Common Mistakes in Competitor Analysis and How to Avoid Them
If you're in B2B SaaS, chances are you’re already doing some form of competitive analysis. Maybe you’re putting together battle cards, prepping for an RFP, or trying to figure out why your competitor’s product keeps popping up in late-stage deals.
The reality is that most competitive analysis out there isn’t very good. It’s often rushed, surface-level, or built around assumptions. And when that’s the case, it’s not just unhelpful, as it can actively lead you in the wrong direction.
So, let’s talk about some of the most common mistakes companies make in competitive analysis and how you can steer clear of them.
Mistake #1: Only focusing on direct competitors
Too many teams focus narrowly on the companies they’re already running into in deals. But the biggest threat might not be your closest competitor—it could be a newer player solving the same customer problem differently.
Avoid this by:
Including indirect and substitute products in your analysis.
Revisiting your competitor list regularly as the market evolves.
Paying attention to companies entering your space from adjacent categories.
Mistake #2: Relying only on public information
If your competitive intel is based solely on websites, product pages, and press releases, you’re not getting the full picture. Public-facing materials are carefully curated and often misleading.
Avoid this by:
Conducting primary research—talk to customers, industry experts, or even former employees (where appropriate).
Investing in dedicated competitive research tools that go beyond surface-level data.
Reviewing customer support channels and help docs, as these often reveal more than a product homepage.
Mistake #3: Ignoring competitor customer feedback
Competitor reviews are a goldmine of insight. You’ll see what customers love, what frustrates them, and what drives them to switch. Yet, many teams skip this step because it feels “unscientific.”
Avoid this by:
Analyzing patterns across review sites like G2, Capterra, or TrustRadius.
Listening to what sales reps hear during win/loss calls or onboarding.
Identifying consistent pain points or feature gaps that you can target.
Mistake #4: Skipping how competitors sell
Knowing a competitor’s features is one thing. Knowing how they sell, such as who they’re targeting, what pain points they lead with, and how they structure pricing, is what gives your team an edge.
Avoid this by:
Reverse engineer their sales process—request a demo, sign up for a free trial, or study their onboarding flow.
Look at how they position pricing tiers and what they highlight in sales materials.
Capturing insights from your own sales team—what do prospects repeat from competitor pitches?
Mistake #5: Treating competitive analysis as a siloed task
Competitive intelligence doesn’t belong to one team. If it stays locked in a product marketing folder, you’re missing the chance to align your entire organization around what really matters.
Avoid this by:
Creating a cross-functional feedback loop with product, sales, and customer success.
Sharing insights regularly—not just when there’s a launch or pitch.
Tying competitive learnings to actionable decisions, like roadmap prioritization or sales enablement.
Mistake #6: Obsessing over feature comparisons
Feature matrices have their place, but buyers care more about value than checkboxes. Too much time spent comparing features can distract from the bigger picture: how your solution actually helps customers win.
Avoid this by:
Focusing on customer outcomes, not just technical specs.
Framing your differentiators in terms of value and impact, not feature counts.
Highlighting use cases or workflows where you outperform competitors—even if you have fewer features.
Mistake #7: Only doing it once in a while
The competitive landscape doesn’t sit still. A one-off slide deck or quarterly report will be outdated before your team finishes reading it.
Avoid this by:
Shifting from project-based to ongoing analysis, lightweight updates go a long way.
Setting up alerts or trackers to monitor pricing, messaging, new feature rollouts, etc.
Creating a living repository that sales and product teams can rely on and contribute to.
Building a competitive analysis system that scales
Avoiding mistakes is just the first step. To truly make competitive analysis a strategic asset, you need to build a repeatable system that evolves with your business.
Most teams struggle here. This isn’t because they lack data but because they lack a structure for turning observations into ongoing insight.
Here’s how to start building a scalable CI system:
1. Define what you need to know
Not every competitor move is relevant. Focus your analysis on:
What influences your buyers’ decisions
What impacts your go-to-market strategy
What affects your product roadmap or pricing
Create a shortlist of core questions your team needs to answer regularly. For example:
Are we losing deals to anyone new?
Has a key competitor repositioned or rebranded?
What new features have been released that we need to respond to?
2. Decide how you’ll collect and store insights
Great CI doesn’t live in random slide decks or Slack threads.
Options:
Set up a CI database or wiki (e.g., Confluence, Notion, Airtable)
Create a competitor battlecard library with regularly updated key points
Use a CI tool (if relevant) to centralize updates and automate alerts
3. Assign ownership—but keep it collaborative
Someone needs to be responsible for the system, but the best CI inputs often come from across the company.
Set-up:
A single owner (usually product marketing) who curates and updates
Lightweight ways for other teams to contribute what they’re seeing (e.g., sales call snippets, screenshots, pricing updates)
4. Tie insights to action
CI isn’t useful unless it leads to better decisions. Every insight should connect to:
A sales play
A product decision
A positioning tweak
A response in an RFP
If it doesn’t change what you do, it’s trivial.
Wrapping up: Make competitive analysis work harder for you
Done right, competitive analysis isn’t about building a prettier matrix. It’s about equipping your team with clear, current, and credible insights that drive better decisions across product, marketing, and sales.
Here’s a quick checklist:
Expand your competitive lens
Go beyond what’s public
Center insights around the customer
Align sales, products, and marketing
Keep it current
Set up a repeatable system for collecting, storing, and using insights
Avoiding common mistakes is a solid start, but the real impact comes when you build a scalable CI process. That means defining what you need to know, setting up structured ways to gather input, and connecting insights directly to actions that matter.
With the right system in place, competitive analysis is less of just a report and more of a strategic advantage.
Further reading
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