We talk a lot about what Product Marketers do. We talk to a lot of product marketers about what they do. It’s a topic so important to us that we launched a feature series, A Day in the Life of a Product Marketer to highlight the dynamic, complicated and challenging specialty. Check out our first instalment with Kim Ellery, Director of Product Marketing at Absolute. On deck we’ve got features with Tim Smalley, Vincent Lo and Faai Steuer – stay tuned!

We’ve discovered, via our ongoing survey of product marketers () that one of the things all product marketing roles have in common is competitive intelligence—collection, analysis and strategic insights shared through sales enablement directives. Sometimes it’s 5% of the role and others it’s as high 20%.

(Please take the survey before continuing) 

Interestingly, our survey showed that 50 percent of respondents vote science; 50% percent vote art. Makes sense. There are a lot of facts, data and other inputs to collect and manage, then communicate in a way that makes sense to an audience who is also distracted and extended. But, it also demands insight, intuition and the ability to see beyond what is quantitative. Your experience gives you context and understanding that numbers just can’t. It’s fluid. It’s instinctual.

What happens, unfortunately, is that more time gets spent on gathering the facts than it does deciphering what they mean. And that, my friend, is a competitive intelligence workflow problem.

Somewhere along the way, whether at collection or curation, organization, presentation, sharing, updating or measuring—somewhere—there is a blockage that impacts the quality of your entire competitive intelligence workflow. Something is compromised because the whole franken-system of tools and add-ons that you’ve brilliantly Macgyvered is only as reliable as it’s weakest part.

You deserve better.

The key tenets of smart competitive intelligence—accuracy, accessibility and accountability—rely on multiple apps and APIs that were built for different purposes. Smart competitive intelligence means it’s trusted, used and successful. It’s good. It’s tactical. It wins deals. It requires a tool designed for the job.

That’s °µºÚÍø. That’s what we do.

Smart Competitive Intelligence Workflow

Collection

Instead of stockpiling articles in Pocket or Evernote, use the one-step °µºÚÍø extension to save, highlight, comment and share. Assign content to specific competitor company profiles so it’s organized and easy to index. It will also show up in news feed so that nothing gets buried and missed. That’s step one.

Next, deploy °µºÚÍøbot to gather all the relevant content across the deepest and darkest places of the internet. If it’s there. °µºÚÍøbot will find it and assign it to that same competitor profile and update feed. No more unwieldy Google alerts and RSS feeds.

And, what about that Sharepoint that gets no love, or the stale competitor decks nobody trusts? Into °µºÚÍø. Real-time, on-demand access all the time, on any device. No more email chains or version control issues.

Salesforce win rates and intel? Integrated.

It’s all in one place and up-to-date.

Curate

Now, start copying °µºÚÍø on all competitor intel, via email, text, Slack or Chatter. It all goes to those styled and up-to-date profiles we’ve begun to build together. That’s where you can design best-in-class sales battlecards and email digests that make sure your team gets what they need, when they need it.

Organize it, filter it and rebuild it into useable assets for sales reps, accounts and product teams, CSRs, marketing and HR.

Communicate

How do you debrief your sales reps, accounts teams and CSRs after prospect and customer meetings? Where does the behind-the-scenes chatter from events and market sources go? You’ve got folders and files, emails and about 37 different Slack channels dedicated to…storing this stuff? And then what? Who reads it? Who connects the dots?

°µºÚÍø collects notes, comments, highlights and chats and organizes all of it into those lovely competitor profiles. And then? Relays it out on custom email digests that can be as automated as or as curated as you want. You’re in control.  You can upload, monitor, highlight and disseminate anything you want, in the priority that makes sense for your team. And they have access to secure, targeted and smart competitive intelligence whenever they need it.

And, did we mention you can ‘call’ a sales battlecard just by texting °µºÚÍø?

Yeah.