Run a Comp Intel Program Like an Award-Winning Klaviyo PMM
Let’s start with a situation I can pretty much guarantee you’ve lived through. You open Slack and there’s a message from a salesperson that says, “Hey, do we have a battle card for this competitor?” And you don’t. Because it’s the 50th competitor you’ve heard of this year, and you’re already drowning in requests.
If your competitive intelligence program feels like it’s failing, it’s not failing because you’re not working hard enough. It’s failing because the problem is infinite. Scale’s the real challenge. So today we’re talking about how to build the foundation of a competitive intelligence program that actually holds up. We’re looking at building a system that gives your company a real market point of view.
And I couldn’t think of a better person to guide us through this than Mindy Regnell.
Meet Mindy Regnell
Mindy’s an award-winning product marketer whose win-loss program won the 2025 Win-Loss Program of the Year from the Product Marketing Alliance. She’s spent nearly a decade deep in market and competitive intelligence, helping companies understand not just who they compete with, but why customers choose.
And fun fact, she’s also an award-winning quilter, with prizes from the Washington State Fair and the largest quilt show in Western Washington. Which honestly feels ridiculously on brand, because great competitive intelligence is basically pattern recognition at scale.
Competitive Intelligence at Klaviyo
Mindy runs market and competitive intelligence at Klaviyo, best known as a CRM for B2C businesses. She’s been there for about two years, and she brings a long view of the e-commerce landscape after nearly two decades in the space.
Her approach isn’t “build a battle card for every competitor that shows up.” It’s “build a framework that makes the chaos manageable.” Especially for regional sales teams who run into a rotating cast of competitors that never make it onto HQ’s radar.
The Long Tail Framework That Makes CI Scalable
Mindy’s framework was inspired by The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. The idea is simple. Back in the 90s, shelf space was limited, so you only worried about a small set of top options. Then Amazon and streaming changed the game. Suddenly the catalogue was endless, and the long tail mattered.
Competitive landscapes work the same way. You’ll always have tier-one competitors, but you’ll also have a long tail of niche tools, regional players, and random alternatives that show up mid-deal. If your CI program only covers the top three, it’s not a program. It’s a folder.
So Mindy built a way to categorise competitors into groups that actually mean something, so sales can respond quickly without needing a brand new asset every time.
Mindy’s Playbook: How to Build the Framework
Know yourself first
Before you map competitors, get crystal clear on what makes your company meaningfully different. This is what stops you treating every competitor like a full threat and helps you focus on where you truly win.
Cluster competitors by the real problem they solve
Mindy groups competitors based on root pain points and durable differences, not surface-level features that change every quarter. The goal is categories that stay useful over time.
Pressure test with the right people
She rolls the framework out to trusted teammates for feedback, and one of her best tips is to include people who are new. They’ll spot gaps faster because they aren’t trained on your internal assumptions yet.
Get leadership buy-in by making it about outcomes
Mindy positions the framework as a force multiplier, especially for regional sales teams who see the most “unusual suspects.” When leaders can see how it helps teams win, buy-in gets a lot easier.
Laying the Groundwork Without Creating a Content Factory
Mindy also shared a sequencing tip that’ll save your sanity. Build broad framework battle cards first, then go deep on your tier-one competitors. That way you’ve got coverage for the long tail without starting from scratch every time a new name pops up in a deal.
It’s the difference between “we’re always behind” and “we’ve got a system.”
Messaging Critique: Anthropic
To close out the episode, we shifted into the messaging critique, and looked at Anthropic’s recent Super Bowl ad. It’s competitive storytelling at its best, managing to make a statement without naming its main competitor, ChatGPT.
Instead of trying to win by being louder, the ad focused on clarity and simplicity. It took something complex and made it feel understandable, which is exactly what strong positioning does. It’s a reminder that you don’t always need a direct comparison to compete. Sometimes the smartest move is to define what “good” looks like, then let the market do the math.
If you’re building competitive intelligence, Mindy’s advice comes down to two things. Manage scope like your sanity depends on it, because it does. And position your work around stakeholder outcomes, not deliverables. When people can see how your CI program helps them win, it stops being “nice to have” and starts becoming infrastructure.
Big shout out to Mindy and the mentors who shaped her path. Her approach is a reminder that foundational PMM work is like leg day at the gym. Not always glamorous, but it’s what gives you long-term strength and stability.
LINKS:
Messaging Critique: Anthropic
Connect with Mindy:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mindyregnell
Connect with Elle:
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[00:00:41] Elle: Hey, pmms. So I want to start with a situation that I can guarantee most of you listeners have lived through. So it goes something like this. You open Slack and there's a message from a salesperson and it says, Hey, do we have a battle card for this competitor? And you don't because it's like the 50th one you've heard of just this year, and I can guarantee that you already know what I'm about to say.
[00:01:09] If you are feeling like your competitive intelligence program is failing, it's not failing because we don't work hard enough. It's failing because the problem here is infinite and scale becomes your real challenge. So today we're talking all about how to build the foundation of your competitive intelligence program, as in how to stop reacting to competitors one by one, and instead building a system that gives your company a real market point of view.
[00:01:40] And I could not think of a better person to talk about this. With you guys, it is my pleasure to welcome Mindy Renell to the show. Mindy is literally an award-winning product marketer. Her win-loss program uh, took home the 2025 win-loss program of the year from Product Marketing Alliance, [00:02:00] and she spent almost a decade deep in the market and competitive intelligence, uh, space, helping companies understand not just who they compete with, but why customers choose.
[00:02:11] And fun fact, she's also an award-winning quilter, taking home prizes from the Washington State Fair and the largest quilt show in Western. Washington, which honestly feels so on brand because great competitive intelligence is basically pattern recognition at scale.
[00:02:29] Mindy, it's amazing to have you on the show.
[00:02:31] Mindy: Well, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here
[00:02:34] I, and I relate, I can't tell you how many times I get that, that slack message of like, Hey, have you heard of X competitor? And I'm like, I,
[00:02:42] don't know. Twice in the last two years.
[00:02:45] Elle: yeah. Or maybe not at all. And they're just popping up constantly, especially with like how quickly things are scaling in our society today with ai. I feel like new companies are just popping up out of nowhere all the time.
[00:02:58] so let's dive in and let's give some context to our listeners. you come from Klaviyo.
[00:03:04] Tell us a little bit about Klaviyo and what your role is there.
[00:03:08] Mindy: Yeah, so Klaviyo is, um, best known as a CRM for B2C businesses. we're, uh, building the autonomous CRM, which is basically allowing marketers to, really scale their efforts. Um, but it's, generally otherwise described as like marketing automation software. and so I run our market and competitive intelligence program at Klaviyo.
[00:03:29] I've been here about two years. Um, but I've been in e-commerce as an industry for. Probably longer than I'd care to admit. 15, almost 20 years. Um, and I've been doing CI for, as you said, almost a decade.
[00:03:43] Elle: Yeah, so especially given the space that Klaviyo is in and your particular, focus and expertise, I feel like it is especially good that you are the one who's leading this conversation with us today. and yeah, I feel like Klaviyo is one of those brands that you've been seeing for a while now, and unless you're [00:04:00] directly in that.
