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hello everyone and welcome to today's modern sales pros master class and live q a about getting ahead with competitive intelligence sponsored by the wonderful team at work auto and as folks are getting in and getting settled here we have a little poll that we're going to pop up and we do want to take a chance to get to meet our panelists now we've got one new panelist and one returning panelist so justin let's start with you you're an old hat you've been an msp member for a while but we always want to know from our panelists anything new any new hobbies skills that you've picked up since the start of the coronavirus pandemic yeah um i um i've been taking a lot of walks in in nature as much as possible and uh i have two kids who are eight nine who are incredibly uh huge nature enthusiasts and you're you're muted that's it's probably the most common phrase in twenty i'm sorry yeah seriously uh i was saying that i have two um young kids eight and nine and they are huge nature enthusiasts and um they and i do a lot of walks um because just getting outside is important and so i think i've learned a lot about birds and things of that nature through them and all the things they've telling me because like they're amazing at how much a knowledge they retain so i feel like i've learned a lot more about nature uh in the course of the pandemic that's that's pretty awesome it's good to get outside and give you and you're in the bay area right yes i live in half moon bay ah all right and folks in the chat panel do just let us know where you're calling in from it's always good to get a sense of where we're at and then we have a first timer here as well there's acos welcome thank you thank you for joining us but it's a tradition any new hobbies or skills that you've picked up since the since the start of the panda it's a good question i was kind of thinking a little bit about this um i think for me justin probably can attest to this i'm a big fan of my hair cutting my own hair is definitely a new skill of mine it's taken quite a bit of practice uh some challenges my brother's actually really good at it so i'm kind of taking his lead but that's been one of the areas i've spent a lot of time over the past 12 months actually cutting my own hair that's and i i've got a lot of questions about that you know obviously don't don't got a lot going on up top here what what what how do you do it right because it looks like you got a good some good lettuce on top it's the angle of the mirrors and just kind of taking your time with it so it's just practice practice makes perfect it's like competitive intelligence practices you know whether or not you came here for competitive challenge we got hair care tips we got outside bird culture aviary stuff and and we'll do a little competitive intelligence too all right folks we're going to jump in because we've got two amazing panelists and we've got a relatively short window at time we want to get these folks back and ron can enroll in with their day before we jump into our programming today though today's event is hosted by the team at modern sales pros for those of you who don't know modern sales pros is the world's largest community for revenue leaders so those are folks in sales management revenue and sales operations and the related supporting disciplines we have about 22 000 members and one of the great parts about our community is it exists to help our members answer questions they'd otherwise struggle to solve on their own like how the heck do i get started with competitive intelligence uh we do programming like this just about every week and we do hope to get back to you in person events real soon in the future one of the great parts about the community as well is when you ask a question in our online forum it's not just one or two high-growth sas companies you get perspective from across the ecosystem of amazing long big companies folks like adobe and also folks that are at high growth startups a really great way to help you up level your career for those of you who aren't members you'll be invited to join afterwards but today's programming actually wouldn't be possible without the sponsorship of the team at workato and i'll head it off to justin to say just a few words about work auto sure uh we are an enterprise automation platform and so basically what that means is that we help to automate a lot of the otherwise manual tasks that simply are frustrating for a lot of companies and by doing that we allow people to get back to the work that is potentially more exciting or more strategic um so that's what rocoto does awesome and we're excited to have you here and justin's being a little bit bashful he's a long-term member of modern sales pros as well but gentlemen let's let's actually get to know you both a little bit um you know we this topic comes up quite a bit how do i how do i use competitive intelligence what is it um justin why don't you give us a little bit of your background and um and then we can hand it off sure um like some of the folks that are in sales ops i have a a a bit of a diverse background i guess but uh it's gone into started in finance then consulting and then i made my way into the kind of sales op sales strategy space um uh previously before uh workato i was at medallia and that's where vikas and i worked together um and then i think just a tidbit on this topic and sort of why uh it's so important and why it's near and dear to me is just because it's in very few deals i feel like where um a prospect isn't potentially considering what their other options are and um so competitive intelligence if you really think about the holistic nature of it is not only uh competing you know in one-off deals against known competitors but also knowing how to articulate your you and your value prop vis-a-vis the other alternatives some of which of course always are just to do nothing and uh which sometimes is the biggest competitor of all um so i think gathering the intelligence figuring out how to leverage it and scale it figuring out how to make sure that it is more programmatic and sort of always on versus just sort of a la carte and um you know more of project-based nate of work is key for sort of any organization that helps to stay ahead and particularly ahead of the competition so i'll go into more but vikas has has a ton on this too so i'm anxious to hear what he has to say too yeah and infocus please do introduce yourself i think it's the first time we've had on an enterprise product marketing lead so what the what the heck does that mean and and uh we're i i got your background already but share it with the community because i think you're gonna be great here yeah sure so you know it's interesting how i kind of entered into product marketing i started off consulting my first part of my career joined medallion 2014 and held a couple of roles in both sales and customer success so working on the front line with our sales reps with our customer success managers and being customer facing really helped me kind of understand what was actually happening in the market it actually led to my interest and passion in competitive intelligence it's the best way to influence and arm your sellers your sales teams your customer success folks to understand how to better drive uh wins within your organization and that's actually how i entered into product marketing for the past uh two years a little over two years now i've been leading our product marketing team at slack really focused on competitive intelligence finding ways to programmatically scale what's happening in our markets supporting our sales