⚔️ Turning Competitive Intelligence Into Deals Won

I built and run the competitive intelligence program at Arena, by PTC, a cloud-native PLM and QMS platform for manufacturers. Our buyers are engineering, quality, and operations leaders evaluating a crowded market: established enterprise vendors moving to the cloud, newer SaaS challengers selling simplicity and low upfront cost, QMS-only specialists, and the most common competitor of all, doing nothing and staying on spreadsheets, shared drives, and paper.

When I started, competitive knowledge lived in people's heads and scattered files. Reps went into competitive deals with whatever they remembered, every competitor claimed the same things (collaboration, compliance, end-to-end lifecycle), and we had no consistent way to tell sellers who actually mattered or how to win against them.

I owned competitive intelligence end to end: research, prioritization, battlecards, enablement, and proving that it changed outcomes.

The hard parts:

• Too many competitors, too little focus. Sales needed to know which competitors mattered most, not get a long list where every vendor looked the same.
• Generic feature comparisons don't win deals. Every vendor's checklist looked alike. Reps needed specific questions, proof points, and examples, not a spec sheet.
• Intel that doesn't get used is worthless. A 30-page PDF that no one opens doesn't change win rate. It had to be easy to find in the middle of a deal and kept current.

Success meant a higher competitive win rate, revenue influenced by CI, and battlecards that sellers actually used.

1. Evaluated and purchased Crayon, then built battlecards that update themselves. I evaluated and purchased Crayon as our competitive intelligence tool. Every battlecard is built on Crayon's AI Sparks: curated insights paired with prompts that generate targeted response tiles. The tiles auto-update weekly or monthly, so reps always see current intel instead of a snapshot that goes stale the day it's published. Each card covers the competitor's target market, strengths and gaps, pricing signals, common claims and how to answer them, and land mines: discovery questions that expose a weakness, like asking a competitor to demo a full workflow live instead of in slides.

• Crayon (AI Sparks): our CI platform, where AI Sparks pair curated insights with prompts to generate targeted battlecard tiles that auto-update weekly or monthly.
• Arena battlecard with release notes: our own product view, kept current so comparisons stay accurate.
• MCP connection to Claude and Copilot: puts the full CI system inside the AI tools teams already work in.
• AI deal briefs + ROI calculator automation: a scheduled skill that generates a competitive brief and ROI calculator for each competitive opportunity.
• Win/loss interviews and call clips: the primary source of truth behind the positioning.

The lesson: the intel itself is only half the work. Delivery, meaning current, searchable, and available wherever people are working, is what turns research into wins.

• Competitive win rate rose from 20% to 27% in one year, a 35% improvement.
• ~$6M in revenue influenced through competitive intelligence.
• 4,000+ battlecard views from 488 users, which shows that sellers rely on it, not just that it exists.
• Every competitive deal now gets an automated brief and ROI calculator, with no manual request needed. Notable win of 100k using the first generted deal brief.
• CI is now an always-on resource beyond sales, supporting product research, launches, email, and content through Claude and Copilot.

What I'd tell anyone building CI: build for the moment of need, keep it current automatically, and connect it to win/loss so the program learns from every outcome.