[00:04:01] Space, you may not know quite what they do. So thank you for the context. okay. So the topic today is around standing up a competitive intelligence program, which is obviously so important, especially in a really crowded market. Uh, so let's start with this case study segment of our show. so tell me what was going on at Klaviyo when you realized that something needed to change or that you needed to introduce this, uh, competitive intelligence program?
[00:04:30] Mindy: Yeah. So I would say, Klaviyo prior to my being there, didn't have a competitive intelligence program, so I was brought on specifically to stand up a, a CI program?
[00:04:41] and so when I.
[00:04:42] came in, it was pretty apparent that we had a lot of competitors. I have this slide I use internally to like, help our folks understand our market and it's just a smattering of logos.
[00:04:52] And I'm like, we have a lot of competitors, like a lot, this isn't even all of them. Um, and so when you think about, Understanding a market, and getting sales reps set up for success. it's hard to, to solve for every single competitor, um, especially when you have like multiple product lines, multiple geos, multiple segments.
[00:05:10] And so that's very quickly what I noticed when I came into the space. if you're within marketing automation, there are different channels that you offer. So there are email platforms, SMS platforms, WhatsApp platforms, you know, customer data platforms review, like the list is so long. And so one of the first things I tried doing was even just getting a, a, like a general sense of like our, our top competitors.
[00:05:34] And that proved to be really, really hard. so what I did was I started to, um. Think about a different way to do this. and so I kind of took inspiration from a, um, a book that I had read in college, um, called The Long Tail. Um, the Future of Business is Selling Less Of More by Chris Anderson. And so the idea was, is that in the nineties we all listened to the same music.
[00:05:57] and the reason for that is it was [00:06:00] constrained by the limits of shelf space. And so if there were only room for 25 CDs and you, you know, broke that down across all the genres, it's probably not surprising that if you are into pop music, you listen to probably the same five or six artists. and then if you consider right, Amazon came into the picture and all of a sudden Amazon didn't have shelf space and all of a sudden there were so many more brands and musicians that you could find.
[00:06:24] Then you get to streaming and now it's like insanely infinite. And so I saw parallels in that book. With kind of my market and the idea of the book is that those individual niche brands or, you know, niche products individually don't add up to a lot. But as a collective whole, that long tail is really, really impactful.
[00:06:45] and so that's where I get the name long tail competitive framework from. So what I started doing was trying to figure out how do I get competitors into kind of, um, buckets or categories, for lack of a better way to describe it, so that we could build a framework that allows you to think about the different types of competitors that you see in the market.
[00:07:06] And so it would allow me to build a more scalable, program, if not just to account for what our reps, in AMEA or APAC were seeing because they were gonna be far more likely to run into smaller regional players, um, that, you know. I have like 300 customers, 500 customers, maybe a thousand. you know, and Klaviyo is far beyond that in terms of size and scale.
[00:07:30] So that's, that's where we started. And then, um, once I kind of came up with that system, I, um, you know, ran it through some of our folks from a sales leadership perspective really got buy-in as like, Hey, we're gonna do it this way. we're gonna build this framework, we're gonna train people on the framework.
[00:07:46] And you know what, our biggest competitors, just like those small regional players, all fit into buckets and they all fit into a category. Um, and it'll actually make it easier for me to go build those tier one competitors. And you know what, they're [00:08:00] probably gonna sound a little similar because if you build it right, they pretty much are.
[00:08:04] Um, and so that's one of the things that I was really excited about. It makes it a lot easier for reps when they get onboarded, um, to one, understand our space. Because if you could imagine throwing, um, a whole bunch of new hires across different geos, different segments. Like all of those different competitors, it would be overwhelming.
[00:08:23] So we really start by training on the fundamentals. reps feel a lot more supported. Um, and in particular, I, I really made sure that I was taking care of my reps in that are gonna run into less global competitors. and so that really made a big difference for us overall.
[00:08:41] Elle: Yeah. I love that. Okay, so, uh, and just a quick shout out because I hear so often that things that we took, classes that we took in college or what we majored in has nothing to do with, you know, what field we're in. Um, shout out to the professor who introduced that book to you and was such an
[00:09:01] inspiration.
[00:09:02] Mindy: I, it must have been, I'm an an economics major. and I think there's a lot of econ eComm people is like a running joke. I know several of them. And so, um, Yeah, it was just like one of those books I remember reading. Um, and thinking, wow, this was like really interesting.
[00:09:19] And I, I love that it stuck with me all this time.
[00:09:22] Elle: Yeah, the fundamental of it and the way that it shaped your thinking so that now as you're, as you approach competitive intelligence, you're not answering the question of who is this competitor and how do I compete against them? Instead, you're looking at it from the perspective of, okay, like how can I, create these, you know, categories as you said, that will help me figure out the best way to compete against them.
[00:09:49] So it's, you're kind of shifting your mind a little bit. So I guess with that in mind, talk a little bit more about what you did To build these categories and, what that [00:10:00] looked like. And, um, maybe even, it would be best if we did this through, creating a playbook, right? And so in every episode we take your beautiful case story and turn it into a playbook.
[00:10:09] So let's jump into that and then hopefully it can help provide some color from, what you've built at Klaviyo as we build out what this playbook could look like. So let's say that, I'm a PMM who's like trying to build a competitive intelligence program from scratch. what do I do?
[00:10:27] What is step one?
[00:10:29] Mindy: Yeah. So step one, when you're trying to figure out how to understand yourself and the market, is to really start by actually just understanding yourself. So, with all companies, there's really something that makes you fundamentally different. Now, is this easy to figure out sometimes. No. but you really have to like start to understand yourself, your competitors, and you kind of dig into it and you get a sense.
[00:10:52] Um, so once you have a general idea of what makes you pretty unique, you can then, kind of start to look at everybody else. But it, can't happen without having a true, deep understanding of your platform and really what makes you different. And there will be people that feel close-ish, but like you really gotta focus and really hit home.
[00:11:16] What makes you super, super different.
[00:11:18] Elle: Let's double click on that for a minute. and I'm sure many of us have read April Dun Ford's book and about positioning, and many times I feel like through LinkedIn at product marketing events in Reddit forums, I've constantly seen this discussion of I'm not different or I can't find my differentiator any quick.
[00:11:40] Tips or suggestions? Um, maybe how have you done it in your career? How do you find how you are truly different?
[00:11:47] Mindy: Yeah. So I.
[00:11:47] would say sometimes the, the ways to think about what makes you different, is, uh, I definitely start by having conversations with folks internally. talk to some of your sales engineers, talk to other folks on the product marketing team, [00:12:00] what are the things that generally stand out about you.
[00:12:02] You can also then start referencing kind of like your top competitors in the space and have an idea of like, okay, is this different? Can I make this statement about somebody else? Um, and so when you really start to double click down into like the nuances of what makes you different, it can be really impactful.
[00:12:19] So I remember at a previous company, um, that I was at in the e-com. Our space. what made them really different was kind of like writing the intersection of like a software as a service SaaS platform and kind of an open source platform. So they kind of took a very open source mentality while still being a SaaS platform.
