Healthy Competition: Product Marketing | Competitive Intelligence | Strategy

April Dunford is the world's leading expert on positioning for B2B tech companies and the author of 'Obviously Awesome' as well as the newly released 'Sales Pitch.'

We focused on how competitive intel and positioning intersect in business:

- bashing "approaches," not competitors

- the importance of positioning your competitors

- when to mention competitors (and when to leave them be)

- why you shouldn't be scared of talking about competitors

- why you need to know your differentiated value

And lots more.

Jess Petrella is the Director of Product Marketing at Unbounce and the creator of multiple templates dedicated to helping Product Marketers succeed with AI. In this episode, we dove into:

• her favorite PMM workflows that incorporate AI
• her favorite AI tool among the many that she's tested
• mistakes she made during her AI research that you can avoid

And lots more!

In this episode, I was joined by Jason Oakley and Tamara Grominsky. They're both career Product Marketers that have led a ton of great launches over the years for companies like Klue, Unbounce, and Kajabi.

We're all working together on a course for Product Marketers called Ready for Launch - The PMM's Guide to Product Launches, so I thought it'd be fun to share insider stories on important launches we each led. We also talk about some other launches from companies that caught our eye and why we liked or disliked them.

Want to master the art of product launches? Join our upcoming cohort before Oct. 31st here: https://maven.com/course-crew/readyforlaunch

Brooklin Nash is the Co-Founder of Beam Content, a content marketing agency that helps B2B SaaS companies create expert-driven content so that they can build trust with their buyers.

Evan Huck is the CEO & Co-Founder of UserEvidence, the customer voice platform that automates social proof for GTM teams, generating verified case studies, testimonials, and stats in minutes.

I’ve been a fan of UserEvidence for a while, so it was great to sit down with Evan and hear about their growth and how they’re standing out in a sea of GTM tools. By the end of this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to effectively use customer stories to win deals

• The pros and cons of selling in a non-defined space

• Evan’s #1 tip for entrepreneurs that are building today

and lots more!

This session was recorded live in the Healthy Competition community (healthycompetition.co). If you're into this kind of content, we'd love to have you!

Yi Lin Pei is a career coach for product marketing, marketing and no-code tech roles. And in this live session, we chatted about what folks can do to find their dream jobs. A few topics we discussed:

• How to negotiate compensation packages
• When you should upskill before you pivot to a different career
• Why you should think like a Product Marketer during your job search
• The method that maximizes her clients' chances of getting an interview

And lots more!

This session was recorded live in the Healthy Competition community (healthycompetition.co). If you're into this kind of content, we'd love to have you!

Jessica Davis is the Manager of Competitive Intelligence at HubSpot, and she shared a ton of great details about the program that her team has put together.

• how they got buy-in from their leadership team to invest in the CI team's headcount
• how they rolled out a brand new competitive intel program in 6 months that included 50+ new battlecards (and 90% engagement from the sales team)
• how often they update their competitive materials
• how HubSpot's competitive intel team is structured and the department they role up under

And lots more.

Harvey Lee is the VP of Product Marketing at the Product Marketing Alliance. He's also a musician and spent lots of time in the music industry. I'm a musician too, so we geeked out about all things rock n' roll—history, specific bands, moments in time—and tweezed out what we felt PMMs could learn from them.

Here are some specific topics we covered:

• Why bands pivot and change their sound
• Why legacy bands endure
• The effects tech shifts in music and how success is measured
• Why good bands fail
• How to spot a rockstar at your company

Harvey Lee is the VP of Product Marketing at the Product Marketing Alliance. He's also a musician and spent lots of time in the music industry. I'm a musician too, so we geeked out about all things rock n' roll—history, specific bands, moments in time—and tweezed out what we felt PMMs could learn from them.

Here are some specific topics we covered:

• Why bands pivot and change their sound
• Why legacy bands endure
• The effects tech shifts in music and how success is measured
• Why good bands fail
• How to spot a rockstar at your company

Derek Osgood is the Founder & CEO of Ignition, a collaborative hub to plan, execute, and measure go-to-market launches. He worked as a Product Marketer across multiple industries, such as gaming, banking, and SaaS, and now he's building the platform he wished he always had. In this interview, we talked about:

• what it was like being a PMM for Playstation
• his journey of going from PMM to founder
• opportunities and challenges of selling to Product Marketers
• Ignition's GTM strategy of niching down
• the ideal PMM tech stack

And lots more!

Mayur Palta has led Competitive Intel at some of the world's most valuable companies. And he just published a book with the lessons he learned along the way. In this episode we dive into:

• what CEOs don't understand about Competitive Intel
• memorable competitive campaigns between Oracle, AWS, and Salesforce
• how to build your "compete" muscle with the Outcompete Operating System
• the ethics of working for companies that are competing with your prior employer

And lots more.

