What is a competitor comparison chart?

A competitor comparison chart (or competitive intel checklist) is a useful tool we’ve created to help marketing professionals systematically gather and analyze information about their competitors – all in one handy document.

The checklist covers various aspects of a competitor’s business, including market presence, product offerings, pricing strategies, marketing tactics, and sales processes.

The chart is designed to help you identify key competitors, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and uncover opportunities to differentiate your product. This valuable intelligence leads to more informed strategic decisions, more refined marketing messages, and improved product positioning.

How to use this template

Using the competitive intel checklist template is straightforward and ensures you cover all critical areas of competitive analysis. Follow these steps to make the most of the template:

Gather market information

• Identify your competitors’ target customers, including segments and verticals.
• Determine the number of customers they have and notable big-ticket businesses.
• Analyze their geographical presence and customer reviews, noting positive and negative trends.

Analyze product offerings

• List the suite of products offered by your competitors and their defining features.
• Compare pricing, discounts, and promotional offers.
• Assess the perceived strengths and weaknesses of their products.
• Check for free trials, partnerships, help documents, and user experience insights.

Evaluate positioning and messaging

• Examine how competitors differentiate themselves in the market.
• Review their messaging and use cases, noting any variations across segments or verticals.

Study marketing strategies

• Identify their tagline and activity across marketing channels like blogs, social media, webinars, etc.
• Determine the types of content they produce and their marketing approach (e.g., account-based marketing).
• Analyze their social media engagement, press releases, and event participation.
• Compare their organic search rankings and website visual identity.

Assess sales and customer success strategies

• Understand their sales process and sales cycle duration.
• Evaluate their use of tools like live chatbots and sales assets.
• Check their response times for customer requests and complaint escalation processes.

Provide a company overview

• Note any recent acquisitions or mergers.
• Describe their growth trajectory and employee distribution across departments.
• Identify the locations of their support and sales teams, and observe any recruitment surges.

By following these steps, you can gather comprehensive competitive intelligence, enabling you to make strategic decisions that enhance your product’s market position and drive business success.

Download your competitor comparison chart

Competitive intel checklist

Competitive intel checklist Date last reviewed: DD/MM/YYYY Category Activity You Competitor #1 Competitor #2 Competitor #3 Market Who are their target customers? Including segments and verticals. How many customers do they have? Some companies will have this pu…

Google Docs

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What is a product launch checklist?

We’ve created a comprehensive product launch checklist to guide you through every critical step of launching a new product or feature.

The checklist ensures that every aspect of the product launch process is meticulously planned, executed, and monitored. When used consistently, it helps in organizing tasks, assigning responsibilities, and tracking progress from the outset, through to the completion of a product launch.

What does the launch checklist cover?

Our product launch checklist template covers every element of a product launch, including:

• Market analysis
• Persona researchis designed
• Pricing
• Positioning
• Goal-setting
• Go-to-market (GTM)
• Collateral creation
• Sales enablement
• Internal launch
• External launch
• Analysis
• Feedback

Who’s this checklist for?

The checklist is designed specifically for Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers, but it can be used by anyone managing the product launch process.

How to use the product launch checklist

To use the checklist, start by downloading a copy of the template. You can then make a copy for your own launch process.

Once you have your checklist, follow these instructions to get the most from the tool.

Step-by-step guide:

1. Assign tasks: Carefully read through each section of the checklist and allocate each task to the appropriate team or individual, ensuring everyone knows their responsibilities.
2. Track progress: Regularly update the checklist to reflect completed tasks and identify any outstanding items.
3. Communicate: Keep open lines of communication across all departments to ensure everyone is aligned and informed.
4. Review and adjust: Continuously review the progress and make adjustments as necessary to address any issues or changes in the plan.
5. Celebrate successes: Acknowledge the completion of significant milestones to keep the team motivated and focused.

Download your checklist

Launch checklist

Template Launch checklist
Task,Tactic,Owner,Complete
Market analysis,Define the purpose of your analysis
Understand the market size and value
Compare the competition
Identify your target market
Analyse publicly available data
Speak to industry associations
Collate, analyse and act on your findings

Google Docs

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Crafting detailed, accurate, and insightful buyer personas is essential for understanding your audience and driving successful product marketing strategies.