[00:12:39] and yeah,
[00:12:39] there was like one other company out there that kind of probably tried to describe themselves in a very similar fashion. but it was, it was pretty unique. and it really stemmed from really understanding like the history of e-commerce platforms. Um, so if you go back and you look at e-commerce platforms, like early on open source platforms, were kind of like your magentos, your open carts, platforms where you need a developer to go build it.
[00:13:03] And the thing about an open source platform is you've got full access to that root underlying code and you can pretty much do anything. Um, which is both the most amazing part of it. And the worst part about it is dealing with whatever it is you just did, because you can. Gut the engine of your car, and then wonder why it doesn't work later.
[00:13:23] Right? But you could build an insanely fast car at the same time because you have access to everything. And then if you compare that to when SaaS platforms came about long before they had open APIs, which led to App Marketplace, it was a closed system. It either did it or it didn't. So as SaaS platforms evolved, you started to see APIs, you started to see app marketplaces, but that didn't mean that you necessarily had full access to everything.
[00:13:48] And so the company I remember at the time was starting to really unlock our parts of the platform that no other SaaS platform did. And so that was like a really. Interesting spot to really hone in on that [00:14:00] differentiation. I think I kind of stumbled into pieces of this framework back then without even realizing that that's what I had done.
[00:14:09] I just kind of was like, well, you asked me about a small open source platform that I've never run into before. They're pretty similar to this other competitor. Just go use those same talking points. I think most pmms and CI people have probably done that before. Um, but my challenge is that if you can do that at the very intersection of everything and start there, you can then, build on top of it.
[00:14:32] But it is, it is genuinely like pretty hard. sometimes you might even have to have like conversations with like executives to be like, cool, you built this. Like, what made this special when you started and like, might disagree, or maybe not as, as different as it once was. I would be shocked if a product marketer told me that's never happened before.
[00:14:54] Um, but I think that can be like a really good place to kind of get like the origin stories. I remember working on a project at one point and like finding out the origin stories of all of our competitors to like validate a, a narrative. and now I.
[00:15:07] know a lot of weird facts about a lot of different companies in the e-commerce space.
[00:15:14] Elle: Oh, the stories you hear. so what you're saying and like basically what you described with the open source company example, and then, and I don't wanna get too much into obviously our playbook and your framework, which is so valuable, but, and this is a somewhat of a call out to our conversation that we were having before this recording, but, one way that I've always found my differentiator, which to your point is like you start within, right?
[00:15:39] Like. Yes, this will absolutely relate to positioning in your market and your competitors. But I've always created, and there, this wasn't, I don't know if this is like a legit framework or not. This is just how I did it because that's how my brain works. But I would make like a table and I would put in like each column would be [00:16:00] something different.
[00:16:00] So it'd be the first column would be, okay, here's the customer, this is the, then the next column would be like, this is the pain that they're experiencing or the problem they're trying to solve. This is how they're currently attempting to solve the problem. Like the alternative, right? This is, yeah, this is
[00:16:17] Mindy: I, I've done this one before.
[00:16:19] Elle: Yeah. Right. And then it's like, this is what we are doing. To try to solve their problem. This is how we're doing it. And this is to your point of like talking to engineers, talking to sales engineers, talking to like people who are technical, who, who built it, asking them how does it work, and having a very strong technical understanding of that so that you can articulate.
[00:16:41] Okay, and why is the way that we are building it, why does that matter in terms of why it's better, like better than the alternative. Then you do that same exercise. That's what I did anyway for competitors and now I'm, I did it one by one, like, oh so many competitors. So painful, which was so like Mindy, where were you in my life when I needed you?
[00:17:01] But anyway, what I did was basically the same exercise as if I worked for the competitor. Now obviously I can't interview the competitor's engineer, but I can make some assumptions based on whatever content I can find on the internet. So anyway, so that was how I would find our differentiator. It's very painstaking and I'm sure there's like better, stronger ways to do that, especially now with ai.
[00:17:25] 'cause I haven't done something like this in quite a while. So we took a long time to talk about step one. I'm eager to
[00:17:33] Mindy: step one and, and, uh, and step two and three are like the hardest three steps, and then it all kind of builds on top of it. So
[00:17:41] Elle: Totally. Yeah. Okay. So step one, like get your differentiation, own it. Like, so let's say I've done that. Now I understand my differentiation. Now what do I do with it?
[00:17:52] Mindy: Cool. So step two is exactly what you just described. Understand the pain caused by your different types of competitors. Now you can [00:18:00] kind of do this at the same time as step three, which is starting to understand like categories and finding your patterns. But as you think about some of your different competitors, you might think, wow, those two are really similar, right?
[00:18:11] But it?
[00:18:12] to find out what's painful about them, you really should think about it in the context of yourself. so if you start by thinking about, kind of some of those different examples of, of where you've got Paine. Let's Go back to that example we were talking about earlier, right? Open source platforms. The pain of that is that you have to maintain whatever customization you built, right?
[00:18:33] That means all those security patches, all those updates, all of those things that you have to manage. Wow, that's a lot, right? The, and that takes up a lot of engineering effort. It takes up a lot of time. It's really hard to do. the root pain of other SaaS platforms is that you're limited to either what's in their app marketplace or what they have APIs for.
[00:18:53] So you're not really getting that flexibility that you might have with other platforms. So you've kind of got two clear categories. Um, now what happened at one point, which kind of. I think the company I worked at was really at the intersection of, is there, became a third type of e-commerce platform, and that's called headless commerce.
[00:19:12] Um, which is basically where you're buying just the APIs, so you're kind of decoupling the front end of your e-commerce system from your backend. So you could use, basically any front end system, WordPress, aquia, Adobe Experience Manager, and pretty much any e-commerce platform as long as they were headless, um, and had the APIs to support it.
[00:19:31] So that kind of became a third category. and so really understanding like the root pain of that really became down to like, okay. It's weird because you could be an open source platform or a SaaS platform and you could be headless. So you almost had to think about headless as like a choice that a customer made, um, so that you could then think about like, okay, what is the root ping?
[00:19:52] Do you have the documentation? How easy is your frameworks? Do you have starter kits? and so you could start to think about all of [00:20:00] those, pretty differently. and so. Sometimes the way I found it easiest is to look at maybe different segments of the market and understand if there are different pain points for some of those.
[00:20:12] So, a really common example, 'cause I think everybody loves to, to give Salesforce a hard time, right? Um, it's, uh, in a category of competitors I've called an acquisition Franken stack, which is exactly what it.
[00:20:25] sounds like. Um, it is a series of AC acquisitions that are cobbled together that kind of works like a Frankenstein.
[00:20:32] and those have, those exist in any space, in
[00:20:35] Elle: I, I was gonna say, I can think of so many companies like that in other spaces, so I know exactly what you mean.
[00:20:42] Mindy: And, and the problem with those sorts of platforms is you realize that. They don't actually, they're not on the same architecture or underlying infrastructure, so they don't actually really work together as well as you think they do. So that can be one category of competitor and kind of give you like a starting point.
