Something freaked me out a couple months ago.

A competitor’s CEO got ahold of a message I was sending their customers and posted it to LinkedIn as engagement bait.

My messages read something along the lines of, “Hey, I noticed you use [competitor]. Would you be open to a 30 minute chat? Would love to understand what you like and dislike about the tool. Happy to compensate you for your time.”

I think the intention of them posting this was to hype up their own solution.

Maybe to show that a larger competitor was taking note of what they’re doing.

But something interesting happened. I started seeing a couple people comment on the post…

• “This is the most bullish signal on Apollo I’ve seen.” (my employer)

• “I always do this whenever I work for a client, or now, for my own business. it provides me with friction they’re not addressing, but also why they bought this solution, what triggered it, etc.”

Of course, there were some trolls too :-)

But the point of me sharing this is to remind you that you shouldn’t be ashamed of conducting competitive research. It’s weirdly taboo to some people, but forget about them.

You can only make good business decisions by reaching out to and learning from your competitor’s customers.

Q&A 🤝

How HockeyStack is disrupting the Revenue Analytics category

“Tell me the origin story of HockeyStack and the gap that you saw in the market”

HockeyStack started in product analytics. We had a successful startup, and had built a simple product analytics tool for ourselves to analyze thousands of users’ behavior. But after conducting buyer interviews, we realized that every single prospect started repeating the same sentence: “our data is siloed across different places, and we don’t know what’s driving pipeline.”

So we pivoted into the world of data and the first iteration of the HockeyStack platform you see today.

“How do you differentiate HockeyStack from established competitors in your space?”

We differentiate on product, pricing, and sales process.

Product: Traditional attribution software is template-based. You have a few deal stages, contacts, a form on your website, and the software shows ROI.

HockeyStack’s main differentiator is the way we collect and clean the data from various platforms. We can ingest any type of data, clean it, and turn them into reports, allowing the end user to build any dashboard that they need to answer questions.

Other product-based differentiators:

• We don’t use cookies

• We have multi-touch + lift reports for incrementally

• Report builder in the platform

Pricing: We’re more expensive than our competitors, and we don’t compromise on this area. This is for a reason—our product is better than theirs. Yes, it's hard to win over a CFO with a $100K+ price differential… but discounting heavily and being the low-cost solution can actually hurt you in the long run.

Sales process: Our sales team is trained to deeply understand our buyers’ needs. One example of this is when a $6B company came inbound. We had 3 people in the first demo who came inbound. It was clear from the very first call that two of them were gonna be champions and the other one was gonna to block the deal. So, we scheduled 1:1 calls with the first 2 to map out the entire marketing team, how every team would use HockeyStack for their own needs, and why other purchases got blocked before.

This allowed us to build a very custom demo for the entire group and executive team, and those 2 champions fought for HockeyStack when the other prospect KILLED the deal TWICE.

Each time, our champions revived the deal with the frameworks and roadmaps we built together. This is the power of a hands-on sales process.

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

Competitors lying about our product was the biggest one. No matter how much we educated our buyers, competitors have always found a loophole to lie about something else.

In the end, I got so involved in this and had multiple people from my network taking demo calls with competitors, recording them, and sending them back to me with all follow up materials they were sent.

We eventually started embedding all the lies into our demo. For example, if we learned that a competitor was lying about our integrations, we would emphasize integrations in our demo to show the truth.

If they started lying about our tracking tech, we would double down on it.

Now as we are more established, it doesn’t happen as often. But I am still 100% on it.

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

Collect all the information you can about your competitors, show the buyer how you differentiate in an authentic way, then let them make a decision.

Forcing the buyer to make a decision or talking down about a competitor never works.

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

Learn from the people on the frontlines, get involved in the competitive deals, and always iterate based on market feedback.

EXAMPLES 🍊

Your weekly dose of vitamin C(ompete)

Love the comparison table on David's site.

The reason is simple: Most comparison tables I see are stuffed with useless features that nobody even cares about. Literally rows and rows of features with check marks and x's.

Yawn. Confusing. Overwhelming.

David went the opposite route.

Their main differentiator is having more protein than any other bar. And they expressed it in three unique ways in their comparison below.

* chef's kiss *

This is how most startups should approach comparisons IMO.

Answer the question: "what is the one differentiator from competitors you want people to take away from your site?"

Then focus the majority of your positioning and messaging around that.

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy