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Disrupting Zapier
Also: what you should know before hiring for competitive intel
Hey, hi, hello,
This has been on my mind lately.
Before hiring for competitive intel, know which team needs it most.
Hereâs how to think about it: CI typically serves three key groups, each requiring different activities and skills from the CI lead.
Sales and Marketing: This is who I spent the majority of my time serving at ZoomInfoâas such, my activities consisted mostly of enablement, creating battlecards and other competitive collateral to support deals, tracking market leaders, and win-loss analysis.
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 theyâre usually more interested in what the innovative disruptors are doing in your space (less so the slower legacy players).
Strategy: This group includes executives, finance, legal, and opsâso 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 isnât 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 youâre building for key when youâre putting together that first CI program.
Presented by Alpharun
Alpharun is a new interview platform that I'm really excited about. Here's why.
As a competitive intel practitioner at Apollo, I run a win-loss program to learn why we win and lose deals.
Historically, I've had to either 1) send surveys to get quantitative data or 2) schedule half hour interviews for more qualitative insights.
Sending surveys is nice and quick, but doesn't get me as much detail as I'd like. Scheduling interviews gets me that detail I'm looking for, but they take up a lot of time.
Alpharun is like the perfect middle ground. How? By letting interviewees record voice responses to my questions, and then asking AI-generated follow-up questions based on the quality of the response.
Then on the back-end, I get a full transcription of their responses, along with AI-powered summaries and trends. It essentially gives me in-depth interviews at survey scale.
I use it for win-loss, but you could also use them for other market or product research tasks, as well. If you want to learn more, book some time with their founder below!
Q&A đ
How Relay.app is Taking on Zapier
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âTell me the origin story of Relay.app and the gap that you saw in the marketâ
Iâve 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 wasnât 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.
âHow do you differentiate Relay.app from established competitors in your space?â
We have 3 key product-based differentiators:
Deeper and more robust integrations that make previously fragile automations "just work"
An easy-to-use set of AI steps that scale from simple extractions all the way to powerful agents.
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.
âWhat are some of the biggest challenges you've faced while trying to disrupt the market? How have you tackled them?â
We have two core challenges:
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.
Awareness: Our product is already great, but how do we let people know it exists and give them confidence it will solve their problem? Weâre 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.
âWhat's one insight or lesson learned that's been critical to your competitive success?â
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.
âAny parting advice for revenue leaders competing in crowded markets?â
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 didnât âfeel rightâ, mostly because the pain didnât 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 đ§
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Trivia Time đ§
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EXAMPLES đ
Your weekly dose of vitamin C(ompete)
Should you kick your competitors when theyâre down?
Well, maybe donât kick⊠but thereâs 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 đâ
From the Community
Here are a couple threads that got folks talking this week.
âWait, whatâs the Healthy Competition Community again?â
Itâs where 100+ Product Marketers and Competitive Intel practitioners connect and share tips to help each other win.
ICYMI đ
Here are the most popular competitive Q&As Iâve 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.
đAndy
PS: Here are some more goodies if you want to keep the party going:
Check out my swipe file (free). It has all my fav competitive marketing examples.
Get paid what you deserve (free). 100+ practitioners shared their anonymous salary data with me. It should be especially helpful if youâre looking for a new CI role or negotiating a raise.
Level up your tech stack (free). I made a directory of recommended software and agencies to help you research competitors, differentiate, and learn why you win or lose.
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