Competitive Intelligence Glossary

Ansoff Matrix

Product-Market Expansion Grid

A growth grid mapping four strategies by whether products and markets are new or existing: market penetration, market development, product development, and diversification.

BCG Growth-Share Matrix

Boston Matrix · Growth-Share Matrix

A portfolio grid that classifies products or business units by market growth and relative market share into Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks, and Dogs.

Blue Ocean Strategy

A strategy of creating uncontested new market space ("blue oceans") instead of competing in crowded, bloody "red oceans" of existing demand.

Disruptive Innovation

Christensen's theory of how simpler, cheaper products that incumbents rationally ignore can improve until they displace those incumbents from the mainstream market.

Jobs to Be Done

JTBD

A lens that says customers do not buy products — they "hire" them to get a specific job done. Competition is defined by the job, not the product category.

Network Effects

Network externalities

A product exhibits network effects when each additional user makes it more valuable to every other user — the strongest and most self-reinforcing moat in software.

PESTEL Analysis

PEST analysis · PESTLE

A scan of the macro-environment across six external factors: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal.

Porter's Five Forces

Five Forces analysis

A framework for judging an industry's profitability by the strength of five competitive forces: rivalry, new entrants, substitutes, buyer power, and supplier power.

Porter's Generic Strategies

Cost leadership, differentiation, focus

Porter's claim that there are only three durable ways to outperform an industry: be the lowest-cost producer, be meaningfully different, or focus on a narrow niche.

Scenario Planning

Scenario analysis

A method for preparing for the future by building several plausible, internally consistent stories about how the environment could evolve — and testing strategy against all of them.

Switching Costs

Everything a customer must spend — money, time, effort, risk — to move from one product to another. High switching costs lock in customers and mute price competition.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

A structured audit of a company or project across four quadrants — internal Strengths and Weaknesses, external Opportunities and Threats.

Value Chain Analysis

A breakdown of a firm into the sequence of activities that create value, used to find where cost advantage or differentiation is actually produced.

VRIO Framework

VRIN · Resource-based view

A test for whether a resource or capability is a real source of sustained advantage: is it Valuable, Rare, costly to Imitate, and is the firm Organized to exploit it?

Battlecard

Competitive battlecard · Sales battlecard

A concise sales-enablement reference on how to sell against a specific competitor — their strengths, weaknesses, objection handling, and traps to set.

Competitive Benchmarking

Measuring your product, pricing, performance, or processes against named competitors on defined criteria — turning "how are we doing?" into a comparable scorecard.

Competitive Intelligence

CI · Competitive analysis

The systematic gathering and analysis of information about competitors and the market, turned into decisions — pricing, positioning, roadmap, and sales strategy.

Competitive Landscape Analysis

Landscape mapping

A structured map of everyone competing in or around your market — direct rivals, indirect alternatives, adjacents, and new entrants — and how they relate.

Competitive Teardown

Product teardown

A deep, hands-on deconstruction of a single competitor's product — signing up, walking every flow, and documenting how it actually works beneath the marketing.

Competitor Monitoring

Competitor tracking

The continuous, systematic observation of competitors' public activity — pricing, product, messaging, hiring, funding — as it happens, rather than in quarterly research bursts.

Feature Gap Analysis

A systematic comparison of your product's capabilities against competitors' to identify where you trail, where you lead, and which gaps actually cost you deals.

Feature Parity

The state of two products offering broadly equivalent capabilities — and, as a strategy, the decision to match a competitor feature-for-feature.

Intelligence Cycle

The classic process model for intelligence work: define requirements, collect, analyze, disseminate, get feedback — adapted from government intelligence into business practice.

Market Intelligence

The broader discipline around competitive intelligence: everything knowable about a market — customers, competitors, regulation, technology, channels — gathered to inform strategy.

Objection Handling (Competitive)

Prepared, honest responses to the specific concerns prospects raise when comparing you against a named competitor — grounded in current facts about both products.

Perceptual Map

Positioning map

A two-axis chart plotting competitors by how the market perceives them — used to find crowded territory, open space, and the gap between your intended and actual position.

Sales Enablement (Competitive)

Equipping revenue teams with the competitive knowledge to win deals — battlecards, objection handling, landmines, and proof — kept current enough to be trusted.

Share of Voice

SOV

A measure of a brand's presence in a channel relative to competitors — the slice of total category conversation, advertising, or search visibility it owns.

Win Rate

Competitive win rate

The share of competitive deals you win — overall, and against each named rival. The single most direct scoreboard of competitive performance.

Win-Loss Analysis

The practice of systematically interviewing won and lost prospects to learn why deals were really decided — often revealing competitive dynamics the CRM misses.

Category Creation

Category design

The strategy of defining and evangelizing a new market category — and positioning yourself as its default leader — rather than competing for share in an existing one.

Competitive Moat

Economic moat · Sustainable competitive advantage

A durable structural advantage that protects a company's profits from competitors — network effects, switching costs, cost advantages, brand, or scale.

First-Mover Advantage

The benefits of entering a market first — and the equally real evidence that fast followers often win. Whether moving first helps depends on what the head start lets you accumulate.

