ACT PlaybookPlaybook: Align on Value
Competitive Analysis: Know where you win, and where to walk away
Score every alternative against the outcomes your buyers care about, and focus your team on the deals you are built to win.
Why It Matters
Your buyers compare you with more than your competitors
Buyers weigh adjacent tools, a consultancy, building it themselves, or simply doing nothing. If you only watch the vendors that look like you, you lose deals to alternatives you never saw coming.
Competitive analysis in the ACT Playbook scores every alternative against your value drivers, the same outcomes your value architecture promises. That tells you where you win, where you co-exist, and where to walk away.
Key Benefits
What a clear competitive picture enables
Know where to compete head-on
You see which segments you are built to win, and where a competitor holds an advantage you should route around.
Shape the buyer’s evaluation criteria
Your strongest differentiators become the questions the buyer asks every vendor, before the competition knows the game has started.
Stop chasing deals you cannot win
When a competitor structurally owns a segment, you walk away early and spend the time on deals that fit.
Answer "why not them?" with proof
You know exactly where you are stronger, and you can back it with evidence the buyer can check.
Find the white space
Outcomes no competitor delivers credibly become your clearest claim, as long as you can prove it.
Four Types of Competition
Look beyond the vendors that look like you
Direct
Same job, same kind of product, same buyer.
Adjacent
An overlapping job or an overlapping buyer, with a different scope.
Substitute
A different route to the same outcome, including building it in-house or doing nothing.
Complementary
No real overlap with your customers. A partnership candidate, not a threat.
How It Works
From a list of names to a decision where to play
- 1
Discover every alternative
Research each one across ten dimensions: company, product, customer fit, pricing, buyer sentiment, content, sales motion, hiring, search visibility, and advertising.
- 2
Categorize and rate the threat
Assign each competitor a type and a threat level based on customer overlap, market, product category, and switching costs.
- 3
Score against your value drivers
Rate for every outcome you promise whether each competitor supports it, partially supports it, or does not have it.
- 4
Decide where to play
Turn the scores into win, co-exist, and avoid zones for every customer profile, and keep a profile per competitor.
Competitive Scorecard
How the alternatives cover your buyer’s pain
The scorecard matches your value drivers to each alternative solution and market category. It shows at a glance where you clearly differentiate and where you need more work on your product, your proof, or your story. In this illustration, the value drivers are named after the five typical pain areas.
| Value driver | Direct competitor | Adjacent solution | Build in-house |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulation | |||
| Competitive Edge | |||
| Risk & Security | |||
| Productivity, Cost & Quality | |||
| Reputation | |||
| Where to play | Co-exist | Win | Win |
- Competition supports it
- Competition partially supports it
- Competition does not have it
Where every dot is red, you have white space to claim. Where a competitor shows green, you need stronger proof or a different zone. The scores decide where to play: in a win zone you compete directly and lead with your differentiation, in a co-exist zone you position specifically for your customer profile, and where a competitor holds an advantage you cannot replicate, you avoid the head-to-head and redirect to your win zone.
That makes the scorecard a key input for your positioning and messaging: it tells you which outcomes to lead with, which claims you can defend, and where your story needs to set you apart.
Learn and Improve
Turn every insight into a better conversation
Competitive analysis only pays off when your team uses it in the next customer conversation. Put what you learn about the alternatives into your value architecture, and your reps walk into discovery knowing where you stand against each of them.
Trap-setting discovery questions
Turn your differentiators into open questions the buyer takes into every vendor evaluation, so you shape the decision criteria already in discovery. For example: "What happens today when something breaks, and how long until it is fixed?"
Objection handling
Have clear answers ready for why you are the better choice, backed by proof. And for the outcomes where a competitor is stronger, have an honest answer on how you handle the gap, before the buyer raises it.
Your moat
What competitors cannot copy quickly: time, specialization, data, network effects, or process know-how. Lead with it, and check with every analysis that it still holds.
All three belong in your value architecture, next to the key capabilities they support. When you lose a deal or hear a new objection, update them there, and the whole team works with the better answer from the next call on.
Keep It Current
Markets move, so does your analysis
- Weekly
- High-threat competitors
- Monthly
- All competitors
- Quarterly
- Full audit of categories, scores, and zones
- On trigger
- Funding rounds, price changes, product launches, key hires
AI handles the monitoring on this schedule: it watches competitor websites, pricing pages, reviews, and job postings, and updates the profiles and the scorecard when something changes. From the same data it keeps your battle cards current, the one-page summaries your reps use in day-to-day customer conversations.
Keep Reading
Turn your competitive picture into price and position
Over time, the analysis also builds your commercial differentiation against your key competitors: how you price, and how you prove the return. And it decides how you position yourself in each market category, which is where buyers compare you in the first place.
Find out where you stand against the alternatives
Take the free Value Architecture & Sales Motion Assessment. It shows which parts are already in place and where to start.