Market Intelligence
Build a living market intelligence system from the conversations you're already having — automatically detecting competitive mentions, buyer trends, and emerging opportunities without a dedicated research team.
Traditional market intelligence is slow and backward-looking. Analyst reports describe what happened last quarter. Surveys reflect what customers were willing to admit to a form. Your sales and customer calls capture what's actually happening right now: which competitors prospects are evaluating, what's shifting in their buying criteria, which problems are becoming urgent. BuildBetter turns that real-time signal stream into a structured intelligence system — so your team acts on market shifts before your competitors even see them.
Market intelligence is scattered, slow, and incomplete
- Competitive mentions from prospect calls never make it into a centralised system — they live in individual rep notes if they're captured at all
- Win/loss analysis is based on CRM fields that reps fill out inaccurately or incompletely after the fact
- Analyst reports and review sites describe the market as it was 6–12 months ago, not as it is today
- Emerging buyer pain points and category shifts are invisible until they show up in declining win rates
- No way to systematically track which competitors come up in which segments, or how often the conversation ends in a loss
- Marketing positioning decisions are made on assumptions rather than documented evidence from actual buyer conversations
Capabilities
Competitive Mention Tracking
BuildBetter automatically flags every competitor mention across your call library. See which alternatives prospects considered, how they describe each competitor, and how often specific tools come up in deals you win versus lose.
Win/Loss Intelligence from Actual Conversations
Instead of relying on post-hoc CRM fields, pull the real reasons from transcript signals. Surface the objections that ended in losses, the proof points that closed wins, and the switching triggers that brought prospects to you in the first place.
Emerging Trend Detection
Run a monthly query to identify pain points or topics that are appearing more frequently than in previous periods. Market shifts show up in conversation data weeks before they appear in industry reports.
Buyer Psychology Mapping
Understand not just what buyers decide but how they decide: who's involved, what they prioritise, what triggers urgency, and what stalls deals. This informs both positioning and sales enablement simultaneously.
Natural Segment Discovery
Find clusters of customers who describe similar problems in similar ways — these emergent segments often reveal ICP refinements and positioning opportunities that top-down demographic segmentation misses.
Opportunity and Whitespace Mapping
Surface unmet needs that customers articulate but that no current solution addresses well. These are your product roadmap and positioning opportunities — problems visible in your calls before they appear in your competitors' feature sets.
How to get started
A structured approach to rolling out this workflow in your team.
Set up competitive intelligence tracking
Query all competitor mentions in your call library
Ask Chat: 'Which competitor tools or alternatives do prospects mention most often in sales calls? How do they describe each one?' Get a ranked list with representative quotes.
Segment by win/loss outcome
Cross-reference competitive mentions with deal outcome tags. Which competitors appear most in lost deals? Which come up and then disappear by the close? The pattern tells you where to compete and where to retreat.
Build a competitive intelligence brief
Ask Chat: 'Summarise what prospects say about [competitor] in our calls. What do they like? What frustrates them? Why did they evaluate us instead?' Use this to update battle cards monthly.
Track pricing position signals
Filter Signals for mentions of price, cost, or budget. Map how pricing objections correlate with specific competitors and segments — your real pricing position lives in these conversations, not in your spreadsheet.
Detect market trends in real time
Run a monthly trend query
Ask Chat: 'What pain points or topics are appearing more frequently in calls this month compared to last month?' Rising themes are your leading indicators of market shifts.
Track technology and regulatory mentions
Filter Signals for mentions of specific tools, platforms, regulations, or industry events. These signals reveal how your buyers' broader context is changing — which informs both messaging and product direction.
Identify urgency triggers
Look for patterns in what events push prospects from 'interested' to 'buying now': a new hire, a failed audit, a funding round, a competitor winning a major account. These triggers shape your demand generation strategy.
Map buyer psychology and decision-making
Surface the decision committee
Ask Chat: 'Who else do prospects mention as part of their buying decision? What concerns do each stakeholder type raise?' Map the real decision-making structure across your ICP, not the one on the org chart.
Identify what stalls deals
Filter for stall signals — Objection type with specific themes like 'need to check with IT', 'waiting on budget', 'comparing options'. Each stall pattern has a corresponding enablement or marketing asset that could unstick it.
Understand the 'before state' in detail
Query: 'How do prospects describe what they were using or doing before looking at us?' This tells you both your competitive landscape and the alternative that matters most — often the status quo, not a direct competitor.
Synthesise and distribute intelligence
Produce a monthly market intelligence brief
Ask Chat: 'Summarise the key competitive and market trends from this month's calls. What's new? What's shifting? What should the team know?' Distribute to sales, product, and leadership.
Update battle cards from real conversation data
Replace assumption-based competitive positioning with quotes and patterns from actual calls. Battle cards grounded in buyer language are more trusted by sales reps and more effective in deals.
Feed strategic planning with conversation-based evidence
Before quarterly planning, run a comprehensive market intelligence query. Present real evidence of where the market is going — not analyst speculation — to anchor strategy discussions in data.
Before & After
Real-world impact teams see after adopting this workflow.
Best Practices
Recommended Practices
- Run your competitive intelligence query monthly at minimum — markets shift faster than quarterly review cycles can track
- Always segment competitive mentions by deal outcome (won/lost/open) — a competitor mentioned in lost deals is very different from one mentioned and then discarded
- Share intelligence briefs with product as well as sales — the unmet needs you surface in calls are your most valuable roadmap inputs
- Build a 'market signals' document that logs trending pain points and competitive mentions quarter-by-quarter so you can see shifts over time
- Use conversation-based intelligence to anchor quarterly planning discussions — hard evidence from buyer conversations carries more weight than intuitions or analyst frameworks
- Track what prospects say about you, not just competitors — 'How do buyers describe the problem we solve?' is your most important positioning question
Watch Out For
- Don't build strategy on a single month of data — look for patterns that hold across at least two to three months before treating them as confirmed trends
- Competitive mentions from early-stage prospects are different from those in late-stage deals — segment them separately or you'll draw misleading conclusions
- Be careful conflating market trend signals with ICP bias: if 80% of your calls are a single segment, your 'market trends' may just be that segment's trends
Pro Tips
- The most underused query in competitive intelligence: 'What did prospects say they were doing before they came to us?' — the status quo alternative is usually your most important competitor
- When a competitor comes up repeatedly in lost deals, ask Chat to pull every mention and look for the consistent framing — that's what you need to address in your positioning
- Trigger events are your most actionable market intelligence: once you know that 'just raised Series A' prospects close at 3x the rate of others, your demand generation strategy becomes obvious
Ready to build a market intelligence system from conversations you're already having?
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