/competitive-analysis-templates

name: competitive-analysis-templates
description: Master competitive analysis templates including competitor deep-dives, battle cards, feature comparison matrices, and win/loss analysis. Use when analyzing competitors, creating battle cards for sales, positioning against alternatives, tracking competitive moves, or preparing for competitive threats. Covers competitive intelligence frameworks, positioning strategies, and templates from Crayon, Klue, and April Dunford.

Competitive Analysis Templates

Templates for analyzing competitors, enabling sales teams, and defining strategic market positioning.

When to Use This Skill

**Auto-loaded by agents**:

• `market-analyst` - For competitor deep-dives, battle cards, and positioning maps

**Use when you need**:

• Analyzing competitor strategies and offerings
• Creating sales battle cards
• Building feature comparison matrices
• Tracking competitive intelligence
• Conducting win/loss analysis
• Defining differentiation strategy
• Monitoring competitive threats
• Positioning against alternatives

What is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis helps you:

• **Understand** your market position and competitive landscape
• **Identify** differentiation opportunities and white space
• **Enable** sales teams to win competitive deals
• **Inform** product roadmap and strategic decisions
• **Monitor** competitive threats and market shifts

**NOT**: Copying competitors or building feature parity **BUT**: Finding defensible differentiation and strategic positioning

**Good competitive analysis**: Actionable, evidence-based, honest about trade-offs, regularly updated

**Bad competitive analysis**: Feature lists without context, outdated, biased, not used by teams

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Evidence Standards

**Core principle:** All competitive intelligence must be based on verifiable public sources. Strategic analysis and recommendations are core value, but factual claims require source attribution.

**Research requirements:**

1. **Use verifiable public sources**

• Competitor websites, product pages, and documentation
• Pricing pages (with URLs and date accessed)
• Review sites (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius) with specific review citations
• News articles, press releases, and public announcements
• Product demos, trials, and publicly available materials

2. **Source attribution**

• Every claim about competitor features, pricing, or strategy must cite source
• Format: "[Feature/Claim] (Source: [URL], accessed [Date])"
• Review quotes must cite specific review with link
• When multiple sources confirm: cite 2-3 representative sources

3. **When data is unavailable**

• Explicitly note: "[Pricing not publicly available]", "[Requires product trial]"
• Never fabricate competitor information to complete analysis
• Recommend steps to gather missing data (demo request, trial signup)
• Note limitation in battle card or analysis

4. **What you CANNOT do**

• Fabricate competitor features, pricing, or capabilities
• Invent user testimonials or review quotes
• Make up market share numbers or competitive statistics
• Create fictional customer case studies

5. **What you SHOULD do (core value)**

• Provide strategic analysis of competitive landscape
• Identify differentiation opportunities based on research
• Recommend positioning strategy against competitors
• Guide battle card creation and sales enablement
• Teach competitive intelligence methodologies
• Help interpret competitive data for strategic decisions

**When in doubt:** If public information is unavailable, note the limitation explicitly rather than inventing data. Your strategic expertise in competitive analysis and positioning is your primary value.

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Three Core Templates

1. Competitor Deep-Dive Analysis

**Purpose**: Comprehensive competitive intelligence for strategic decisions

**Use when**:

• Quarterly competitive reviews
• Market entry planning
• Product roadmap planning
• Understanding new competitive threat
• Executive briefings

**Key sections**:

• Company overview (size, funding, strategy)
• Product analysis (features, UX, pricing)
• Go-to-market strategy (sales, marketing)
• SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
• Customer intelligence (reviews, win/loss)
• Competitive response strategy

**Template**: `assets/competitor-deep-dive-template.md`

Complete template with all sections, example content, intelligence sources

**Time investment**: 8-12 hours initial, 2-3 hours quarterly updates

**Comprehensive guide**: `references/competitive-intel-guide.md`

Intelligence gathering, research techniques, analysis frameworks, organizing intelligence

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2. Battle Card (Sales Enablement)

**Purpose**: Quick-reference competitive enablement for sales teams

**Use when**:

• Sales team faces competitor regularly
• New competitive threat emerges
• Need to improve win rates vs. specific competitor
• Onboarding new sales reps

**Key sections**:

• Quick stats (foundational context)
• When you'll face them (common scenarios)
• Where we win (strengths with proof)
• Where they win (their strengths + how to counter)
• Common objections & responses
• Discovery questions (uncover our advantages)
• Proof points (customer stories, data)

**Quick skeleton**:

# [Competitor] Battle Card

## Quick Stats
- Founded: / HQ: / Funding: / Employees:

## Where We Win
- [Advantage 1]: [proof point]

## Where They Win
- [Their strength]: [our counter]

## Top Objections
- "[Objection]" → [Response with proof]

**Full template**: `assets/battle-card-template.md`

Sales-ready format, specific talk tracks, objection handling, proof points

**Format**: 1-2 pages maximum (quick reference for calls)

**Update frequency**: Immediately on competitor changes, monthly review

**Comprehensive guide**: `references/battle-card-guide.md`

Creating effective battle cards, sales enablement, training, maintenance, metrics

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