Competitive Intelligence Glossary

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.