[00:21:01] Sometimes you might have competitors that are just really simple and they only do one thing. so those kind of give you places to start to look for those patterns and start thinking about how to put people into categories. Now, if you have a competitor that, let's say, you could argue as maybe a competitor, but they're going after like a different segment of the market or, you like, Klaviyo is focused on B two B2C customers and B2C brands, I don't really try to over index on brands that are specifically solving for B2B.
[00:21:34] Now, if they're trying to solve for both. You're fair game. but I try to avoid getting hung up on the edge cases. And so that's a really important step. As you're starting to think about those patterns, you wanna make sure that you're solving for your main competitors. and you might eventually find that if you have a category of competitors, you can even break it down like a little bit further and you could start creating like subcategories or sub flavors where maybe [00:22:00] there's like a different feel for a particular vertical, like hospitality and restaurants.
[00:22:05] you know, you could have a, a flavor of restaurants feeling a little bit different than, you know, um, hotel chains or things of that nature, but they might fall into like that same overarching category. Start with those big categories. Worry about solving for some of those like nuanced use cases later.
[00:22:22] and so. Sometimes when you add like a new product line, it may not even fit into your like, existing framework and you might have to build like a new one because it's so different. But it still gives you like a very repeatable thing and it's so much easier. I know we all love like working in numbers of like three, two to three.
[00:22:40] I would say if you could try to keep it under five, um, for like your primary category, you'll be in a better spot. Um, and then start worrying about like sub flavors later.
[00:22:50] Elle: Yeah. Okay. You just gave us so much good information. So I wanna start with what I heard you say, the first bit of that around pains, and there's so many different kinds of pains here, so I just wanna clarify things that I'm hearing. So first you find, first you look at the customer's pain. Just with the, with what your solution then alleviates.
[00:23:14] And that's not necessarily having much to do about their competitor. That's your own the customer's pain and you solve it. Right? There's that kind of pain and then there's the kind of pain that's established with the going with the competitor solution. 'cause no solution is perfect. There's always something that's like, ah, I hate don't like
[00:23:33] Mindy: There's trade
[00:23:34] Elle: what, there's trade offs.
[00:23:35] Totally. A hundred percent. Yes. Exactly. So then, which I really like that aspect of it, of looking, um, just as you're kind of building out those categories you mentioned. To, think about them in terms of like what those trade offs are. And that's a very, that's also a very non-biased way of doing competitive or setting up your competitive intelligence too, because it's, you're truly walking through the customer's shoes and [00:24:00] like, this is what the life would be like for a customer to use this competitor.
[00:24:04] They would have these pros and these, these trade-offs, these pains. so, uh, from there, is step three then creating the categories or, or what would step three then be from
[00:24:16] Mindy: Yeah. So, uh, for step three.
[00:24:19] when you're starting to think about the categories, you're really starting to find that root underlying pain of your competitor and starting to kind of cluster them together. So these competitors have this root pain and they kind of all belong together. Some part of the step three that can be a little tricky sometimes is like, you could do it based off of, you know, the way the platform is built.
[00:24:40] You could do it based off of, If you were to think about this, let's say like for example, with cars, right? And you were gonna categorize different types of cars. I'm gonna preface this by saying I'm a quilter. I am not a car person. I know very little about cars. So if you were to ask me to group cars together, you'd end up with some weird, weird ways of lumping to cars together.
[00:25:00] Are all red cars the same? Probably not, right? Foreign versus domestic, that might be useful. I'd probably say like automatic versus stick is probably a more useful description, right? So you start to kind of walk through those potential ways that you can lump it together. But when you think about that root underlying pain, if you can really get it to be grounded in something that they're just not going to change and they're not going to give up because it's core to who they are, your model will last a little bit longer.
[00:25:34] Now there's the chance that a competitor could like shift from one category to another because they've made fundamental changes to who they are as a platform. But that category should still stand up, um, because it's just one competitor kind of moving and shifting around. so that's kind of how I think about like breaking it down.
[00:25:52] I write it down on a piece of paper. I'd probably got check it with a couple people that I know that like. Are more on like the [00:26:00] product marketing side or like the sales side, because those categories have to make sense. I can't just pick an arbitrary, um, something so insanely technical that somebody who's brand new would not understand.
[00:26:13] Like if I based it on like data architecture and infrastructure and I tried to say modern versus legacy, what does that even mean? Right? Those categories should make some
[00:26:23] Elle: hate that comparison. It's terrible.
[00:26:27] Mindy: Yeah.
[00:26:27] You're like, what is modern? Like, I.
[00:26:30] need you to define that. So, and by partially just not. Putting yourself, you don't, you might feel really similar to one of those categories, by the way, and that's gonna be the hardest one. But one of those is gonna be those competitors that kind of feel the most like you to the point of, you know, pmms everywhere, feeling like they don't have strong differentiation.
[00:26:51] Um, you might have to narrative your way around that a little bit and find the angle that you take to say like, yes, you might think I fit into this category, but here's a little bit of what makes us different. And so I think as you, um, start to get those categories together, you start to kind of like bleed a little bit into step four, which is starting to like pressure, test it, check with other people.
[00:27:15] Does it make intuitive sense? I would start with people that are probably like a little bit more. Familiar with your platform first, like a sales engineer or, um, somebody else on your product marketing team, just to like gut check that, that like logically makes sense. And then you move on to like step four pressure test it with people that are brand new to the company.
[00:27:38] Um, my favorite go-to brand new BDR or SDR who's like week three,
[00:27:46] Elle: probably also like junior and career most likely. So they're the really the best person to test, to pressure test with. Okay. Quick question before we move on to pressure testing, which I guess the, I don't know if there's anything more to that story, but, I [00:28:00] love the categorization aspect of it, and you're talking about pattern recognition, which, so just funny, fun connection with quilting and pattern recognition.
[00:28:11] Shout out to that. but,
[00:28:14] question about when you start to look at competitors and you're putting them into categories, obviously the whole point of this is so that you don't have to look at every competitor. So how many competitors do you recommend looking at to make sure you have a good sense of what the categories look like?
[00:28:33] Mindy: So I would say, if you start thinking about as you're doing this exercise, you'll probably get a pretty good sense of who your tier ones are, right? Your biggest, most important competitors that come up all the time. You definitely wanna make sure those guys fit. And then I would say going down to like, your tier twos, the one that, you know, reps are gonna ask you enough about that, like you'd probably consider building a battle card for.
[00:28:55] Um, And so I think those are probably where I would start. and then, you know, if you need to find, different flavors or different things as you kind of grow and evolve, it's. easier to do that later, but probably testing with like one or two, like randos, um, is probably a, a pretty good like gut check.
[00:29:13] what I do as I get a little bit further down into this process is start to make it so that it's got clear criteria so that I can write in a framework battle card, like, Hey, did you just run into somebody that you've never seen before? Here are the steps I would take to figure out what category they should go into.
[00:29:32] Um, and so if you think of it as a repeatable, scalable framework, it can go really far. I got really good at, at, I mean, I can do it here at Klaviyo, but I've gotten really good at doing it at other companies too, where give me five minutes and I can tell you like roughly what type of competitor they are and if you can do that and you know, like the root underlying pain of that type of competitor, then you just tell them like Hey, use this framework.