Our B2B buyer persona template is designed to help you create comprehensive profiles of your ideal customers – saving you hours of time, and making sure everyone is aligned on who you’re trying to target!

By using our template and following our step-by-step guide, you can gain deep insights into your target market and tailor your marketing efforts effectively

Curious to learn more? Let’s dive in.

What is a B2B buyer persona template?

A B2B buyer persona template is a strategic tool used by product marketers to create detailed profiles of their ideal customers.

These personas help in understanding the needs, motivations, and behaviors of different buyer segments within the B2B market. By capturing essential information about potential buyers, marketers can tailor their strategies to better address the specific challenges and goals of their target audience.

It’s a super handy tool (if we don’t say so ourselves ).

The template includes several key components:

• Role in the Buying Process: Understanding the buyer’s influence and decision-making authority within their organization.
• Job Title and Responsibilities: Knowing what they do and their key duties helps in framing your product’s benefits in a way that resonates with their daily tasks.
• Company Information: Details about the company size, industry, and market position provide context about the environment in which the buyer operates.
• Demographics: Basic information such as age, gender, and location, which can influence purchasing decisions and communication preferences.
• Goals and Challenges: Insight into what the buyer aims to achieve and the obstacles they face, allowing for more targeted messaging.
• Validators: Factors that build trust and credibility, such as testimonials or case studies relevant to their industry.
• Why They Will or Won’t Buy: Understanding the motivators and barriers to purchasing helps in crafting persuasive messages and overcoming objections.
• Communication Preferences: Knowing how and where to reach your buyers ensures that your messages are delivered effectively.

How to use our B2B buyer persona template

Follow this step-by-step guide to get the most out of the template.

• Gather Data:Start by collecting information about your current customers and prospects. This can be done through surveys, interviews, sales data, and market research. Aim to gather insights about their roles, responsibilities, company details, goals, challenges, and purchasing behaviors.
• Define the Persona Components:Use the template to structure the collected data. Fill in each section with the relevant information, ensuring you cover all key aspects such as demographics, job details, company information, goals, challenges, and communication preferences.
• Segment Your Audience:Create multiple personas if necessary, especially if your product serves diverse industries or roles. Each persona should represent a distinct segment of your target market, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts to different groups effectively.
• Validate and Refine:Share the draft personas with your sales team and other stakeholders to ensure accuracy and relevance. Use their feedback to refine and adjust the personas, making them as realistic and useful as possible.
• Integrate into Your Strategy:Utilize the personas in your marketing strategies, campaigns, and content creation. Reference them when developing new messaging, choosing communication channels, and designing customer experiences. This ensures that your efforts are aligned with the specific needs and preferences of your target audience.
• Update Regularly:B2B buyer personas should evolve as your market and customers change. Regularly update the personas with new insights and data to keep them relevant and accurate. This ongoing process helps in maintaining a deep understanding of your buyers and staying ahead of market trends.

Download your B2B buyer persona template

B2B buyer persona template

B2B buyer persona template For help on how to fill this template in, check out our B2B buyer persona example. Remember: the characteristics are interchangeable. Depending on what’s most relevant for your business, you may want to remove or add additional fields. We’d recommend a maximum of 10 f…

Google Docs

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Product differentiators are unique features, attributes, or benefits that set a product apart from its competitors in the market. They’re the characteristics that make a product stand out and provide a competitive advantage.

Product differentiators can be helpful for several reasons:

• Market positioning: Differentiators help position a product in the market and create a distinct identity by communicating the unique value proposition.
• Market expansion: By offering something distinct, a product can appeal to a broader audience and penetrate untapped markets, driving business growth.
• Price premium: Customers who perceive unique value in a product are often willing to pay more for it.

Tools to identify your product’s differentiators

Identifying your product’s differentiators is crucial for developing a strong value proposition and standing out in a competitive market. Here are some effective ways to identify your product’s differentiators:

1. Voice of customer: Engage with your existing customers and target audience through interviews, surveys, reviews, testimonials, and other feedback mechanisms to ask about what they value most in a product, their pain points, and what sets your product apart from others they have used.