Ranee is a Product Marketing leader with 17+ years experience developing marketing and product strategy for global brands and VC-backed tech startups. In this episode, we discuss burnout. Specifically:

• why it plagues Product Marketers
• how to detect if you're burnt out (vs. just having a bad day / week)
• what to do when you feel it creeping into your life
• the ideal future of Product Marketing

And lots more.

Tamara is the VP Product Marketing at Kajabi, an all-in-one platform that helps creators and entrepreneurs package their knowledge into profitable online courses, coaching programs, membership sites, and more. Tamara is also a creator herself, writing a newsletter and moderating a community both called PMM Office Hours. Here's what we chatted about:

• Her journey from Product Marketing to Chief Strategy Officer and then back to Product Marketing
• How she got her role at Kajabi when they weren't initially hiring for a VP of Product Marketing
• Different opportunities for Product Marketers that want to become creators
• and lots more!

This episode was recorded live in the Healthy Competition community with Sam Rinaldo, Competitive Intel at Lucid, and Tracy Berry, Competitive Intel at Freshworks. Both Sam and Tracy spent a portion of their careers in the government intel space before pivoting to the corporate side. After listening through, you'll learn:

• how their backgrounds gave them a leg up when they transitioned to the tech space
• similarities and differences between their current workflows compared to when they worked for the government
• what they learned in government intel that they were able to bring with them and apply to their current roles in tech
• common misconceptions that the tech industry has when it thinks about government intel

Anand Sanwal is the Co-Founder & CEO of CB Insights, a tech marketplace platform that enables organizations to make buying decisions quickly and with confidence. We covered lots of ground in this episode—there should be something in here for just about anyone:

• lessons from growing the CB Insights newsletter to nearly a million subscribers
• "human-in-the-loop" as a differentiator, and whether or not AI poses a risk to this
• CB Insights's new product, Yardstiq, and how it delivers quant & qual data for a market landscape
• how competitive intel should change as an organization grows and matures
• why "all-in-one" platforms have a competitive advantage over point solutions today

Bobby Pinero is the CEO & Co-Founder of Equals, the only spreadsheet with built-in connections to any database, versioning, and collaboration. I've joked that every company's biggest competitor is Excel, so it was fun to learn how Bobby and the team at Equals are actually positioning against it. There's a lot to learn from this interview:

• identifying best fit early adopters for your product
• how Equals is growing by acknowledging legacy spreadsheet strengths
• the approach to sub-category creation between traditional spreadsheets and BI tools
• and lots more

Anthony Kennada is the Co-Founder & CEO at AudiencePlus, the first owned media software for marketers, enabling companies to build, engage, and monetize an owned audience. In this episode, you'll learn how some of the most successful companies today own their audiences vs. rent them on social media platforms or paid ads. As well as:

• the community-to-media flywheel
• how Anthony helped create the Customer Success category at Gainsight
• the first steps you can take to begin building a media arm (even if you're on a budget)

Ryan Sorley is the Founder of DoubleCheck Research, a win-loss analysis provider that was recently acquired by Klue. We talked about all things (you guessed it) win-loss and broke down everything you need to build a successful program. Some other topics we touched on:

• behind Ryan's decision to grow DoubleCheck and eventually join Klue vs. staying small and going the solopreneur route
• what surprised Ryan since joining a Saas-based business
• a surprising tip to get more responses from your win/loss outreach
• where AI fits into the future of win/loss
• and a lot more

President's Club isn't just for Sales anymore! In this live session from the Healthy Competition community, I spoke with Mayur Palta, Competitive Intel Lead from Databricks, and Tirrah Switzer, Sr. Director of PMM at Community Brands—both recently made President's Club at their companies. We discussed their company's requirements for making President's Club, the projects they worked on to achieve President's Club, advice to help you get CI & PMM eligible for President's Club at your company, and more!

Jarod Greene is the VP of Product & Customer Marketing at Highspot. Prior to becoming a PMM, he worked as a Research Director at Gartner. Analyst Relations has always been a big question mark for me (and a lot of PMMs that I know), so we made sure to cover how to build a successful AR program and what to do if you aren't ranked highly on a grid or magic quadrant. If you were handed AR as a PMM, this episode is for you.

Juan Mendoza is the CEO & Editor of The Martech Weekly, a curated newsletter of everything that happens in marketing and technology. In this episode, he shared his backstory of starting a weekly newsletter, the power of social media, what he thinks about imposter syndrome, and why he's glad he didn't start a Substack.

This is "the PLG episode" and I was joined by two powerhouse PMMs to guide me through it. Madison Leonard is a PLG Product Marketer & advisor to early & late-stage startups and Anthony Pierri is a Co-Founder at Fletch PMM, a Product Marketing advisory for early stage B2B SaaS startups. We talked through common PLG misconceptions, how to structure a PMM team and your website's homepage to support PLG, how PLG differs from sales-led, and much more.

May Habib is the Co-Founder and CEO of Writer, a generative AI platform that keeps content consistent and on-brand. We dove into May's background in natural language processing, spotting the opportunity for an application like Writer, navigating the AI hype cycle, what they're doing to stand out, and why doubling down on marketing teams helps them grow faster.

I'm hearing a lot of "do more with less" lately. And although many of us might wish we had more resources like a dedicated Competitive Intelligence tool (e.g. Klue, Crayon, Kompyte, CompeteIQ, etc.), it's sadly not something that we can always get buy-in on. So in this session, we were joined by four Product Marketing and Competitive/Market Intelligence pros to walk us through how they run their programs without a CI platform.

Devon is the Founder & Managing Partner at Fluvio, a consultancy that helps software and technology businesses find product-market fit, establish go-to-market strategies, and deliver high-impact marketing campaigns. He shared how he transitioned from a full-time Product Marketing career to building his business, how he got his first clients (and how you can get yours), the difference between consulting and freelancing, and more.

Christopher Lochhead is the co-author of a number of what I would consider some of the best business books out there, most notably Play Bigger, Niche Down, and my personal favorites the Category Design Toolkit and a Marketer’s Guide to Category Design. He’s one third of the Category Pirates, a writing band that share category creation and category design principles, frameworks, and case studies. And he’s also an advisor to dozens of startups, and is a 3x former public company CMO. In this episode, we discussed Christopher's first foray into category design, what to look for in a company if you're searching for a new job, his thoughts on Microsoft + OpenAI, Liquid Death, and Elon-era Twitter, and the importance of having a product hook.

Camille Trent is the Director of Content & Community at PeerSignal, a free resource that aggregates data, examples, and research. Unlike the sea of opinion-based GTM advice flooding your feed, PeerSignal delivers data-backed research and carefully curated SaaS market data. In our chat, Camille shared how she's scaling PeerSignal, how she structures her research, what the mechanics look like behind a successful media company, and a lot more. 

Howard Lerman was the Co-Founder and CEO of Yext for 16 years. Now he's building Roam, an All-In-One Cloud HQ for distributed companies. We dug into lessons he learned at Yext, all-in-one vs. specialty products, his strategy for winning with Roam, TikTok's value for B2B companies, and a lot more. 

Jason is the Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Klue, an AI-powered Competitive Enablement platform that helps product marketers collect, curate, and deliver competitor insights to revenue teams. This conversation was recorded live in the Healthy Competition community, and we discussed how Klue is building the Competitive Enablement category, Product Marketing best practices, and his new template that helps Product Marketers stay focused and productive, the PMM Productivity Hub. 

Blake Bartlett is a partner at OpenView, an expansion-stage venture firm that helps build software companies into market leaders. He's been with OpenView since 2013 and coined the term "Product-Led Growth" (PLG) in 2016. Some of my favorite content on LinkedIn comes from Blake's show, PLG123. In our conversation, we dove into all things (you guessed it) PLG, why that strategy isn't a differentiator on its own anymore, what companies should do in ADDITION to PLG, how his content strategy with OpenView has led investment opportunities, and more.

The economy's in the toilet. Layoffs are happening left and right. It's probably a smart idea for Product Marketers to diversify their income. So in this episode, Raechel Lambert joined us to explore all things freelancing. After personally figuring out what works and what doesn't as a PMM freelancer, she built a business helping other folks explore and take advantage of the opportunity. It's called Olivine Marketing, and it's a full-service agency for Product Marketing, Branding & Websites, and Sales Enablement. We talk about the opportunities and risks of freelancing for companies in different stages of growth, market rates for PMM freelancers, how to get your first clients, and a lot more.

Really stoked to get this interview out. If you listen to this podcast, you probably already know who Dave is. But just in case, here's some background. Dave was the 8th employee at Drift, eventually became their VP of Marketing, helped them create the Conversational Marketing category, left to join Privy as the CMO, helped them get acquired by Attentive, and now runs a fantastic community for B2B marketers called Exit Five (of which I'm a member). 

We talked about category creation, how his competitive messaging differed between Drift and Privy, and we also dove into some other topics that I had never heard him talk about on other podcasts.

Dan Hamilton, VP of Competitive Intelligence at Salesforce, joined a live Q&A with the Healthy Competition community. He's spent 8 years at Salesforce working on CI, and he filled us in on how to progress in your career, the qualities of a good Competitive Intel practitioner, tactical plays he's working on to make his program more efficient, and more.

In this live session, I was joined by Federico Jorge (Founder of Stack Against) and JJ Haglund (former Adobe and Amplitude) to talk all things relating to SEO and Competitive Intel. We dove into the different types of competitive content that Google ranks, the strategies you should consider, how JJ attributes the majority of his side hustle business to SEO, and Federico's new free resource, the Competitive Keyword Generator. 