[00:29:59] and then [00:30:00] they immediately have something to, to go off of.
[00:30:02] Elle: Yeah. okay. So step three is the category. Step four is pressure test. once it's pressure tested, obviously you'll iterate as needed, pending the results of the pressure test. Um, what happens after that?
[00:30:15] Mindy: so I would say that's where you wanna start to get buy-in. definitely run it by your, your leadership and your sales leadership in particular so that they have an understanding of how to do it. Now you're gonna wanna really make sure you put a little bit of positive spin on it. I would say, if you have regional sales managers, and regional sales teams that are going to have the most one-off players, and competitors, position it for them.
[00:30:42] Right. We're doing this so that your team will be well covered because I know your team is specifically going to run into the most region. They're not gonna be random. Right. You know, they're going to be there, but they're going to be small. And my team is small, and so I'm not gonna be able to build you a battle card for every small regional player.
[00:31:04] Right. and when you position it to them like that, it makes them feel more comfortable and more supported for your global sales team. Right. In most cases, I would say that's like your US based sales. Wherever your company is headquarters, those sales reps and those sales managers are probably gonna be the ones that inherently like, get the most love.
[00:31:23] 'cause that's your primary market and where you get things going. they rarely are gonna feel the same pressure as those other teams for them. I would position it almost more as, Hey, this is going to be a repeatable framework. It's gonna make it easier for your reps to apply the knowledge that they have on competitor A to competitor B, because they fall into the same category.
[00:31:42] So as they get really good at one competitor and they start running into other co competitors in that same category, that confidence carries over and it's almost like the good kind of copy paste. and so it'll help your reps get up to speed faster, all of those benefits and perks. [00:32:00] I think we don't position enough of our work internally, and I.
[00:32:05] know this is like a positioning exercise and to think about positioning your positioning work feels a little meta.
[00:32:10] but you should do it. I think the best product marketers and like competitive intelligence professionals are the ones that like take the time to think about each stakeholder. Maybe a little bit differently. Um, and make sure that when you're asking for something or presenting something, or presenting it in the context of how it's going to be the most useful, most beneficial to them, which feels maybe a little obvious.
[00:32:33] Once you say it out loud, you're like, Yes.
[00:32:36] of course they're gonna be more likely to
[00:32:38] do something.
[00:32:39] Elle: the Yeah. Surprising the number of people who don't do that though.
[00:32:43] Mindy: I think it's because nobody tells us.
[00:32:45] somebody has to tell You
[00:32:46] And then you're like, oh, save for the light bulb. Somebody will give you that light bulb moment and you'll be like, oh, I get it.
[00:32:53] Elle: yeah. So follow up when you do some of those, have the, some of those conversations with sales to get buy-in and approval, do you, I mean, I would. I don't know if you've done this or found it helpful, but do you tell them, Hey, like we did a quick pressure test with like this salesperson, this BDR, this like, just as an anecdote to show, I guess like some early proof of concept for
[00:33:17] Mindy: I would say yes. And then I would say also like, does the categories make sense to them? Like, do they feel right to that.
[00:33:24] leadership group if they feel like cons, you should, worst case scenario, feel like maybe the categorization needs a little bit more refinement and they feel like they're generally on board with the idea.
[00:33:37] and they, but they maybe feel like some of the categories are a little confusing. I've built, frameworks like this more than once here. And I think sometimes it's just like you tweak the wording a little bit and you're like, ah. Okay. It makes sense to leadership to like adjust it just slightly and as long as they're good, everybody's good.
[00:33:56] Um, and you start and kind of work top down. So it, it [00:34:00] really helps to, I would say like maybe even preview with like. Your, your senior most sales person, like your, your chief sales officer or your CMO or whoever you need to get to get like that ultimate buy-in first and then get them to let you present to their leadership team.
[00:34:17] Um, So that can be another way to like get your buy-in faster. Um, and again, usually as long as doing it in those smaller groups, you'll, you'll get the right feedback upfront, um, and really be able to kind of, work that all, um, together and, and letting them know that like, by you're doing this work, you're going to get everything else a lot faster because it's foundational.
[00:34:40] and I think foundational work in product marketing, I know, you know this to be true, is so often overlooked because there's just so many other things going on, but it's, it's like leg day at the gym. not that I do leg day at the gym. I'm not really much of a gym person, but my husband tells me it's very useful.
[00:34:56] Um, and that you, you thank yourself later for having good core fundamentals. I, I wish I had a non gym analogy, but, I'm thinking of one of our, one of our, enablement managers literally runs a session that's called Sales Gym. And so that's like, the thing that sticks in my mind when I think about it is like, his whole thing is like, you're gonna do good core fundamentals.
[00:35:17] Elle: I really love that analogy for salespeople. I don't know why. I don't know why it just fits. It just, it's very, it feels very on brand
[00:35:24] Mindy: It, it, it's, it's not like that inherent competitive nature that you would expect from a sales. team.
[00:35:29] Right
[00:35:30] Elle: yeah. okay, so we've got buy-in. I guess, what does that look like then after you get the buy-in? Obviously now you have your categories, so
[00:35:40] Mindy: now you
[00:35:41] start building, so when you get to the phase where
[00:35:44] Elle: Yeah, so just like,
[00:35:45] Mindy: so when you start building, you're, you're kind of doing, two things. One, you're building out the battle cards for your framework. I actually have a template that I just, a lot of people in the, the CI community probably know me for at this point. I have a long tail battle card framework.
[00:35:59] [00:36:00] Um, so you kind of fill out this framework, battle card. Um, the framework battle card helps you understand like, what is that category of competitor, why would somebody choose it? what are the core characteristics? How do you figure out if somebody belongs in this category? Right. Write your cheat sheet of like, these are the steps I take.
[00:36:17] I go to their website, I look for x. Um, sometimes it could be something as simple as like, is it a technical solution or a non-technical solution? You could probably tell the difference for our open source and SaaS example earlier, go read the support docs. Is it marketer friendly? No, it's probably in this category, right?
[00:36:36] Like there are very easy, clear ways that you can kind of make it easy for somebody else. Then you have like a little section that's like list all the competitors that you know of that fall into this category. Every time somebody asks you about a new competitor and you do that five minute exercise, this is where you write it down.
[00:36:53] could eventually build like a Excel spreadsheet cheat sheet of like, here's every competitor. Here's what battle card you use, but have it on the battle card. It makes it a little bit easier. right? Then you start writing out like your key messaging. Of why you're different and better than that type of competitor, the key characteristics.
[00:37:10] Then you can start throwing in like your generalized objection handling, uh, discovery questions based on that root pain. And you've got a battle card for that framework. Then you can go build your tier ones, right? It's now you already know a lot about that root underlying pain. You're probably gonna use a different template, um, because you're gonna go a lot deeper and have a lot more specifics on that competitor, but you'll have a good, strong idea of like probably why you win, and maybe a pretty good sense of why you lose because of those trade-offs.
