Use this when a competitor shows up in deals often enough to matter. It produces a teardown that tells sales where to fight, where to walk away and what to say.
Inputs
- Competitor name and site.
- Your own positioning, product scope and pricing.
- Win-loss notes or rep anecdotes involving this competitor. Even five are useful.
The play
1. Read their story
Homepage headline, category they claim, the customer logos they lead with, the use cases on their navigation. Write their positioning in one sentence as they would: "For <who>, <product> is the <category> that <benefit>."
2. Map pricing and packaging
Plans, price points, what is gated to higher tiers, contract terms, free trial or not. Packaging choices reveal who they want and who they tolerate.
3. Mine customer complaints
Read reviews (lowest ratings first), community threads and public support forums. Cluster complaints into themes and count them. Recurring themes with 5+ mentions are real weaknesses; single rants are not.
4. Map their sales motion
Self-serve or sales-led, demo gating, typical discount behaviour, implementation time, who they target in the buying committee.
5. Read recent moves
Launches, pricing changes, leadership hires, funding, layoffs from the last 12 months. Direction of travel matters more than today's feature list.
6. Decide where to compete
Use the matrix in references/teardown-template.md: segments where you win, where you tie and where you lose. Losing segments are as valuable as winning ones; they tell reps when to qualify out early.
Output format
Competitor: <name> | Their positioning: <one sentence>
Who they win: <segments> Who they struggle with: <segments>
Pricing: <summary> Packaging traps: <what is gated>
Strengths (be honest): <3>
Weaknesses (evidence): <3, with count of mentions and source>
Recent moves: <dated>
Where we compete: <segments + win theme>
Where we avoid: <segments + early qualify-out question>
Talk track: <3 lines a rep can say, no trash talk>
Landmines: <questions that expose their weak spots, asked neutrally>
What good looks like
- Honest strengths. A teardown that says the competitor is bad at everything gets ignored by reps who just lost to them.
- Weaknesses come with evidence and counts.
- Landmine questions are neutral and fair: "How long did implementation take for teams your size?" not "Did you know they're terrible at onboarding?"
- It answers when to walk away. The best teams lose fewer deals by qualifying out of the wrong ones faster.
Rules
- MUST use public sources or your own deal notes, and cite them.
- MUST date pricing; pricing pages change often.
- NEVER disparage the competitor in rep-facing copy.
- NEVER use confidential material obtained from a competitor's employees or customers under NDA.
Example prompts
- "Do a teardown of Northbeam versus us. We lose to them in mid-market."
- "A new competitor just launched. Tear them down from their site and reviews."
- "Turn these 14 loss notes against Acme into a teardown and talk track."