2. Competitive analysis: Evaluate your competitors’ products to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Look for areas where your product outperforms or offers distinctive features that can provide a competitive advantage. Understanding the competitive landscape helps uncover potential differentiators.

3. MUD framework: The MUD framework is a strategic model that evaluates differentiators based on the impact, distinctiveness, and sustainability of a product. [more on this below]

4. Internal brainstorming and collaboration: Engage your all relevant internal stakeholders in brainstorming sessions to analyze your product’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and threats to identify traits that set your product apart.

My team applies a combination of these approaches in a step-by-step method to identify our product’s differentiators. These methods have helped us understand customer needs, evaluate our strengths, and craft a compelling value proposition that sets us apart in the market.

What is the MUD framework?

The MUD framework is a strategic model that helps organizations evaluate and identify their product differentiators to gain a competitive edge in the market. Here’s a breakdown of each component:

• Meaningfulness: Meaningfulness refers to how impactful and valuable a product’s benefit or feature is in meeting customer needs or solving their problems.
• Uniqueness: Uniqueness focuses on the distinctiveness of a product’s differentiating factor compared to competitors. It involves assessing whether the product feature or attribute sets it apart from similar offerings in the market. The greater the uniqueness, the stronger the differentiation and competitive advantage.
• Defensibility: Defensibility refers to the sustainability and protection of a product’s differentiator over time. It involves assessing the barriers or challenges that competitors may face in replicating or neutralizing the differentiation. Factors such as patents, intellectual property, exclusive partnerships, or technological complexity can contribute to the defensibility of the differentiator.

By evaluating each element of MUD – Meaningfulness, Uniqueness, and Defensibility – organizations can gain insights into their product’s competitive differentiation. This framework helps guide strategic decision-making, such as focusing on enhancing or leveraging existing differentiators, identifying new areas for differentiation, or exploring ways to strengthen the defensibility of the product’s unique attributes.

How CometChat used the MUD framework to identify product differentiators in the first 60 days of PMM

CometChat’s newly formed PMM team, led by Ryan Graff, utilized the MUD framework to identify differentiators for our product internally. Here’s how we approached it:

Step 1: Download & customize the MUD framework template: 

We created this sheet and tailored it to fit our specific needs. The goal was to keep it simple and repeatable, so we kept it limited to exactly what we needed. 

Download here. Here’s how to customize this template:

1. Create an organized list of categories of different buying factors such as product benefits, capabilities, and features of your offering. See the template for reference.
2. Keep the rest of the columns blank for now.

We had about 20 categories listed for our offering. This provides a structured framework to move to the next part.

Step 2: Brainstorming sessions with functional leaders: 

We planned two long brainstorming sessions with ONE leader from each function – product, engineering, marketing, sales, support, customer success, and leadership. Presenting this template to everyone, we picked a category from column A and started an open discussion on what each leader thought could make a potential differentiator for our offering. Listed each of these under “Itemized buying factor” along with a detailed description in the next column. We managed to create a list of more than 40 potential differentiators.

The next step was to collaboratively discuss how each of these listed items passed on the MUD test. Ask these three questions and let the group decide:

1. Is this line item meaningful – what value does it create for the customer?
2. Is this line item unique to our company/product – does no other competitor offer it?
3. Is this line item defensible – will it sustain for a long enough period of time or is it temporary?

Make sure to discuss real examples and proof points for every answer. Otherwise, it’s just hearsay.

Next, from each dropdown under “Meaningful”, “Unique”, and “Defensible”, we picked Yes or No based on the discussion. Enter any comments in the adjacent column. Eliminate rows with a “No” in any of the 3 columns.

Only items with Yes under all three, i.e. Only items that are meaningful, unique, and defensible remain for the next step. We had about 15 items on this list.

Step 3: Validating through customer interactions: 

So far we’ve identified what we think our differentiators are. But it’s also important to validate the identified differentiators from a buyer’s perspective. So we engaged in conversations with existing customers through interviews and gathered feedback to understand their perception of our product’s strengths and what truly set us apart. 