teams but also supporting the broader organization our product managers our executive teams on using kind of competitive intelligence to really think about proactive strategy when it comes to our growth as an organization oh and congratulations it's a little that little teeny slack acquisition uh congratulations on that one um but folks we're gonna we're gonna jump in here today please just two housekeeping notes uh first things first please do use the q a panel uh we've got these great panelists here uh we may want to follow up with you afterwards and then secondly before somebody asks the recording will be available after the event so we got you covered there um with that you know i think we started on this a little bit when we got going but you know justin let's let's start with you on this like why why the heck is this important like why why do we have to worry about what our competitors are up to i know it sounds a little bit basic but it's actually pretty pretty dang important yeah i mean i think um on the one hand like i said in most markets you're gonna be facing competition and like i said some of the competition is uh for them to just solve it on their own um and and to continue to maybe do nothing and so i think uh being able to articulate your value um how and why someone should do to choose you over you know doing whatever they're doing today or a potential competitive offering is key for for winning again in most in most all markets and i think like the the thing is is that um i think why it's important is because of that because it's so uncrucial to to winning and growing company but i think it's also important because what i've seen is a lot of companies tend to under invest or under re uh resource this function for quite some time i mean i've seen larger companies during my consulting days where they probably weren't really focused as much as they should be so i think then it becomes okay so if it's going to be traditionally undersourced then how do you either have someone who does this well as part of their job and how do they do that or how do you have maybe a team of one uh which vicas knows from starting in medallia to to really build a function and then scale it and what does that look like and how do you use technology to potentially help you so i just think that it's it's an incredibly important function and i think the last thing i'd say is that no company um has a flawless product and so uh being able to learn and understand where your blind spots are and where you know the market is moving um maybe where your competitors potentially are innovating and that you should consider uh are key things just to understand and then it's up to you to decide how to act there's there's a lot of discipline in that we've had folks on talking about you know cold calling and sales development how even if you're using a competitor that's a there's a whole bunch of discovery there's almost a separate script that you can go down there to learn some of those some of those insights how how have you seen um you know justin organizations really collect and kind of operationalize this um this type of information because it feels like it's a little bit it's kind of everywhere yeah sure i mean i think i think it's a great place if you're new to this or you just kind of want to take an audit of how you're doing is just look just ask yourself like what are the most important competitive information or pieces of information that we should be collecting and i would structure it ideally into quantifiable information and qualifiable qualitative information so structured and non-structured you know so uh structured good examples would be like how many competitive deals are we in uh which competitors are showing up most so that's literally just like being able to tag competitors to us um but then the other stuff that's super important would be you know questions like why are we losing and i'm a big fan i think there's a lot of people in msp that like this too i'm a big fan of the like double response sales force categories so you have like a loss reason which is like a drop down but then there's like lost details that must be so you get both the sort of you know quantitative and qualitative um but then the last thing i would say just that could talk a long time and if if there's more i can go into it but the last thing i think is crucial if you're thinking about where do i start so yeah first start with what data and then map out process to go get it and i can have i could provide some more suggestions of key things but is start early your win loss interviews um and and figure out who's gonna do it um ideally uh you should probably try to spread the wealth i think there's you know sales and marketing and sales leaders um tend to be you know good folks to do this but um so that's step one is get the information but then that's only step one then you have to sort of synthesize it and then you have to um kind of cascade it so that it can be turned into action and um you know people have different cadences usually quarterly is a good opportunity to pull up and look at that information to see you know how have trends change things that nature but i'm i am just a huge fan of the competitive intelligence you can get from just understanding what did we do right what did we do wrong why did we win why did we lose and what do we learn from it so i would start with some of those fundamentals and then you can add that's a great having a really good foundation of data helps but how do you take that data and apply it like what do i do with it once i kind of have it yeah it's a great question i think one of the things that we've seen really successful in lost programs is you're able to really change your messaging and foundational kind of marketing content right so when we think about win-loss programs both at medallion and at slack what we're really trying to understand is that outside in perspective voice of the customer and so we can figure out what messaging is actually resonating with our customers what differentiation for example we're able to iterate on our messaging much more effectively and more quickly and that comes back to the feedback loop that kind of justin's alluding to with the sales organization which is it's a big lift and ask to ask your sales managers your sales reps to fill out win-loss reports in salesforce so as a marketing lead my goal is really put together what is the best content that we can then deliver for our for our reps for our internal teams to make that information as effective as possible a repository of customer quotes customer stories working with our customer marketing team it's a much more effective way to scale out and create that air cover from a marketing standpoint based off of what's happening in the market itself so again it's leveraging the voice of the customer for your wins creating that air cover for your sellers to kind of take that to market and for the losses really being able to instrument that information with your various internal stakeholders one of the things that we really kind of focus on as a product led organization at slack specifically from our product led growth perspective is we want to be competitor aware but still customer obsessed right and our win loss program is very much focused on what are our customers actually saying what is the reality of the market let's take that information synthesize and then share that with the broader stakeholders so there's definitely a balancing act there well it feels like that's that's part of the the art of it too right you can you can look at what everybody else is doing and then along the way