[00:37:40] Elle: So doing the com, uh, the category level battle cards first gives you a little bit of efficiency when then you go to do the tier ones. 'cause you have a, a pretty strong sense of their approach already. are you open to linking your long tail [00:38:00] framework in the show notes for the
[00:38:01] Mindy: Yeah, I've got, I've actually got a presentation deck. 'cause I've, I've done this once at like a, in a small group of ci people of like, Hey, here's my framework. if you enjoy a good meme, making fun of ci, that's like half the deck. Um, I mean, if you can't break out like Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man, when you're trying to figure out differentiation, I don't even know what you're doing.
[00:38:21] I'll, I'll give you the, the template for that, uh, that battle card in terms of like that battle card framework. it's, all written out in like a, here's what you're going to write in this section. Uh, because I.
[00:38:32] it's my excuse of staying in touch with people sometimes is like, I've got templates for days.
[00:38:36] You will find an excuse to come back and talk to me.
[00:38:39] Elle: I love it. It's very generous of you. Um, and I'm sure you're gonna have, lots of you, you're gonna have a full inbox after people start consuming some of that. okay, so here we've done the battle cards now. so next step, I'm sure you, you obviously have to do some kind of like enablement or roll up to sales.
[00:38:58] So I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but what does that process look like then?
[00:39:03] Mindy: Yeah, so I would say that process is generally, um, one, you should probably do like a good. competitive enablement for everybody just to introduce the framework and get them familiar with it. also a really good opportunity to to, to tell salespeople, Hey, we've built this framework. Here's how, uh, how, how it works.
[00:39:22] You might even show like visuals of like, here's what Those? competitors look like in these categories globally versus like in the EMEA region versus apac. Uh, you could even slice it down by country and say like, Hey, if you are in, um, you know, Benelux, you might see these. If you're in France, you might see these.
[00:39:39] Um, so that you can make it really easy for people to see that like, oh, those competitors look right. That was a step I
[00:39:45] missed. I think the first I did the training, I, I only showed global, um, which is silly 'cause the whole reason I built it was for my regional sales team. And when I redid that same slide, but with the Right.
[00:39:58] competitors for them, all of [00:40:00] a sudden the light bulbs went on.
[00:40:01] Um, so don't. Don't skip making sure that it makes sense for the audience that you're speaking to. and then work on making sure that it's built into your onboarding right level set with the whole company. Make sure all your sales reps, probably your CSMs know this framework and then make sure That it's part of that onboarding process so that rather than starting folks off with like, Hey, here's competitor number one.
[00:40:25] 'cause in most companies that number one competitor's probably gonna vary by geo segment product line. You teach
[00:40:32] Elle: Yeah. That is such an important tip that you mentioned that I could totally see myself like missing, doing the enablement. And so I think it's worth repeating and making sure that I understood it right and that the listeners understand it. Right? So whenever you do enablement to whichever audience, whether it's a global audience or you know, regionally, or you know, by.
[00:40:56] Use case or, or industry or whatever, which we will get to that in a minute too. make sure that you give some examples of like, that are more unique to that audience. So you can expect to see these types of competitors in these categories to give them a frame of reference. 'cause it all goes back to what you said just a few minutes ago around context for your stakeholders and who you're talking to and giving them that context.
[00:41:20] Um, 'cause it makes them trust you more and feel like you understand them and they'll wanna use your battle cards. And
[00:41:27] Mindy: I.
[00:41:27] have mine actually drawn out on like a two by two grid, kind of like Gartner magic quadrant style. Um, so one, if you're ever gonna do a two by two grid, the correct answer is the happy spot is always that upper, um, that upper right corner. So even if like sometimes the orientation of like you would think like hard to easy, you'd put, you know, easy to hard, you flip it.
[00:41:48] So it's hard to easy so that the happy spot is in that upper right. It just intrinsically makes more sense to people. Um, it, it's a great way to explain things from an SLT. And so I have all of those logos on that two by [00:42:00] two. and so when I, have like the little kind of like. Just buckets around those different categories.
[00:42:07] I have a global view and then a, a regional view. And I'll show both oftentimes in a training. So I'm like, Hey, when you look at the landscape from a global view, it looks like this. And then if you've got your, like your EMEA sales team and you say, Hey, here's what it looks like for emea, same framework, different competitors, and it still works.
[00:42:26] And they get to see that like aha moment. Um, I really wish I had thought of doing that like first round. Um, but I remember, I think I was getting ready to do a specific dedicated training with my MEA sales team. And um, I think I was talking to somebody and they were like, yeah.
[00:42:42] but I don't like you don't have the right competitors on that chart.
[00:42:45] And I was like, they're like, your framework doesn't work. And I was like, oh no, it does. And then I realized that I just needed to show the right logos. And so I actually started by. Adding in the right ones and then removing the ones that didn't matter. 'cause there were a couple like global competitors that might show up in two out of three regions but not the third.
[00:43:04] Um, and so you just make sure if you're showing the chart to your third region, you just remove it. Um, and this has kind of become like a, a well adopted like framework. my, one of my coworkers on our product marketing team who, uh, works on our segment, uh, like go to market side of the house, uh, was like, you know, this was probably one of the most valuable things you did and you did it in your first, like three months. and so, um, that was kind of wild to think about that, like that, that was one of the first things. I'm still using it and it's well over two years later since I first built it.
[00:43:39] Elle: I love that. Kudos to you. That's great. Um, what a great one. Almost first impression. I mean, first three months is still very early. Um, okay. I have two questions. Um, and then I know we still have to move on to our next segment. So I wanna quickly, if I'm gonna try to ask both of these questions in. At the same time, even though they're not [00:44:00] exactly related.
[00:44:01] so my first question is, it's hard to think that we've got so far in the conversation without really talking much about ai. So I know that we all as pmms, look, we know that AI hallucinates and so thus it's, it becomes a bit less trustworthy. So, I'm not asking you should we use ai? Like, that's not my question.
[00:44:21] My question is like, under what circumstances do you think it's actually helpful for A PMM to use AI doing competitive intelligence analysis? Like when, when should I use AI for that and when do I not and just move forward with the human touch.
[00:44:40] Mindy: Yeah.
[00:44:40] So I would say, um, generally speaking, I'm, I'm the type of person, and I don't think this is a secret about me. Um, I will die on the hill that, that I will never have 32nd battle cards. I'm not gonna let AI build a battle card. You're just depends on like your source, your content, it's tends to be wrong.
[00:44:56] Um, there, there are platforms that I love like Gong, and Gong has great ai, but I, I wouldn't want gong to build me a battle card. Um, because you're talking about using your call data. That's what your customer's saying. It assumes they know everything correct about your competitor. Your sales rep already is hitting all of the right points for you.
[00:45:13] Like at that point, why do you even need a battle card? But Gong AI can be great for finding new objection handling that belongs on a battle card. I wouldn't trust it to be the best answer, but it'll tell you what you're saying today. Um, and then that's where you can kind of come in and say, okay. Is this the best possible answer?
[00:45:31] How do we get our reps to answer those more consistently? I always use AI with a strong human in the loop. AI can be great for research. I'm a big fan of perplexity. Um, I think it's a great search engine. but I don't actually assume that it's correct. I actually go look at the, the underlying source material.
