and I led the product teams for Gmail and Google Calendar for several years after we were acquired.

After all of that time working on email and calendar tools, I realized that the real opportunity wasn’t to make the user 10% more productive in a single tool but rather to make the user 10x more productive by helping them across ALL of their tools.

So we decided to build a next-generation cross-product automation tool that would save you time by automating actions across all of your apps.

In the V1 today, you can think of it as a modern evolution of Zapier. Our ambition is to be an AI-powered assistant that works day and night on your behalf across all of your work.

“How do you differentiate Relay.app from established competitors in your space?”

We have 3 key product-based differentiators:

1. Deeper and more robust integrations that make previously fragile automations "just work"

2. An easy-to-use set of AI steps that scale from simple extractions all the way to powerful agents.

3. A flexible set of human-in-the-loop steps to keep you in control. This differentiator specifically helped a customer cut their onboarding program from a month to 2 days.

We came to these differentiators through the following process: customer discovery interviews -> design partner program -> beta -> launch with a very tight feedback loop with users at each step.

“What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced while trying to disrupt the market? How have you tackled them?”

We have two core challenges:

1. Integrations: We have to build a TON of them. Unfortunately, there's no magic answer here other than having great engineers and cranking them out.

2. Awareness: Our product is already great, but how do we let people know it exists and give them confidence it will solve their problem? We’re focusing on a marketing strategy that combines content and social proof to both show people how and why they should use Relay.app, and also give them confidence that real people they trust are using it successfully.

“What's one insight or lesson learned that's been critical to your competitive success?”

Run towards competition, not away from it.

Competition means there's a problem that someone cares about. I've found it way easier to explain why we're different and better rather than try to explain in the abstract what we are and why people should care.

“Any parting advice for revenue leaders competing in crowded markets?”

Don't "muscle through" something that doesn't feel right, or jam in more features to find PMF.

During our beta in early 2023, we tried hard to sell Relay.app at a departmental level to customer success leaders to uplevel their repeated processes like customer onboarding, QBRs, renewals, etc.

After 6 months, and hundreds of meetings, we only had a few customers. Even though they were happy, it just didn’t “feel right”, mostly because the pain didn’t feel big and repeatable enough.

Instead of improving our sales process or adding more features, we went the opposite way and cut down to a much simpler core that could compete directly with Zapier with just a couple of big differentiators.

As soon as we did this, the numbers immediately started to take off. So my main advice is to refine the core over and over again until it feels easy, rather than powering through objections and adding incremental features.

JUICY SCOOPS 🧃

What’s happening now

• 🔒 | Crowdstrike’s outage gave competitors momentum [more]

• 📈 | Uber and Lyft surged after Tesla delayed robotaxi launch [more]

• 🤖 | Meta claims new AI model beats out OpenAI and Anthropic [more]

• 🛻 | Rivian CEO wants more EV variety than just Rivian and Tesla [more]

EXAMPLES 🍊

Your weekly dose of vitamin C(ompete)

Should you kick your competitors when they’re down?

Well, maybe don’t kick… but there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging a negative situation and reminding folks that things are business-as-usual for you.

SentinelOne did a good job of this during the Crowdstrike outage earlier this week.

COMPETE GEEKS ONLY 🛑✋

From the Community

Here are a couple threads that got folks talking this week.

“Wait, what’s the Healthy Competition Community again?”

It’s where 100+ Product Marketers and Competitive Intel practitioners connect and share tips to help each other win.

ICYMI 👀

Here are the most popular competitive Q&As I’ve published:

• Co-Founder & CEO of River vs. Luma & Partiful

• Founder & CEO of Capsule vs. Descript & VEED

• Head of Marketing of RevenueHero vs. Chili Piper

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy