Competitive Intelligence for Sales: How to Win When Prospects Are Evaluating Alternatives
70% of deals involve competitive evaluation. Learn how to arm your team with intelligence that wins head-to-head battles.
In most B2B deals, you're not just selling against the status quo—you're selling against competitors. And your prospects often know more about your competitors than you do.
The Competitive Reality
- 70%+ of B2B deals involve competitive evaluation
- Prospects research 3-5 vendors on average
- Review sites like G2 are consulted in 92% of purchases
- First vendor to respond wins 35-50% of competitive deals
Building Your Competitive Intelligence Program
1. Know Your Competitors For each major competitor, maintain: - Product comparison matrix - Pricing intelligence - Strengths and weaknesses - Common objections they raise about you - Win/loss patterns
2. Monitor Continuously Track competitor movements: - Product announcements - Pricing changes - Customer reviews - Job postings (reveal priorities) - Content and messaging
3. Arm Your Team Create and maintain: - Battlecards for each competitor - Objection handlers - Proof points and case studies - Competitive demo scripts
4. Learn from Every Deal After competitive wins and losses: - What did the prospect say about the competition? - Why did they choose us (or not)? - What objections did they raise? - What features/capabilities mattered most?
The Battlecard Essentials
Every competitive battlecard should include:
Quick overview: Who they are, target market, positioning Key strengths: Where they genuinely excel Key weaknesses: Where we have advantage Landmines: Questions to ask that expose their gaps Objection handlers: How to respond when they attack us Proof points: Customers who switched from them to us Pricing guidance: How their pricing compares
Competitive Selling Tactics
Don't badmouth Attacking competitors backfires. Focus on your strengths.
Ask revealing questions "How important is [feature they lack] to your evaluation?"
Leverage third-party validation Let G2 reviews, analyst reports, and customer quotes make the case.
Create switching momentum Make it easy: migration support, data import, training included.
Speed matters When you know they're evaluating, move fast.
The Prospectory Advantage
Our platform includes competitive comparison data showing exactly where we differentiate from Apollo, ZoomInfo, Outreach, and others—giving your team instant battlecard access.
Ready to transform your sales pipeline?
See how Prospectory's AI-powered platform can help your team research, reach, and relate to prospects at scale.