[00:45:47] but I think as you're thinking about like some of the gut shack on like what people, what words people might use to describe different types of platforms or like general market sense, it might be helpful. Um, I don't [00:46:00] personally use it, but I could see it fitting into that like way of, of understanding, um, your market.
[00:46:06] But I would say. anything that's like core and foundational, you should always like strong human in the loop. I would actually rather have this battle card framework. I built this before, like AI became like the biggest buzz in, product marketing. And I look at it now and I'm like, I would still use this framework over a 32nd battle card all day, every day.
[00:46:27] Um, now could you combine AI plus this framework? I think that's where you start to unlock something really powerful. Um, if you can really, that requires a lot more guardrails and it's probably like a whole separate conversation, but it's something that I've been working on, like finding ways to make it easier for reps to consume battle cards.
[00:46:45] Elle: We'll have to come back for a part two of the EPIs of the episode then.
[00:46:50] Mindy: ready for it.
[00:46:52] Elle: okay. I lied about how many questions I had for you. so let's just jump to the very last one though. 'cause I know we have, so we still have so much to get to. So, if I'm a PMM right, and I'm building my competitive intelligence platform from scratch, what's one piece of advice that you might have for me?
[00:47:11]
[00:47:11] Mindy: So if you're getting started for the first time, two pieces of advice, I would have one, definitely make sure that you go in with a clean scope, figure out exactly what it is that falls in your wheelhouse and what doesn't, and be really clear, and set expectations on what's realistic.
[00:47:28] With this battle card framework that I've built, I can cover a lot of competitors, but there's a limit to the number of competitors, even within a tiering system that like one person can support. Yes, I know that people think with AI you can support a lot more, but if you're really clear and upfront on like, Hey, here's what AI does and here's what AI doesn't do very well.
[00:47:49] Right? You don't want wrong information. Um, when I think about like using ai, like generally you're getting a collective whole of the internet. I don't really want the collective whole of the internet, [00:48:00] right? I don't really care what one random person on a G two crowd says they could be wrong. Um, it, it's a lead.
[00:48:06] It, it's a way to something that you could go track down. it could be sentiment, it could be a whole bunch of other things, but you don't wanna, like inherently treat it as the source of truth. I don't really care what my competitor says on their marketing website like I do, but I don't like, that's marketing polish, right?
[00:48:23] The real truth, the real heart, and the real, like details are in their support docs. I want that, not the rest of it. And I don't care what one other competitor says about another right. That might be useful, but I certainly wouldn't wanna use it to like build a battle card. So as long as you're setting expectations up front, especially around AI and how it works and how it doesn't work, I think you'll be in a better spot.
[00:48:47] And then that other piece of advice is just how do you position things, right? If you go to each stakeholder. Separately. And you think about you're going to ask them for something, make that ask about how they're going to benefit. Hey, sales manager, I wanna make sure that you are gonna sign off on our win-loss program.
[00:49:04] here's what we're gonna do, right? We're gonna reach out, we're gonna talk to customers. It's gonna do X, Y, Z. and really we're gonna validate the things that you're probably already running into the, during the sales cycle, but because it came directly from the customer, it's gonna have additional weight.
[00:49:19] We're also gonna be able to better stack rank. Now all of a sudden, it's just not me asking a sales rep to talk to their customer. It's about what they're going to get out of it. Um, and they're gonna be much more inclined to, to give me what I'm asking for. Um, and so I think that's just a technique that we can apply in, in a lot of different ways across, you know, competitive market intelligence and product marketing as a whole.
[00:49:40] So those
[00:49:41] Elle: Yeah,
[00:49:41] Mindy: my pieces of advice.
[00:49:42] Elle: I have come, I'm coming back to context. That's what I'm hearing for, for from all of this is creating context, providing context, gathering context. it's a really strong takeaway. I love it. Okay. Um, I wanna very quickly run to the next segment of our show, um, which is the [00:50:00] messaging critique. So this is where we as product marketing experts get to analyze real world marketing.
[00:50:06] And the fun part is that Mindy, as the guest on my show, you get to choose the company that we look at today. So, um, the ground rules are, uh, try to pick a company that either you know the market really well, or, um, you are the target customer. Wouldn't be fair to critique. Um, messaging on a company that we don't know their target audience very well.
[00:50:26] and then tell me what you're loving about it, uh, what you wish the PMM would've done differently. And maybe we'll iterate a little bit and see how we can give some advice to those pmms on how they can take it to the next level. Uh, so without further ado Yeah. Like Reveal, like who's the company we're looking at today?
[00:50:43] Mindy: So I, I'm gonna give a quick story on how I came to the conclusion of this one, but we're gonna talk about, if, if everybody is not already talking about Anthropic, Claudes Super Bowl ads, you're missing out. Um, but the reason I like it, and actually when we first started talking about this, I had a different one in mind.
[00:51:00] you have to do a competitive ad with, with a competitive person. It's just, it's A must. Um, my favorite, most iconic competitive ad that I think most people would point to is like, oh, it's really clear, is the, hi, I'm a Mac and Hi, I'm a pc. Um, and then there was like a version of that that Google, um, did with Pixel and it's called Best Phones Forever.
[00:51:20] And it's Pixel and, and an iPhone. Um, like being good friends and it makes a lot of really direct stabs at iPhone. Um, like really aggressively, but it's framed in this cute, their best friends and they just
[00:51:33] Elle: Yeah, you.
[00:51:35] Mindy: But what I loved about Anthropic, uh, ads, about, ads are coming to ai but not to Claude, is that they don't even have to tell you what competitor they're talking about.
[00:51:49] You already know. It is so obviously chat, GPT coded, they never make a claim. They never say that this is how ads are gonna work [00:52:00] on chat. GPT, they never mention chat GPT by name. It's just so obvious because so many people know the experience of talking to chat GPT, that you.
[00:52:10] watch that ad. and there are four different ads.
[00:52:14] They're each a person like having a conversation with ai, um, and trying to solve a problem. And it sounds like chat, GPT, it's got that like, oh. Well, that's a great idea. Yeah. It's got that validation. It pauses in weird ways That you kind of associate with having a conversation with ai. Um, and then like in the middle of getting advice, it's giving you an ad.
[00:52:37] And, um, I, I like, it's hard to say which ones like my favorite of the lot, but I think the one that's probably gonna stand out to most people is a, a. A guy is. having a conversation with ai, trying to figure out how to connect with his mom, um, and in the middle having this conversation connecting about his mom and like things That he should do to be more empathetic.
[00:53:00] It starts to suggest a website, I think it's golden encounters.com if you're looking to connect with Cougars. and like this, just like look on his face. Next level, Claude registered that domain name and it actually takes you to a website that talks about Claude. and so um, I am like positive. It's uh,
[00:53:23] Elle: is. That is so
[00:53:26] funny. That is so funny. I did not know that they did. I, I've seen that particular ad. I did think it was hilarious. That is pretty next level.
[00:53:36] Mindy: Yeah, it was, uh, I think it was pretty, uh, now I've gotta like look up what the, the website was for. Um, it was. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was definitely, um, nope. Somebody's already built a, a version of it now That's like the, the.net, but it's, uh, oh, yes, it's golden encounters.com and it says, hello, [00:54:00] curious young cub, are you looking for Roaring Cougars in your area?
