We were one of the most loved products in the market
Sales were increasing, customers were raving about the product
Even the analysts were putting us in top quadrants, waves and ranking
It seemed like the party would continue
This was somewhere in mid 2000s
Smaller competitors were selling at $1000 a pop or lower
We were selling at $250-300K at lower end
Larger deals were in $millions
It hardly seemed like we should worry about the #competition
We had more of everything
– more features
– more awards,
– more deals, more customers
Competition had less of everything
– low price
– less features
– could handle less data and very few users
It also took less time to setup and use
Competition product could be downloaded in minutes and could be up and running in a day or two
Our product took a few hours just to download and setup required experts of our tool, data and more.
It was usually weeks before you could see the first report and get value.
Our competition analysis focused on features and capabilities and deal sizes and pricing.
We thought we were still winning.
We didn’t know this at the time, but found out later…
– Small competitors were winning 2-5 seat deals coming in below $5000 approval thresholds
– Some of the same teams that used reports and dashboards from our product were also buying these tools and using these for faster analysis
– we focused on SSOT – single source of truth and data lineage and scale
– competitors were focused on ease of use and fast time to value even if the data was not always 100% clean and accurate..
– we were friends with IT
– competition was fast becoming friend of the business
Bit by bit we lost momentum.
Our product continued to survive but our competitors thrived.
It’s not enough to track your competition and do a comparison
To truly understand a threat you must look at their pricing, GTM tactics and targeting along with customer adoption and much more..
Easier said than done
Sometimes these threats don’t show up as big enemy ships on the radar
But are just taking away sales below the radar…
What do you see in your market?
Do you track the competition?