lose who you are and uh what was that term that you used again competitive competitive aware competitor aware customer obsessed uh david shelheis our chief legal officer talks about it quite a bit it's part of our onboarding program for every single sales and you hire which is yes competitors are out there they're going to be in the market we're dealing with some large ones in our in our collaboration space but if you put the customers first you're always going to win on that customer obsession right that is going to be the key differentiator for us as an organization of truly understanding our customers outcomes and their business priorities i feel like that's that's a really smart especially when you start to think about onboarding right you can you know reps don't have infinite time and if i can kind of qualify you out because i can say hey you're not the right fit for us you know there's these guys down the road that do it that's that's very interesting i like that so you know justin you started to hit on this a little bit before you're talking about structured and unstructured data and insights can you talk through that a little bit more at depth for folks as the majority of our audience today was like well hey at least we've got a competitive thing kind of ish yeah i would i so this is something that we've um spent some time on as as our own company and we wanted to get there at least a couple things that we wanted to get better at um and so one of them was just understanding we we feel like more of our deals are competitive but our reps are busy and they aren't necessarily sales force obsessed so always capturing the competitive data as early in the sales cycle as we would like is a challenge uh you know we usually always find out about it in like you know at the proposal stage but that's like mid-stage and there's a lot i mean a lot of this sales science data shows that a lot of your competitive you know um importance of competing is actually takes place early in the sales cycle so surfacing the competitors being able to position yourself well against the competitors a lot of the battle actually takes place before you get to the bake off um so getting that information sooner in the sales cycle critical for win rate so that's number one number two is we felt like well gosh we actually have done a lot of win loss interviews understanding of our competitive differentiation we actually feel like we have some pretty good content but it's not being leveraged that well you know everyone's like wait wait where do i find the battle card again or like for the 19th time here it is and um but that happens like everywhere it's literally everywhere i grow up a high growth startup right where yeah so so we basically at work we kind of have this philosophy that like we want to stop trying to force sales reps to do things that are unnatural for how they work instead we want to use and build workflows that allow for them to just get the stuff they want in the way they already like to work so that was a really long wind up to say here's what we did basically we created an automation that leveraged the technology that we have in the tech stack to make it way easier for our reps to tag competitive deals very early on that allowed us to do a number of cool things number one we got way more competitive intelligence like we used like our number of deals that had competitors tagged to them used to be something like less than 30 early in the sales cycle now it's over 70 percent that's huge for us um just to be able to understand way earlier who we're competing and what we do with that and then i'll show you kind of what we built and how we did it um just because it could be hopefully sparked some creativity but i think it is really important to think through your tech stack and and how you can better leverage it to automate some of this because like i said it's really hard to get reps to always remember to do some manual sales force tasks so i don't i'll just take a second and i can actually show you guys a little bit of what we did um and perhaps it might be interesting since folks so uh kind of you know appropriate that it was a combination of workato and slack is what we did but let me just quickly share or present it for you guys so basically we built something called a sales intelligence bot and what it combined combined is it combined essentially slack gong and salesforce and uh what would happen is we would know right at the end of a call uh a rep would get tagged or get uh pinged and says like hey you just had a call uh with say like giant tiger um and we want and we knew know that some competitors were mentioned the reason why we know that is because we built some automations that basically says whenever the prospect so not the ae or someone from mercato mentions a competitor we're going to uh give you the option to tag it so in this case there were three competitors mentioned and they get this tag immediately and then what they can then do is like i said it surfaces the competitors and if they want to with one click they just go and they can add it to the salesforce app well that just makes it incredibly it's a lot easier for them to do they don't have to type anything it's just done for them super easy but we're also kind of on the mindset that like uh sales ops is a support role like our role our function is to make sellers more effective so i believe very much in like a give get type of thing if i'm going to ask them for something i better give them value too which is kind of what we're trying to do and solve that issue where like we basically disseminate the battle cards right to them uh so they can just click here and go into guru and get the battle cards for any of our competitors we just listed one here for the demo of mulesoft and so that way it's timely and um they get it when they need it but then the other thing that um we did again i love the kind of idea from customer obsessed uh is like our customers are aes so we asked them like how can we make this better they're like well hey in competitive deals like typically the way i do is like i'll go and i'll look at our content then i'll just like go talk to other aes who recently won deals because like i find that that's really useful so we're like all right well why don't we make that easier for them so we built that in the next thing where we basically said hey show me comp recent competitive wins against this competitor and i can just click down and select competitor and then i can see like hey here are some recent competitive wins and i can go talk to josh or boaz or jeff and and and go read about these deals if i want to again this is not a very difficult thing for us to build or or to do but i think it's an example of how number one i'm not having to prompt these people every time i'm not having to find this stuff it's automated it's in the background it's always on always working which allows us to scale and as a look kind of like a one-man shop or whatever you know it allows us to actually be way more professional while still resourcing this correctly um you know maybe not building out a huge team given you know the the the situation so this is kind of an example i think of uh what i would find is a little bit more kind of intelligent ways to collect data and do it at scale and allow also you to leverage that data in timely ways to have cool competitive programs sorry for the long wind-up but i thought maybe that's helpful oh i think it's i think it speaks to how uh a couple parts on this right we're going to talk a little bit more about like how to actually get started how to build it how to implement it but one of the