[00:54:04] Unfortunately, golden Encounters is not a genuine business, and even if it were, it certainly wouldn't be. and even if it were, it certainly has no place when you're talking to your AI and it's just goes and takes you to cloud. It's so good.
[00:54:18] I love how they like, yeah, they like spart. Not only is it ex very entertaining and funny and thus memorable and hitting on something that's, I think very meaningful and that the user cares a lot about is having ads in their experience, but taking the narrative out of the ad or the commercial itself so that you can actually engage and interact with it, like creating the domain name.
[00:54:47] Elle: I think that
[00:54:48] Mindy: I love that people know, it's kind of like when John Oliver's last week, tonight has like a random thing and he puts the URL up there and you know that it's gonna be something wild. I feel like they took inspiration from that. Um, but it was, I think my, if I take one step further on, what I liked about it was it clearly upset the CEO of OpenAI.
[00:55:06] He went on a Twitter, uh, tirade. There are now Tuck Crunch articles talking about how upset he was, um, and how we would never do it this way. And I'm like, but it, they never said it was you. And it's heavily implied and it's definitely fud, but like, it is people's fear, it hits on a root, um, emotion of like.
[00:55:26] That would be a great way for them if they were gonna start building out a category of battle card frameworks. There can be, uh, AI that has ads like that is a category you're no longer, um,
[00:55:39] Elle: And it's your differentiator for that
[00:55:41] Mindy: yeah, you're, you're no longer if, if something is free. Um, that's not the product or the product.
[00:55:47] Like that logic definitely holds. but it's, it's a stake in the ground. That's the risk that Claude has taken by making this ad. They can't go back on it. Um, if they ever do expect these ads to [00:56:00] resurface in, great sati.
[00:56:03] Elle: A hundred percent. Yeah. so, and I'd be very curious to see, like, it'd be so interesting to be on the inside of Anthropic to see how the campaign is performing because I've seen results in my tiny little LinkedIn network, multiple people showing up in my thread, and those are only the people who are actually openly
[00:56:25] announcing this to their, to their talk.
[00:56:28] Well, their network saying that they're switching. I've seen like, bye Chachi pt. Like, hello, Claude. Like I've seen it multiple times just in my tiny little network. Yeah. So it's clearly like
[00:56:40] Mindy: could,
[00:56:40] Elle: effective,
[00:56:41] Mindy: if I could get the insight scoop, I would wanna be in like their CI channel. There has to be a CI channel at Anthropic, and people had to be like sharing the, as soon as it hit Twitter, um, that somebody was upset, that had to have been like a moment, and the marketing team had to have, I would've felt so proud.
[00:57:00] Elle: Totally. I'm sure they're still celebrating. so to wrapping up two questions in the into one, I guess like part A, the question is, what do you wish the PMM team would've considered, if anything at all for this campaign? And then two, how would you evolve this campaign going forward?
[00:57:20] Mindy: I would say it's, it's hard to say that there's much I would change about the ads. I think the fact that they pre elite them before the Super Bowl or released them, uh, was really smart. I think the only thing that, like, theoretically, I don't think they made any marketing claims, obviously. Like that doesn't mean that can't get you a cease and desist or, you know, um, legal nastiness there.
[00:57:42] But I think, I feel like they'd have a really tough case. so I can't really find much that I would fault them if they had named chat GPT by name. It would be a totally different story. But yeah, I think they did such a good job. Um, like just Gold Star. This will probably go down as one of the best competitive ads, that's been [00:58:00] run,
[00:58:00] Elle: I think so too. Okay. And then how would you evolve it going forward?
[00:58:04] Mindy: gosh, I would say like continuing to double down on that, right? There are other AI platforms out there, chat, GPT, and uh, anthropic are not the only players. Um, I think they're gonna cause people to take sides. Um, and if they can, stay firm or maybe even like partner with other, companies that are like-minded to form like a trust or like, Hey, this is what we're gonna do.
[00:58:28] Um, it's kind of like if you look in certain spaces, there tend to be like patent lawsuits, um, that are just like superfluous. They get like a patent and then they try and like shake down a bunch of other companies and you have like an agreement to say like, Hey, we're standing together against this. Um, I remember.
[00:58:45] Seeing Shopify take a stance once on patents. and so like you could literally get a group together and say like, Hey, we're making an agreement that this is like, the future of ads can be better and they can like plus one what Anthropic is doing. I don't think anthropic needs it, but I think other people would benefit and it would bring more attention to everybody.
[00:59:06] and then, Yeah,
[00:59:07] that's, that's probably where I would say like consider taking is, could you make this a movement? you change the way that AI works? 'cause you were so bold, and reconsider it
[00:59:19] Elle: and it got such a, such a strong positive reaction. Again, at least from what I could see from my tiny little sample size of a network, like,
[00:59:26] Mindy: same, uh, every product marketer, every CI person I know is talking about that on right now.
[00:59:31] Elle: Yeah, a hundred percent. Well shout out to all the anthropic pmms out there. You've definitely got some fans and great job with this competitive storytelling. It's, yeah, I agree. It's gonna go down in history as you know, a goat. Um, so, uh, okay. So Mindy, one of the last things I try to save space for on the podcast is a moment of gratitude because in product marketing, none of us get here alone.
[00:59:55] So, um, I just wanna give you a genuine thank you for being so [01:00:00] generous with your time and your insights and willingness to share your, your playbook and your templates. Um, thank you. We're really, the pm m community is really lucky to have you.
[01:00:09] Mindy: Oh, thank you so much. I, um, I've had a lot of great mentors along the way and, and great colleagues and um, just really. That took a chance on me. Um, I started N CI before it was a thing. So, to extend that gratitude back out, uh, there were three product marketers that really like took a chance on me very early on.
[01:00:27] Uh, Travis Belinas was my first manager. Leo Castro was the person who hired me. Um, and Steven Miser has been my mentor the entire time and I would not be the CI PMM person that I am without those three. and I just have an amazing team at Klaviyo and lots of love to all of them. And special shout out to my first ever direct report Moxi, who just got promoted, um, to full like manager level from associates.
[01:00:52] So, um, I am so proud of her and being part of her career has been really special. So
[01:00:57] Elle: Aw. Look at all those shout outs. Yeah. Aw. Well, big thank you to those mentors and pmms who have shaped who you are because now you're making such this, this such big impact on obviously for your company and your peers and the rest of the PMM community. So go mentors. Um, okay. And I swear this is my last question for you.
[01:01:23] Um, where else can we access your expertise? Is it best to find you on LinkedIn?
[01:01:27] Mindy: Yeah, LinkedIn is is the, the best place to find me.
[01:01:31] Elle: All right, will do. Um, again, thank you so much Mindy. And hey listeners, if you liked this episode, please share it with a PMM friend and, um, I would be so grateful if you would leave a review. It helps tremendously with our reach. Um, and thank you for coming on this journey with us today. I hope it leaves, uh, inspiration for you to take with you in the next step of your own journey.
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