When Competitors Lie About You

How most competitive intel practitioners recommend you respond

Author

Andy McCotter-Bicknell
October 21, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

What do you do when a competitor shares false info about your product?

This was a question I found myself asking a couple weeks ago.

A competitor’s seller shared a slide with a buyer that was evaluating Apollo (my employer). It was one of those tables that explained what the competitor offered and how Apollo’s offering didn’t stack up.

Unfortunately, 80% of it was wrong.

So what do I do?

I narrowed it down to two choices:

  1. Escalate to our legal team

  2. Correct the information internally, and warn our sales team

But I wanted to be sure about my decision, so I asked the Healthy Competition community. Here were the results:

These results cracked me up. 100% agreement!

There were also a few comments from community members that stuck out to me as extra insightful. Here was one of my favs:

If they're using that information publicly on their webpage and they're making claims that are probably false, then involve your legal team and send a cease and desist.

If it's sales people making false claims, just arm your sales team with talking points to respond, which will discredit the other company in the process.

JJ Haglund, Product Marketing & Market Intelligence @ Iterable

Long story short, I took the community’s advice and got to work on an asset to arm sellers with when they run up against that competitor. It’s still a work in progress, but when the time comes, our sales team will be able to say…

"Oh, you’re evaluating [competitor]? Got it—makes sense, they have a great solution too! But just a heads up, if you let on that you’re also evaluating Apollo, they’ll probably share a super inaccurate slide about our product relating to a, b, and c. If that happens, just let me know. Happy to walk through what’s true and what’s not.”

Hopefully that helps discredit the competitor for a while :-)

BTW, if you wanna join the Healthy Competition community, we’d love to have you! I recently changed the membership structure from annual to quarterly to make things a bit more flexible. This is THE community for competitive intel practitioners and product marketers that focus on CI.

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I’m gonna go off-script with this ad (forgive me, Klue team!)

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JUICY SCOOPS 🧃

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EXAMPLES 🍊

Your weekly dose of vitamin C(ompete)

Two fun competitive marketing examples this week: a very silly one, and a very legit one. Let’s start with the silly one.

Made me chuckle. I love plays like this.

Here’s the more legit one: an email platform (Kit) launched a rebrand, and on the same day, one of their competitors (beehiiv) trolled them with a campaign to steal their customers.

Check out the tweet here

It got a ton of attention. And the cool part was their CEO shared some of the results they saw:

  • $175k+ added to their sales pipeline

  • Dozens of mentions in various media publications

  • 250k+ impressions on the first day of the campaign

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy

PS: Here are some more goodies if you want to keep the party going:

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