things justin that you said on that aside from having some pretty slick ways to make it easy for reps to capture this information the other part that you mentioned is it's like you have to be massively efficient whether you're in rev-ops or whether you're running competitive intelligence you're never going to be resourced with a dozen two dozen three dozen people and certainly if you've got three dozen people in your compete or you're probably at a very large very very complex organization uh but because i'd love to get you going a little bit to talk about because you've been the team of half and the team of one and we've got folks that are still figuring out how how did how have you seen folks be able to get started with this and get to that point where like you said you've got this big backlog of customer stories available yeah so i think it's really about prioritization right it's really understanding first and foremost when i was at medallion team of path and because it was a night job for me when i first started i was still doing customer success uh with with my team over there um was really about how do you prioritize what are the most important things for the sales organization right what are the things going to be most effective for them and for us it was just getting a baseline of capturing the data and the insights understanding what was actually happening with our competitive differentiation who are competitors what does the market landscape look like putting together a set of pieces of content slides whatever may be an essential repository for that information i think of competitive intelligence as this kind of three structured tier right there's capture and get in insights that's kind of tier one it's the baseline once you get that foundational aspect going you're able to rev on that relatively quickly the second pillar for me is really around supporting the sales organization for me personally and for any competitive intelligence team being able to build the right kind of content connect with the right kind of systems and data to kind of feed that information out to the reps and then third is kind of the proactive aspect of competitive intelligence which is how do you inform go to market strategy corporate strategy m a strategy with those competitive insights and it is a bit of a crawl walk run and frankly you have to earn that third pillar which is being at the table sharing those kind of proactive messages with with a broader organization it starts by getting the data and insights right first and foremost and so for us what i've done my role in kind of that slack as well as that medallion is going to our sales ops team going to our sales enablement team and listening right sitting in front of our reps hearing from them what are the challenges they're running into in the market what kind of content is going to be the most effective for them in these sales conversations is it stories is it roi calculators is it just getting a baseline understanding of wait slot can do this and this other competitor can do xyz there's a bit of myth versus reality as well too i would encourage folks that are starting off their competitive intelligence functions is there's a lot of noise out there in the market a lot of noise it's very easy to get caught up in kind of chasing every little detail out there reddit posts youtube videos etc focus on the actual signals right they're coming from your sales organization and was actually going to convert acv and impact acv as a team of one or team of half that's the best way for you to kind of keep your sanity and also find ways to scale out the stuff that's actually working when it's time to scale your organization and then for those of you that are looking to kind of build a broader competitive intelligence team once you have those wins early on the business case you're able to make your sales leadership team your sales op leadership team for additional head count frankly becomes a lot more easier which is always a good thing right that business case building is critical where and i want to double click into that a little bit where does that typically incubate right you mentioned you mentioned that you were kind of customer success moonlighting as a competitive person is it an ops does it come out of ops does it come out of solution engineering like where have you seen it get started and justin i want your perspective on this as well yeah it's a great question i've actually seen it live in a lot of different places i've spent a lot of time with other competitive teams across large enterprise sas companies smaller enterprise sas companies i think for any or for any competitive team to be really successful it isn't necessarily to sit within one specific department but you do need that cross-functional tiger team approach where there's buying across enablement ops and the sales organization having it sit within product marketing frankly this is the first time it's sit within product marketing at slack i think it's really effective because it allows for that outside in perspective to live within your marketing organization everybody on my team frankly has uh acb that they need to meet on a quarterly basis from a quarter perspective i expect my pmms to be engaging on deals and hearing directly from our customers if we can't pitch a winning narrative we have to go back to the drawing board so there's pros and cons of having it sit within various departments um i think that access of kind of the political capital across sales marketing and customer success is critical having to sit within a corporate strategy team could be effective as well but it really does vary on where your organization is from a maturity standpoint no i also think like i like that point that you sat around it's kind of have the interdisciplinary move between the teams and be able to have some political goodwill to burn with marketing sales maybe customers maybe even engineering in some instances right yeah i mean i i would i agree with what vicar said i think as as a sales ops professional and some of the people who are on here if they're in sales ops i think it's your core job within this discipline of competitive intelligence to make sure that things are wired correctly to capture the data um you know so if it's um you know win loss rates for competitors that you've got things set up correctly so you can do that um as well as just that you are at least understanding of the process you don't need to be the person conducting all the win-loss interviews but that a a process exists it's being executed has owners and that the insights and data is being captured and disseminated and sometimes the ops person can be in charge of helping that but you know like i i would sometimes like even easier to say like it could be more on me to come up with the what is happening so hey we're seeing competitors go up we're seeing more of these competitors we're seeing our win lots rates do this like we're seeing you know if we look at various revenue bands or ar bands like here's what we see happening but then the like maybe the why i think can then come from either going and talking to your actual aes uh your solution consultants pre-sales knows a ton always uh or or the product marketing team right can be really really into the why and understanding you know here's how things are facing off vis-a-vis our competitive differentiation maybe how we need to improve how we articulate so i think like there's a lot of folks that have a hand in making a great program but i think the folks of the folks who sort of sit in seats like me it's really key that um like vikas said that foundational love layer of having the right data that you're kind of on top of that i think that's that's and that's something we've got a good live question coming in from um from kevin donovan in colorado and it's two-parter let's start with the first part because i think it's a little bit more science than art and i think the second part gets into kind of the meat of the matter but justin you know how as an individual seller and what's my role in getting that competitive information back from the front lines or as a frontline sales manager frontline sales development manager yeah i mean i think that there's look i i i think it's a key part of anybody in sales ops to make sure you have pretty strong relationships with frontline sellers and uh and they feel comfortable pinging you or calling you or whatever and just like saying like hey i want to show you tell you some things um at the same time aes get busy and i think it's it needs to be on you as the person in sales ops too that you just pick up the phone maybe if you have some time while walking or driving or whatever it might be like schedule in time to do kind of um spontaneous calls with aes and and get different perspectives because different people see different um competitors depending on what market they're in and so i think it's important that you get a diverse input um i think that's those are all good things to do they don't scale super well but they're still super important the things that you can do to scale a little bit better is to do things like you know having you know kind of regular quarterly surveys from from your field and asking them and gathering that data and analyzing it that gets a much wider breadth of information maybe not always the depth but um it's still very good um and then i think you know also we try to give um uh highlight uh win law or highlight deals in our friday or you know weekly sales calls and when we do that that's another great opportunity for dialogue and discussion about competitive dynamics or just market dynamics right so someone might bring somebody and in the context of telling their story they'll also maybe say or here's how i competed or here's some things that i was facing that surfaces it and i think that sometimes prompts further reps even after that meeting to kind of submit feedback so those are some things that we do i think that that's that's great perspective on the capture pro i want to i want to get into the second part because i think it's it's pretty interesting and because you mentioned this there's there's lots of noise out there right you go on g2 crowd there's 85 competitors for your your little slice of heaven how as a as a rapper as a frontline manager do you kind of filter through that noise to make sure that when you're going back you're not um you're not crying wolf right it's not like oh i lost this deal because we didn't have future x like how do you and especially as a frontline or a first-time manager i think it's a challenge so how can you as a rapper as a frontline manager really make sure the feedback that you're delivering back to competitive intelligence enablement sales ops wherever it lives is like actually impactful and valuable as opposed to just bitching about a feature that the product doesn't have yeah i think for one of the things that we found to be really effective coming back to the scale piece is we've we collect a lot of feedback from our frontline reps in terms of deals that they're engaging in publicly in our in our slack channels right as transparent it's visible the entire organization can kind of see that feedback coming in in real time what we found to be really effective in terms of kind of filtering out the noise is really focusing on where we want our sellers to go in their sales conversations what kind of conversations do we expect them to have with with their customers around value-based messaging value based selling etc what we're able to do is kind of reverse engineer if there's a product feature or gap that's missing let's actually track that over time right let's build some dashboards to see how much acv is being impacted over time and are we actually seeing a fundamental shift in kind of the conversations that are taking place in our market with our customers on the front line perspective the challenge here i think is it's important to give your reps space to kind of share what they're hearing in in the in in the market because it's important to kind of get that conversation going the key really is can you actually start to see patterns across all the various inputs that are coming in so one of the things that we do that really helps kind of filter out that noise is yes we get first-hand deal experience from frontline folks but as as our managers and our sales management team looks at is what are we hearing from the product marketing or product marketing organization the product management organization in terms of where our product roadmap is headed and are there ways for us to close that gap naturally through product innovation etc right so it's a little bit of expectation setting as well which is yes these deals can be tough but when we dig into the personas the actual buyer profiles we're able to filter down exactly what happened and doing an anatomy of a deal and oftentimes we realize is there are competitive dynamics but the challenge in that deal wasn't necessarily this massive competitor coming in with xyz feature it was lack of executive champion or not going high enough within the account and that's a different framing of a conversation that you have then with the front line rep in terms of coaching and empowerment for the next skill that that individual focuses on so it's a bit of a kind of yes we hear you but let's dig a little bit deeper in terms of the conversations you're having with your customers and where can we improve upon in that entire sales motion no i think having it having it modeled and being disciplined about that because to your point right oh yeah no maybe that's what you heard that you lost because of future x but in reality we got blocked at the cfo that you never talked to um justin you know in your in your earlier days at work as things were kind of getting going how much of the sales process did you have really locked before you started to do some of the competitive work i mean i feel like i feel like the sales process is something that we're always kind of how long is a piece of string justin come on yeah yeah i mean um but i would say this uh we we probably started pretty early with general competitive intelligence but i would admit very much that i was i was another one of the people that i say happen so often where it started very much as a project based effort uh when i first was going uh just because there were so many things that i was trying to get my head around as i was getting up to speed as the head of sales ops and so you know i'd spend a little time to be like okay what are competitors which competitors how's our runway and they're like okay i'll come back to that in another quarter and check to see if anything's changed um but i hadn't built anything that was truly going to be scalable or always on or things of that nature and that's probably how most people will start i think that um we have been the challenge though is that a lot of sales orgs are oftentimes innovating on their go to market and um when you do you might get a new channel or you might get a new motion or you might get a new product that changes the way you sell and so whenever you do that you kind of have to pay attention to new competitors that are surfacing or new ways to compete vis-a-vis that motion or channel or segment or whatever so it's kind of something that like i said you you always have to pay attention to um but i think like i started off by talking about like what are the core things and and i would keep to those and then i'd say is just like whenever in doubt uh always follow the money uh so seriously like wherever there is the most largest amount of ar or acv or you want to call it is coming into or flowing through like start there and and uh because there's there's always tons of stuff that you could do uh so just you know it's our job to always be ruthless in how we prioritize and so that's kind of what i'd say is like yeah there might be some plays that you're innovating but go and really make sure that you have hardened and better processes in the place that are core to how you compete in core to how you make your number i think there's a whole separate conversation we could have about the feedback loop from sales to products to actual product releases and the uh the knife fights that happen over that um i want to move in we spent a lot of time talking about collection and kind of how to scale it but we haven't really talked too too much about how to use it which is really the art of it with competitive intelligence and because i want to start with you here how what are some things that you see people either really really goof up when they've got a good piece of competitive intel or what are some really common applications you've seen that folks are doing reasonably well or things that they should think about before using competitive intelligence yeah so i think so i'll start with kind of where the kind of the challenges that people run into when using competitive intelligence it's from sometimes we've seen reps bring in competitive intelligence or too early on in the sales cycle they actually introduce the competitor into the deal because they jump the gun right because they haven't done the right kind of upfront discovery and they start to see these conversations that creates doubt in the customer's own mind or the prospect's own mind of wait a minute should i be evaluating another tool altogether that wasn't my initial reasoning but it's introducing kind of the competitor or the competitive dynamics too early on into a sales conversation i think where i've seen folks become really really effective with competitive intelligence is if you're an account executive or uh even on the sales engineering side is being just dangerous enough to understand what are the fundamental differentiation from a product capability standpoint and tying it to use cases that that customer cares about right i think of competitive intelligence as being this kind of foundational layer that sits across all of our all of your kind of product marketing messages and your sales motion if you're able to speak to the value that your product is able to deliver and highlight without kind of calling out a competitor explicitly in terms of where the value is going to come from from your specific solution those are some of the most successful ways to kind of have that competitive conversation with the customer by not coming across overly aggressive or kind of defensive in many ways right so one of the things that we try to do here within slack is really create messaging and content one pagers that are not necessarily overly hey slack versus xyz competitor but more around here's what slot can do for sales stock for customer support but then still laddering in our key differentiation and our capabilities that really bring out things that no other competitor in the market can actually do for for for that organization given their product capabilities and we've really worked with our enablement team to arm our sellers on that talk track on that positioning to find ways to pivot away at the right time and so it's kind of this like nice balance of yes be dangerous be dangerous enough to go into a one-on-one conversation with your champion to go deep on a specific product differentiation area but always find the right altitude maybe it's 20 000 foot or 40 000 foot to be able to focus on that kind of value orientation at the end of the day that's a fine line no and that's i was just thinking about that so if you spend too much time talking about a competitor you're doing you're almost doing their job for them um one one question we had and this was more a bunch in registration but because i want you to double click into this you mentioned that hey some of this stuff is you know customer ready materials that are used in the sales process could you walk through a couple examples of that are those like maybe buying guides for sales like what what can you frame that a little bit more for our audience yeah so we have we have a few different types of competitive content that our sales folks use one we have worked with our sales engineering team to put together an evaluation criteria guide so really helping brand new prospects for kind of green field to the collaboration space understand here the types of capabilities you should be looking at think about a holistic collaboration platform for your organization that of course is framed in our own world view that highlights our differentiation it highlights use cases that accelerate and showcases strongest capabilities other pieces of content that we use as we think about kind of the sales funnel is like what are we going to use for kind of stage one stage two but more focused on later stage conversations with champions specifically a lot of our customers are being asked within the it team or within engineering teams to highlight the value of slack and defend the value of stock against free or bundled solutions to the executive leadership team what we've actually worked on is putting together sets of roi calculators uh one pages that highlight kind of our key differentiation and most importantly tight set of executive level slides that anybody could kind of plug and play and have that conversation with their champion we really want to arm our customers to tell our story about why slack in their own words we don't want to be the ones going up to the cfo to defend our own product we want to harm our champion so the way we build our content is really around third-party external validation whether it's through industry analyst reports customer validation customer win stories going deep on product capabilities and gaps for the more technical audiences so it's one of the things that we found really most uh to be really effective about this slide tangent here the shift to remote work people are really tired of reading documentation left and right we've actually started investing in short form 30-second one-minute videos i work with a dedicated sales engineer who's phenomenal at this where he's able to go deep on a specific differentiation topic make it fun make it quick make it memorable rooted in customer stories that then becomes this living breathing asset that our sales team can then use to share with the champion or even share with an executive uh buyer to really showcase the value in the differentiation of stock so we're really investing kind of the video side of things because we've just found that to be a lot more effective uh content type it's and you see that too sometimes in product marketing as well well they'll be you know on a maybe in an emerging market right we'll do a whiteboard wednesday to talk about this concept that's just kind of new to the new to the space here um justin i know you've probably got a lot of thoughts on a lot of thoughts here yeah no i mean i think i think all of the content that vicas is talking about is just critical um i think um to two things number one uh companies do better by having a fewer sets of really great assets than a lot of mediocres but i see a lot of people tending to go towards the second choice but the other thing i wanted to talk about is actually the role of ops and what because said right because like i think a critical point component of ops is like at the first yeah i get the data but then how do you be intelligent about knowing where a seller is in their journey and then partnering with all of the wonderful partners you know product marketing and sales enablement content to get it to them at the right time now there's some software out there that you know that that's kind of what they're trying to do um but i actually think that like there are some ways that you can do it even kind of hacking it together yourself um you know if like what we look at through some automations is if you essentially know the persona and the potentially like uh department that you're having in the key use case and then you can clearly have content that's tagged to that and that's a good ways that you can use either within salesforce or you know other mechanisms email slack to deliver content and actually push it to the uh you know aes when they need it and i think that's kind of like the more sophisticated a more like modern way to uh to do this type of competitive intelligence and enablement just because it's like there is so much and yeah like search tools have gotten a bit better but it's just a lot different experience if i have pushed to me hey we know that you just advanced your deal to proposal state here's the proposal template here's our pricing all these kinds of things that you might need right delivered to you um that's a better way to kind of facilitate and make sure your is being used and i think there is a role for sales ops to partner with product marketing enablement to make sure that happens no i think it's it's all back to what vikas was saying earlier it's that everyone's gotta work together quite quite well one one thing i wanted both your perspectives on we touched on a lot of different types of content a lot of different types of um you know justin you've mentioned hey there's a lot of mediocre content versus a few great pieces for someone that's just kind of getting started on this what are some you know one or two common maybe types of content or formats of content that are going to be uh valuable to justify the project and evolve it into a program i like some of the things i'll just reiterate that i think we already covered just to make sure is like a understanding of the key requirements of buying any kind of platform that have your perspective i think it's key i i really love that one because it's providing thought leadership i do think i think either i i mentioned it maybe acosta too which is like having some kind of like set battle card for some of your key competitors which just sort of says like hey you know and it should be as real as possible so make sure you test this with ae so it should say like here's the things they're going to say about you just expect it here's what you should say here's some thoughts about how you can you know provide some kind of you know competitive um you know landmines or whatever that would uh help to steer the conversations in your direction and then you know um being able to really also be able to do a little bit of a side by side on key competitive or product differentiations by the way though let's just be clear you don't compete on just product alone and that should be like very well like understood and remembered right um you know like i can't tell you like and i will totally just give our our customer success team and support team at worcado like huge accolades like we've literally had people say we picked you because your customer support is so amazing and i was just like that won us the deal it wasn't like the product and so it's like there's a lot of different ways that you can compete and you should remember that that um it's not all just like hey our product has this feature and this doesn't so pick us so um i guess the just like so when you're putting these togeth these documents to go back to your question remember all of the competitive things that you know you have and you have to offer i think there's i think that the the point of um you know the transparency component of that too is important right understanding the edges of what you do and not trying to sell them just oh no no we're going to build that it's like no you're you're a solution that's built with with purpose in mind um yeah sorry i was going to say one other thing i think that's really important um in competitive is it's so easy to get distracted by your competitors and i think we've kind of talked about that i love the way that lacasse and slack talk about it is competitive where customers are obsessed but i think it's really really important when distraction might come up with an intern inside the company hey uh they're doing this should we go do this like uh bring facts that's like the best thing i can suggest is like bring facts be like how big is that market uh how have we competed there how are we doing elsewhere if you know do we have you know kind of extra resources to give it to that or are we gonna be taking resources from this to give to that what are the trade-offs right like i think it's the role of folks in sales ops and sales strategy to really kind of come to the table with that facts so that we can have those conversations because they are really important right maybe you should pivot um but uh what without a good solid foundation of those kind of data points and facts then people are just sort of pontificating and you can get into real trouble because you can pivot your strategy in a way that actually deters you from say like where your core market should be so um it's really up to you guys and you guys on the call to make sure you have those facts when those conversations come because they will come well it's something that you both mentioned quite a bit when we had our prep sessions talking about just knowing your ideal customer profile knowing what your ideal sales motion looks like knowing what your ideal buyer looks like that's not easy work to do but that helps you stay a little bit more true in this situation because of all the points that justin you don't make a snap decision to change pricing or go in and dive in and go after a new market that maybe doesn't make sense or maybe your competitor is going into that market because you're kicking their butt and the market that you're doing really really well in um there's a couple questions and then we're gonna wrap here um first question this this one's in the uh in the chat panel here uh we've talked a lot about kind of internal and and understanding how uh how a competitor's positioning against you what are some of the best ways to bring in sort of those external sources press releases uh you know new hires fundraising announcements big companies right you get your 10ks vikasa how do you fold that into your your machine here in your motion yeah i think it's it's a critical part you need to have that kind of holistic approach to capturing that competitive insight there's great software tools out there like clue and crayon that we've invested in that are really helpful to kind of create that always-on kind of competitive intelligence monitoring uh it creates a centralized repository for us too so that it's easier for folks to track that information one of the things that we look at quite a bit um is press announcements earnings calls are a great way to get really insightful information et cetera