I have a love/hate relationship with competitive intel.

Love because, well, once in intelligence, always in intelligence.

Hate because there’s often a sense of hysteria around it. And I prefer collected.

But if you can avoid feature-accounting and focus on strategy, you can strike gold.

I spent a lot of my PMM hours on it over the years, here are my favorite sources:

1. Website

   Probably still the best source of intel about GTM strategy. Other than the homepage, pay special attention to

   • Solution pages - use cases, personas, value prop

   • Case studies - will reveal their reported ICP (ie who they aim at)

   • Pricing - not necessarily for $ but for how they communicate value; pricing levers

2. Rating and review sites

   There you can see who the actual ICP is. Review sites allow you to filter and see information by tier, vertical, role, and geography. Take advantage of it and see where most reviews come from and if that changed over the years.

   It’s also a great source for strengths + weaknesses.

   • Pro tip: Look how they’re doing around everything you’re great at

   • Gotcha: don’t look at all the review sites that exist out there. Focus on those that are relevant to your target audience.

   So for example, if you’re not getting quality leads from Capterra—don’t look there.

3. LinkedIn

   The People section will teach you a lot about their workforce and strategy. You can apply different filters and see where they market, where they sell, and where they provide support.

   True, it’s a remote world, but if they just hired a bunch of sales folks in APAC…

   • Also: hiring trends, thought leadership (messaging, brand, topics), following, engagement, creators and collaborators.

4. Online customer communities and help documentation (my favorite).

   Anything confusing about their website will be crystal clear here.

5. News

   Anything from sources like Crunchbase, TechCrunch, PR, analyst firms, Glassdoor, CEO mentions, syndicated channels, big events they’re holding, etc.

   • Pro tip: Set up an RSS feed —> send it to a slackbot —> cherry-pick what to share internally ( with your interpretation) in a CI newsletter or a slack channel dedicated to competition.

   Curious to see a real example? Here’s one I used in the past 👉