Patrick Campbell is the Founder & CEO of ProfitWell (recently acquired for $200M by Paddle), a software that improves your retention and monetization automatically through subscription intelligence. In our conversation, Patrick touches on his background in the NSA and how it inspired him to build profiles on competitors, what his profiles consist of, and how he uses them (including a fun story on how he was able to stop the fundraising of a number of his competitors). Lots of in-depth, scrappy examples of collecting and taking action on competitive intel in this episode. And if you're patient, you'll hear me nervously pitch Patrick at the end on a competitive intel service that I've been noodling on. 

Will Aitken is the Head of Sales Content at Sales Feed, the media company arm within Vidyard. I'm in love with Sales Feed's videos, and Will is a hilarious and thoughtful guy. It's clear that his videos are resonating too—Sales Feed has 80k followers on TikTok, significantly more than traditional B2B SaaS companies. He explains how the team got started, the mistakes he's learned from, what Sales Feed's success looks like for Vidyard, and more. We also chat about Will's new community, Social Social, which connects creators and social media managers and allows them to learn from each other.

If you want to make an impact on your org, you need to get as close to revenue as possible.

With that in mind, we're diving deep into how Competitive Intel and Product Marketers can partner with sales to win more competitive deals with:

• Clara Smyth: Senior Product Marketing Manager at Slack
• Pat Wall: Head of Competitive Intelligence at Imperva
• Brandon Bedford: Competitive Enablement Manager at Klue
• Farhan Manjiyani: Product Marketing Manager, Competitive Intelligence at Grafana Labs

Emma Stratton is the founder of Punchy, a consulting and training firm that helps B2B tech companies tell stories that stick, stand out in the crowd, and sell more. In our conversation, we talked about how she got her consulting business started, her favorite messaging frameworks, and how she evaluates competitive landscapes to help her clients differentiate. 

Damon Chen is a solopreneur and indie hacker currently building Testimonial.to, the easiest way for businesses and solopreneurs to collect and display testimonials. In our conversation, we talked about how and why Damen ditched his cushy 9-5 job for the startup founder life, how he started gaining traction, and what he'll need to do to go from $300k ARR to $1M.

Max Altschuler founded Sales Hacker which was acquired by Outreach in 2018. Now, Max is going all in on GTMfund which is an early-stage fund focused on B2B SaaS startups with product-market fit that are ready for hyper-growth. In our conversation, we talk about the similarities and differences between Sales Hacker and GTMfund, how investors should assess startups' competitive landscape before deploying capital, whether or not we'll see more communities getting acquired in the future, and a lot more. 

Chris Orlob helped scale Gong from $200k to $200M+. Now, he's creating online courses that help SaaS sellers and leaders. One of those courses is called Rig the Game—it gives sellers advanced strategies to win an unfair share of competitive deals. He gives us a sneak peek of a couple of tactics from the course, why he transitioned from Sales to Product Marketing and then BACK to Sales, and a lot more.

If you only listen to one podcast episode about Competitive Intelligence—make it this one.

We dive deep into starting and scaling a Competitive Intel program with:

• Tracy Berry: Director of Competitive Intelligence & Communication at Freshworks
• Mitesh Shah: Sr. Director of Competitive & Technical Marketing at Zscaler
• Paul Osmond: Sr. Director of Market & Competitive Intelligence at 6sense

This thing is jam-packed with value. It'd be a disservice to try and summarize it. Just jump in.

Brendan Hufford is the Founder of Growth Sprints, an SEO agency that helps SaaS companies increase revenue from Google through short, focused marketing sprints. In this episode, we chat about Brendan's journey from school teacher, to agency employee, to in-house marketer, to agency owner, and how he's positioned his agency to stand out amongst a sea of competitors.

Joel Primack is a Social & Community Specialist at Lattice, a people success platform that empowers leaders to build engaged, high-performing teams & winning cultures. He's also the host of the Community Led Growth Show—a podcast that features community builders, marketers, and growth leaders who create and scale successful communities. In this episode, we talk about when you should think about making a community, the different options you can take advantage of, and overall best practices if you're starting from scratch.

Adrienne is the Founder and Principal Researcher of Best Buyer Persona, an organization that helps companies discover who their best customers are, how they behave, and why they behave that way. In this episode, we chat about everything that's wrong with the makeup of traditional buyer personas, how she approaches building them with clients, and why it's important to identify anti-personas in addition to buyer personas.

Kishore is the Co-Founder at Goldcast, a platform that helps B2B marketers run webinars, virtual, and hybrid events that drive revenue. In this episode, we chat about Kishore's journey dropping out of school to start Goldcast, how they approach differentiation in a mature category, and his advice to those thinking about starting their own company.