we work a lot with our pr team and our com seems to bring those pieces together and create this kind of a centralized approach there i found that centralizing information through software tools like clue and crayon are probably the most effective ways it's the most scalable way to you're able to create alerts you're able to create updates you're actually able to track marketing messaging on website pages that are changing over time so as an individual you're not the one responsible clicking into the same links over and over again you have an automated tool to help you do that um so for me like i think that that aspect of bringing that outside in perspective is incredibly important the key then is because it's balancing okay are these things actually fundamentally shifting their marketing strategy or their sales strategy or again is it just simply noise and that we need to focus on things that are actually impacting acv or ar on a daily basis and i think that that comes back to what we were saying before right really knowing yourself where is where is the money going where what what matters here um another question coming in and this is from this is from caleb i love this question justin let's throw it at you here so cool all things being equal right products are the same how do you highlight some of those company differences um you know the stuff like customer success or or whatever it might be like how did how do you all do it yeah so one reminder here for all of our uh folks that have uh read the challenger sale long ago right and i still think a lot of what's in that book holds true which is um the data suggests that the biggest competitive differentiation and b2b sales is the value that the sales rep shows in the sales cycle not the product uh things of that nature it's just like do i trust this person and do i believe that uh what they are telling me is a realistic you know um destination for us and do i think that this company can provide value right so um i think let's just focus there because a lot needs to be put then into do you have compelling stories that really show that your company and your offering can provide value that has to be done first before you get into then like let's double click on the specific features that deliver that right because if someone's like what i don't i don't care where you're trying to take me then uh then they're they don't even want to look at your product so um the other thing i'd say they get some specifics though uh and there's just like one interesting story is like we we had a really kind of uh proactive prospect and they actually mystery shopped us and they called into our customer support and they called into a bunch of others and they just experienced it we didn't suggest that for them they did it their own and they were that's kind of where they came away but you could you mean you can set up ways to get people to experience things i mean i think uh any company is always smart to show up front in sales cycles the people that they will be working with downstream who will be supporting with them who's going to be my customer success manager my cs person my you know things that nature um i just think that that's just smart selling and um and it does differentiate you a bit i also think that things like understanding their objectives hey um you know mr mrs prospect you seem like someone who really loves to innovate and has tons of ideas um so i think you're going to probably want to work with someone who's kind of going to be there with you you know not quarter you know call times a quarter but like weekend and week out they can be a partner and brainstorm things like that's who we are that's how we want to work with and you can show that sometimes in the sales cycle by delivering but then also referring them to other customers right that hey this is what i'm saying go talk to our customers and they'll give you their own story and then you just have to be customer obsessed as the cost said so that they they tell they say good things about you and just to quickly add on that i think the customer reference piece is a critical part for us here at slack is called is building that reference edge nomination process from the reps etc one of the things that we leverage quite a bit is just customer satisfaction scores right through our support team through our customer success team etc we'll be showcasing those metrics to our um to our prospects during this first sales pitch right highlighting to them the importance of having aligned customer success representatives to help them think through their kind of change management their collaboration strategy because it's a long game right it's not a one or two month thing it is a multi-month multi-quarter type initiative and for us that's the way we kind of bring that value differentiation to the table gentlemen i feel like we could go on for probably another hour just on that topic because there's so much selling art in there maybe we'll do it again soon but um we are we're almost at time and i know you're both incredibly busy but before we go um because let's start with you one key takeaway for our for our audience anything that you want them to really take home from this be patient uh competitive intelligence and building a function from scratch takes time it takes uh it's a labor of love um you find the right folks and that alignment is really really critical uh take a crawl walk run approach in my opinion like that is gonna be the most successful way to really build a program over time don't jump into scaling phase too early find ways to get those quick wins to help build that business case that would be my biggest key takeaway it takes time yeah and just i'd say just like make sure you're nailing the core things that you have to capture early on and that you are um you know i guess the other two things would be that you try as much as you can to automate and make things easy for people to do otherwise they won't and always remember the value exchange right is that if you're gonna ask someone and get something from them make sure you're always usually giving them more back in return so that they want to uh they want to keep you know contributing and giving you input because they see the value of what comes back to them great great perspective on how to think about uh being in an ops organization and selling motion and justin is there anything coming up that ricato's got going on something maybe on tax day perhaps we do we have our first uh ever user conference which is going to be april 13th through the 15th so not exactly on but it will end on tax day uh um but uh this is just if you look we we pride ourselves in and really having a wonderful community of people who are thinking through cutting-edge automations and how to make things awesome at their company so this is just a great opportunity for all of them uh to get together to share learnings about how they are sort of kind of pushing the boundaries of what's possible so we're really excited about it and we'd love you know anyone and everyone to come check that out you can you can find our website but again it's april 13th through the 15th and and we'll send that out to everybody afterwards the passes are are free for um for msp members which is great well vikas justin this was this was super super awesome for me i learned a ton lots of notes here i want to thank you both so much i know you're incredibly busy and on behalf of gina and the team behind the scenes the 22 000 folks in the msp community thank you so much for sharing your insights stay safe and please have a wonderful rest of your day thanks thanks so much everyone bye