Competitor Analysis for SaaS Products
Is your product better than the competition?
If you want to say your product is better, you need to know ‘better than what’. We can tell you.
As a product manager, you need to know what the market is offering, and what products the customer can choose other than yours. Competitive intelligence for product management incorporates a wide range of sources from customer feedback to product reviews, and can be a powerful tool for improving your product strategy, pricing strategy and marketing strategy.
Competitor research will map your features against the competition, going beyond competitors’ marketing claims to extract the truth about product capabilities.
Product analysis helps you win
Stay ahead of competitors’ products — know the competitor’s roadmap and build the right product features
Allocate development budget effectively — create the right features to counter what competitors are doing
Empower your salespeople — tell sales teams what features they are pitching against
What options do customers have?
Competitive intelligence research will tell you what choice customers have – where can they get better features across each area of functionality that your own product offers, and where is your product the market leader. Competitive insight can sharpen your product strategy and give your product development a competitive advantage.
Competitive analysis helps product managers create a more focused, more effective product strategy.
Communicate your strengths to customers
If you are a product marketer, competitive intelligence will help strengthen your product marketing strategy with feature comparison tables and pitch points aimed at your competitors' own marketing strategy. Set out clearly your product positioning, showing customers how your product compares to the competition. Explain your differentiation on your own terms. Use actionable insights from competitive intel to address customer needs.
Feature comparison tables are difficult to build – they require perseverance, meticulous effort and transparency about your own product. But they provide an excellent snapshot of how your product compares against the competition. And they are valued by customers, helping them choose the right product. By creating feature comparison tables, you can influence buying decisions. They are a valuable resource for your sales team, your product team and your marketing team.
“So excited to get this research. It’s beyond what we’ve had before.”
— Director of Product Management, Okta
Separate fact from fiction
Competitors talk up their products in their marketing and sales communications. From the outside, it is difficult to know how much is reality and how much is exaggeration. Are all the features really available? What is only available for additional fees? How much of the product is delivered by partner integrations? What is the granular detail underneath the high-level claims? Do customers know fact from fiction?
Looking ahead…
Competitive analysis will also help you see the competitor’s roadmap - new features they will be adding in the coming quarters, new use cases they will be targeting or new market sectors they may be entering. Advance knowledge will let you prepare earlier and be ready for their product launches.
Competitor research will tell you what the competitor’s features really are. What is included in the core product and what is only available if customers pay for additional modules. What is native functionality and what is inserted via third parties.
Pick apart your competitor’s claims and show where your product is stronger.
82% of software product managers use competitive intelligence in their planning.
— US survey (n=100)
