How to answer ‘We versus others'? - Feature Table

02 Nov 2014 . category: product-management . Comments
#entrepreneurship #startups

Lately, our customer success team is getting emails asking how we are different from other app connectors mentioning few names in particular.

Our marketing team has started working with me to come up with more set of articles and take next actions. So why me? As a product manager, when I and my engineering team head were deciding what features to include and what not, we do this kind of analysis. It is crucial, so buying decision is made easy to our potential customers. If this analysis has to take a name for reference, then I would call it as ‘Feature table against competitors.’

Below is how we do it -

Note: Above one is just a sample template.

After coming up with that, we score each feature and try to position ourselves better so as to be the first choice for potential customers.

Though we get hold of this from pricing pages of different apps, we firmly believe in trying them out and getting the experience. Since all apps provide a free trial option, there is nothing we need to hesitate!

We also capture the words of our customers who move from competitors to our service and use those words for marketing. If you are wondering won’t there be an issue publicly showcasing what customers say about our service and competitors? Then I would like intimate that the answer is Yes, but we should withstand it with our product offerings. We also take individual interviews with those customers to understand their expectations and meet them, so the word of mouth marketing will trigger down the lane from them.

By the way, there is a whole lot of interviews and product demos I am taking these days as part of customer development exercises. I shall talk about them in a separate section later.

Till then, hope this helps. So though product team does this analysis as part of market research, we can reuse this content even for marketing and training sales teams, so they get comfortable and confident.