Go-to-Market Strategy

GTM

The plan for how a product reaches and wins its market: target segments, positioning, pricing, channels, and sales motion, treated as one coherent system.

Ideal Customer Profile

ICP

A precise description of the account that gets the most value from your product, fastest — used to focus sales, marketing, and product on buyers you actually win.

Market Segmentation

Dividing a heterogeneous market into groups with distinct needs and buying behaviour, so product, pricing, and messaging can be aimed instead of averaged.

Market Share

The percentage of a market's total sales (by revenue or units) captured by one company — the clearest scoreboard of competitive standing.

Positioning

The act of shaping the place a product occupies in the customer's mind relative to alternatives — the single idea you want to own in the category.

Pricing Strategy

The deliberate design of what you charge, how you package it, and how it positions you against alternatives — the most powerful and most neglected lever in the business.

Product Differentiation

Making your offering meaningfully distinct on dimensions buyers value — the alternative to competing on price, and the substance behind any positioning claim.

Product-Market Fit

PMF

The point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand — the moment demand starts to pull the product rather than the team pushing it.

SAM & SOM

Serviceable Available Market · Serviceable Obtainable Market

The two honest shrinkages of TAM: SAM is the slice your product and model can actually serve; SOM is the share of that slice you can realistically win near-term.

Total Addressable Market

TAM · TAM / SAM / SOM

The total revenue opportunity for a product if it captured 100% of its market — usually paired with the narrower SAM (serviceable) and SOM (obtainable).

Value Proposition

The specific, believable statement of the value a customer gets from choosing you — the pains removed and gains created, relative to the alternatives they would otherwise use.

Blind Spots (Competitive)

The systematic gaps between what an organization believes about its competitive environment and what is actually true — the errors rivals exploit.

Change Detection

The automated comparison of a competitor's public surfaces over time — detecting what changed on a pricing page, homepage, changelog, or docs, and when.

Community Pulse

Social listening

The read on what communities — Reddit, Hacker News, Discord, forums, social — actually say about a company, beneath its official messaging.

Early Warning Signals

Early warning system

The observable precursors of competitor moves and market shifts — hiring, filings, pricing tests, vocabulary changes — watched systematically so threats surface before they land.

Hiring Signals

Job posting intelligence

What a competitor's job postings and team changes reveal about their strategy — often the earliest public evidence of a roadmap, market entry, or trouble.

Momentum Score

A composite measure of how much observable forward motion a company is showing — shipping, hiring, funding, community traction — designed to compare trajectories, not sizes.

Pricing Intelligence

The systematic tracking and analysis of competitor pricing — levels, metrics, packaging, discounts, and changes over time — as an input to your own pricing and deals.

Review Mining

Voice of customer analysis

Systematically analyzing customer reviews of competitors' products — G2, app stores, marketplaces — to extract their real strengths, weaknesses, and churn triggers.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Signal threshold

In CI, the proportion of monitored events that actually deserve attention — the metric that decides whether a monitoring system gets read or muted.

ARR & MRR

Annual Recurring Revenue · Monthly Recurring Revenue

The normalized run-rate of subscription revenue — the metric SaaS companies are valued on, and the number competitors most want you to overestimate.

Burn Rate & Runway

How fast a company consumes cash, and how many months of survival that implies — the clock that quietly drives a private competitor's strategic behaviour.

Churn Rate

Customer churn · Attrition rate

The rate at which customers (or revenue) leave over a period — the leak in the bucket that caps growth and signals competitive or product pressure.

Customer Acquisition Cost

CAC

The fully-loaded cost of winning one new customer — and, via its ratio to lifetime value and its payback period, the test of whether a growth model actually works.

Customer Lifetime Value

CLV · LTV · CLTV

The total net profit a business expects from a customer over the whole relationship — the ceiling on what it can afford to spend acquiring one.

Funding Rounds

Seed, Series A/B/C

The staged venture financings — pre-seed through late-stage — that fund private competitors, and one of the loudest public signals of their intent and clock.

Net Promoter Score

NPS

A loyalty metric derived from one question — "how likely are you to recommend us?" — scored from -100 to +100 as promoters minus detractors.

Rule of 40

The SaaS health heuristic that revenue growth rate plus profit margin should exceed 40% — a one-number test of whether growth is worth its cost.

SEC Filings

10-K · 10-Q · 8-K · S-1 · EDGAR

Mandatory disclosures public U.S. companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission — a rich, authoritative source of competitor intelligence.

Total Cost of Ownership

TCO

The full lifetime cost of a purchase — not just the sticker price, but implementation, seats, add-ons, admin time, and switching costs.

Unit Economics

The profit and loss of a single unit of the business — one customer, one order, one seat — which determines whether scale will save a company or bury it.

Agent-Readable Intelligence

MCP · AI-consumable CI

Competitive intelligence structured so AI agents — not just humans — can query and act on it: typed data, APIs, and protocols like MCP instead of PDFs and slide decks.

AI Hallucination

Confabulation

When an AI system generates fluent, confident, false information — the central failure mode of using general-purpose chatbots for competitive research.

Source Citations (Provenance)

Cited intelligence · Provenance

The practice of attaching to every intelligence claim the source it came from — the difference between intelligence you can act on and content you have to re-verify.