How to Do a Competitive Analysis (with a Free Template)

There is a post on r/SaaS that opens with a line every PMM and founder has lived: if you have ever made a competitive analysis doc and never opened it again, this is for you. The comments agree, loudly. People describe spending a week building a beautiful spreadsheet of competitors, presenting it once, and never touching it again. The doc was not wrong. It was just dead on arrival, because it was built to be a document instead of a decision.

That is the trap I want to get you out of. A competitive analysis is not a research project you finish and file. It is the input to three specific decisions: how you position, which deals you can win, and exactly what a rep says when a competitor comes up. If your analysis does not change one of those three things, you did not do a competitive analysis. You did a book report.

Scroll the question threads and you will see how common the confusion is. On r/ProductManagement a new PM is handed "do a competitor analysis" with zero direction and asks what data to even collect. On r/startups a founder admits the research they did before building was shallow and wants to redo it properly. On r/advertising someone just wants a format that will not embarrass them in a deck. The common thread is that nobody taught them the difference between collecting competitor facts and producing a competitive decision. Here is how to do the second one.

Step 1: Pick the right competitors, not all of them

The fastest way to produce a useless analysis is to list every company in your space and grade them on forty attributes. Nobody can hold forty competitors in their head, and your buyer is not comparing you to forty things. They are comparing you to three, and one of those three is usually "do nothing."

Sort your competitors into three buckets:

• Direct. They solve the same problem the same way for the same buyer. These show up in your deals by name. You usually have two or three that matter.
• Indirect. They solve the same problem a different way (a spreadsheet, a services firm, an adjacent tool the buyer already owns). These are easy to forget and they kill more deals than the direct ones.
• The status quo. Doing nothing, or the manual process the buyer runs today. This is the competitor that wins the most often, and almost no analysis includes it.

A good step-by-step starting point that circulates on r/marketing makes the same call: identify the real and the perceived competitors first, because those are different lists. Build your analysis around the three to five that actually appear in deals. Everyone else goes in a watch list you glance at quarterly, not in the core analysis.

Step 2: Collect inputs that change a deal, not trivia

Once you know who, decide what. The reason most analyses rot is that they collect what is easy to find (founding year, headcount, funding) instead of what changes a deal. Funding rounds do not help a rep on a call. Here is the input list that actually earns its place, roughly in order of value.

The highest-signal source is the one most teams skip: your own lost deals. Five to ten honest win/loss conversations will tell you more about a competitor than a month of reading their website. Buyers will tell you exactly why they picked the other vendor if you ask without getting defensive. Structure those calls with the win/loss analysis template so you get patterns instead of anecdotes.

After that, in descending order of usefulness: the competitor's pricing and packaging page (where they make money tells you what they protect), their own customers' words on G2 and Capterra (read the three-star reviews, that is where the real weaknesses live), their sales motion (book a demo, see what they lead with), and only then the surface marketing facts. If you are a small team without a competitive intelligence vendor, this is entirely doable by hand. We wrote the full lightweight system in competitive intelligence for small teams.

Step 3: Build the competitive matrix (the example)

Now you organize it. A competitive matrix is the artifact people picture when they hear "competitive analysis," and it is fine, as long as the rows are decision criteria your buyer actually cares about, not a feature checklist. Here is a worked example for a fictional category. Notice the rows: they are buyer questions, not specs.

Two rules make this matrix useful instead of decorative. First, you are allowed to lose rows. If you fill every cell with a green check for yourself, nobody believes the document, including your own reps. Mark where the competitor genuinely wins and decide how you will reframe it. Second, the bottom two rows ("what they brag about" and "where they are weak") are the only rows a rep will actually use, so do those with the most care. That is the bridge from analysis to selling.

Step 4: Turn the analysis into a decision

This is the step that separates a real competitive analysis from the dead doc. Before you publish anything, write down what changes. Three outputs, explicitly:

1. Positioning. Given the matrix, what is the one thing you make the deal about so you compete on a row you win? Positioning is the answer to "compared to what, and why care," and our positioning against competitors framework turns the matrix into that one line.
2. Qualification. Which deals should you walk away from because the buyer weights a row you lose? Knowing this is worth more than any win. It stops you from burning a quarter on a deal the incumbent was always going to win.
3. The rep-facing output. A one-page battlecard per direct competitor: what they will claim, your one-line reframe, two true landmines, and a trap-setting question. This is the part the analysis exists to produce.

If you stop at the matrix, you have a doc. If you produce those three things, you have changed how the team sells. For the strategic backbone behind why you compete on a chosen axis rather than feature-by-feature, Michael Porter's five forces is still the cleanest lens, and April Dunford's positioning work is the best practitioner translation of it.

The free competitive analysis template

Copy this. It is built to force a decision, not just a record. One block per competitor, plus a summary at the top. Keep it to a page per competitor; if it spills over, you are collecting trivia again.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS: [YOUR PRODUCT] vs [CATEGORY]
Owner: [NAME] | Last updated: [DATE] | Next review: [DATE + 90 days]

============================================================
THE THREE THAT MATTER (everyone else is a watch list)
1. Direct:    ____________________________
2. Indirect:  ____________________________
3. Status quo:____________________________

============================================================
PER COMPETITOR: [COMPETITOR NAME]   (copy this block per competitor)

What they sell and to whom:
  ________________________________________________

Where they genuinely WIN (be honest):
  - ____________________________________________
  - ____________________________________________

Where they are WEAK (specific + true, from reviews/win-loss):
  - ____________________________________________
  - ____________________________________________

What they claim in deals  ->  Your one-line reframe:
  Claim: "______________"  You: "________________"
  Claim: "______________"  You: "________________"

Trap-setting question (makes the buyer find the weakness):
  "______________________________________________"

Proof you can cite (a customer who switched, a stat):
  ________________________________________________

============================================================
THE DECISIONS (fill this in or the analysis does not count)
- Positioning line we will run:  ______________________
- Deals we will DISqualify:      ______________________
- Battlecard built? (y/n):       ______________________

What is deliberately missing: founding year, headcount, funding history, a forty-row feature grid. That is reference material. It goes in an appendix the team skims once a quarter, not in the working analysis.

Keep it alive (the part everyone skips)

The reason the r/SaaS doc died is that it had no review date and no owner. Competitors change pricing, ship features, and shift messaging constantly, so a one-time analysis is stale within a quarter. Put a name and a next-review date at the top, and feed every new win/loss call back into it. Treating competitive analysis as a living asset rather than a project is exactly the discipline the AI go-to-market tooling at FullPilot is built to keep on rails, so the work compounds instead of expiring.

Skip the blank page

If staring at an empty template is where this stalls for you, do not start cold. Browse the Battlecard Library for worked examples against common competitor archetypes and adapt the closest one, or run the Battlecard Builder, which walks you through the rep-facing output section by section. It is far easier to edit a strong draft than to face an empty doc, which is where most competitive analyses quietly go to die.

Do the analysis that ends in a decision. The matrix is the easy part. The judgment about what to do with it is the whole job.

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