Competitive Positioning Map From Public Data

Map one buyer's decision at a time, since small agencies choosing a CRM shortlist different products than enterprise IT teams do. List the options that buyer actually considers. Your sales calls, win-loss interviews and lost-deal notes will name them.

April Dunford, author of the positioning book Obviously Awesome, warns against what she calls phantom competitors¹: companies that could compete with you in theory but aren't on your buyers' radar. The first alternative to beat, she writes, is the status quo: a spreadsheet, a manual process or the limited features of a platform the buyer already owns. Put the status quo on the map as a player too.

Next, list 6 to 10 attributes that sway buyers' decisions. Pull them from buyer interviews, review sites and the claims competitors make on their own homepages.

Then define each one as something you can count or check in public, before you score anyone. Forrester, which publishes the Wave evaluations of technology vendors, has its analysts write scale explanations for each criterion² and score every vendor against them. It also aims for criteria that are "differentiating, rather than exhaustive."

Pick a cutoff date and score everyone from what is public on that date. Forrester draws the same kind of line for its Wave reports: it presents each product as it is publicly represented at the close of data collection².

1. 1

   Fix one scale

   Convert every measure to 0 to 100 the same way for every player. Set the ends from what's possible, such as 1 and 5 stars, not from your lowest and highest player.

2. 2

   Read and record

   Use pricing pages, product pages, documentation, case studies and review sites. Put the link and the date you read it in every cell.

3. 3

   Leave gaps blank

   If you can't find a fact, leave the cell empty. An attribute you can't score for every player can't be an axis.

4. 4

   Score yourself the same way

   Use the same sources and the same scale for your own product. Your sales deck doesn't count as evidence.

Only now pick the pair. Run each candidate pair through four tests, in this order, and drop it at the first one it fails.

The last test is the easiest to miss. If players who score high on one axis also score high on the other, the two axes measure one thing. Spreadsheets calculate this as a correlation (CORREL in Excel and Google Sheets), from -1 to 1. The nearer either end, the more the axes repeat each other.

With 6 to 10 candidates, expect several to move together. NIST's statistics handbook describes principal component analysis as a way of reducing a large set of correlated variables to a small set³ that keeps most of the information. You can apply the same idea by hand: group attributes that move together into families, and use the one from each family that's easiest to check and explain.

Price makes a good axis only when every player publishes one. Otherwise, show it as a label beside each dot rather than guessing positions.

Plot every player on the full scale, 0 to 100 on both axes, and split each axis at 50. Don't let the chart zoom in to fit the data. In crowdsourced experiments, visualization researchers Michael Correll, Enrico Bertini and Steven Franconeri found that a cut-off axis makes differences look bigger⁴, even when the chart clearly marks the cut.

Your nearest neighbors are the rivals you have to beat head-on. Before you brief sales on them with battlecards, redraw the map using the other attributes from each family. If the same rivals stay closest, trust the result. If they move, your choice of labels placed them, not the market.

An empty quadrant needs a verdict before anyone calls it white space: is it unclaimed, or impossible? If feature breadth and enterprise customers tend to grow together, the corner for broad products with no enterprise customers is empty for a reason, not an opening.

On the slide, define both axes in plain words and label what each end means. Add the date of your evidence and a line on the axes you rejected, because that's the first question a sharp audience will ask.

If more than two independent things matter, draw a second map rather than squeezing them onto one. Or use a strategy canvas, a chart from Blue Ocean Strategy authors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. It lists the factors an industry competes on along the horizontal axis⁵, with each player's offering level drawn as a line.

The tool at the top of this page does this scoring and testing for you, from each competitor's public pages. To go deeper on one rival, run a competitor teardown. To put your place on the map into words, start with the positioning statement template.