A customer-centric approach helped ensure that our differentiators resonated with the target audience. 

This step helped us eliminate five to seven items from our list because customers either didn’t care enough about those or simply had a different perspective. Moreover, we were able to rank these differentiators based on how impactful customers found them to be.

Step 4: Editing and polishing: 

We reviewed the list generated during the brainstorming sessions and refined the differentiators, ensuring they were clear, concise, and aligned with our overall product strategy and target market. This step involved rephrasing and fine-tuning the language to effectively communicate the unique aspects of our product. 

Surprisingly, we were able to club a few of the validated differentiators under similar umbrellas.

Step 5: Repeat once or twice a year:

Depending on your product’s development velocity, I’d recommend repeating this exercise at least once every year. That helps you stay up to date with changes in your own product as well as competitor products. Furthermore, these workshops can be a great way to collaborate with all other functions in your company and keep them engaged with your differentiators. People are more likely to acknowledge and use them if they feel part of the process from the start.  

We leveraged the MUD framework to identify and refine our product differentiators internally and then validated them externally from a buyer’s perspective. This process allowed us to tap into the expertise of cross-functional leaders, validate our assumptions through customer interactions, and ultimately create a compelling value proposition that distinguishes our product in the market.

Leveraging product differentiators

We used the identified product differentiators in several ways to gain a competitive advantage and drive business growth. Here are some ways you can use product differentiators:

• Marketing: Use your product differentiators to create compelling marketing messages that resonate with your target audience. Highlight the unique value propositions of your product and how they solve your customers’ pain points.
• Sales: Communicate your differentiators during every aspect of the sales process. Highlight the unique features and benefits of your product and how they can help your customers achieve their goals.
• Product development: Use your product differentiators to guide product development efforts. Focus on developing features and functionality that align with your unique value propositions and strengthen your differentiators.
• Pricing: Use your product differentiators to justify premium pricing. If your product offers unique value propositions that competitors don’t, you can charge a premium price for it.
• Customer Retention: If your product offers unique value propositions, your customers will be hooked and stay loyal.

Product differentiators + the MUD framework: Let’s recap

Identifying and leveraging your product’s differentiators is a continuous process that requires commitment and cross-functional collaboration. As your product and market evolve, it’s crucial to re-evaluate your differentiators to ensure they remain meaningful, unique, and defensible. 

The MUD framework offers a structured approach to periodically analyze your differentiation strategy. Supplement this with continuous customer engagement to validate assumptions and refine messaging.

When done right, clearly articulated and marketed differentiators can transform how your customers perceive your product’s value. They provide the foundation for all go-to-market initiatives and help carve out a distinct, competitive position in the marketplace.

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Every savvy product marketer will use a tool of some sort.

Why? It’s simple.

Without the right structure to your work, you risk lagging behind in a competitive market and failing to fully capitalize on the work you create.

These templates have been pulled from our flagship course to guide through you some of your most important product marketing duties, and to give you a taste of what it’s like to develop in your role with Product Marketing Certified: Core.

Here’s what you’ll get:
B2B persona questions
B2C persona questions
Messaging framework
Go-to-Market template

Use these frameworks to aid you in understanding your target audience, positioning your product in the market, and developing a Go-to-Market strategy that drives growth and adoption.

The best part? They’re 100% free.

All you gotta do is fill in the form.

Get the templates

Enter Product Marketing Certified: Core

With full access to the course, you’ll have another 16 actionable templates, just like these, to cover each and every base of your product marketing strategy.

And that’s not even the half of it…

Taking Product Marketing Certified: Core enables you to:

Grasp every element of strategic product marketing including Go-to-Market, positioning, research, enablement, pricing, and optimization.

Piggyback off the experience of steadfast product marketers at some of the biggest brands, we’re talking LinkedIn, IBM, Adobe, Google, & more.

Upgrade your resume with an official certification, approved by marketing institutions and sought after by current employers.

Boosting your market value as a PMM has never been easier.

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