Every leadership team walks into a quarter carrying beliefs about its competitors that nobody has checked.
That your price sits at the bottom of the market, that the objection your reps hear most is the one the whole category hears, and that the feature beating you is the one on their homepage.
At least one of those is usually wrong. Finding out costs money and a fortnight, because somebody has to sit inside the competitor’s sales process as a real buyer, and that somebody is us.
So the real question is whether the information changes something you would otherwise get wrong. Interesting is cheap. Wrong is expensive.
A Changed Decision Is the Only Return You Can Verify
The temptation is to build a return calculation. Take a win rate, add a plausible lift, multiply by deal size, and produce a number with a decimal point in it.
That number is fiction, and everyone in the room knows it.
Forrester, surveying 21 organizations running market and competitive intelligence programs, found that business outcomes such as revenue growth, campaign performance, and even time saved are harder to capture than teams would like.
Crayon is careful in the same direction. The relationships its annual survey reports between program practices and revenue impact are associations, and not proof of cause.
Take that seriously and the useful unit of return becomes smaller and checkable: a named internal artifact that changed, with a person attached to it and a date it changed by.
A pricing rule, a battlecard field, the order of your demo, or the question that opens your next executive review.
You can walk into a room six weeks later and verify whether that happened. A modeled win-rate lift is not verifiable after the fact, which does not stop it arriving with two decimal places and a meeting.
Which Decisions Are Worth Testing This Way?
Three come up more than the rest. They are illustrations rather than a ranking, because no research establishes which of them pays best.
A pricing floor is only comparable once the conditions match: the metric, the included volume, the minimum commitment, the term, the implementation charge, the discount condition, and how long the quote stays valid.
A headline number without those attached is a rumor with a currency symbol on it.
A battlecard earns a rewrite when the line a competitor’s rep uses against you turns out to differ from the line your team assumed. What you want is the exact wording, the proof they offer, and the question they use to reframe the comparison.
The third is a product question. A capability described as important and never shown live is a different fact from one demonstrated on screen, and that difference should change what gets asked at your next executive review.
That distinction is where this method is genuinely strong. A retail study across three service chains found mystery-shopping assessments were not related to sales performance, apart from a weak cross-selling effect, and were not effective at predicting customer satisfaction.
The same study was clear about what trained observers do well: they evaluate very specific aspects of an interaction that ordinary customers never recall. That is the part worth buying.
| Decision | Evidence to capture | Do not claim |
|---|---|---|
| Your pricing floor | Metric, volume, minimum, term, implementation charge, discount condition, quote validity | That their price predicts their revenue |
| A battlecard response | The exact objection line, the proof offered, the reframing question | That it is the line every rep uses |
| Executive review priorities | What was demonstrated live versus described, deferred, or promised | That an unshown feature does not exist |
One evaluation gets read by several people for different purposes, which is the other thing the research on this method is clear about. One project, several decisions.
Is €499 a Lot of Money?
It is a fixed published fee per competitor, which makes the comparison unusually simple to run.
€499 for one competitor. €2,495 for five. €4,990 for ten. Extra meetings, follow-up, and the analysis all sit inside that fee rather than beside it.
We have run these for some of the best-known names in B2B SaaS and for companies nobody has heard of yet. The fee does not change because the competitor is famous.
Set the number against the decision, in that order:
A pricing rule governing a quarter of your outbound quotes is not a minor assumption to be carrying untested. Keep the fee beside that decision rather than inside an invented return model.
And if the decision at stake is genuinely smaller than the fee, you have your answer, and it is a perfectly good one.
Context worth having: in Wynter’s panel of 50 senior B2B SaaS leaders, only one in ten said competitor pricing barely influences, or does not influence, their own. That establishes attention. It says nothing about the quality of what they are attending to.
In Crayon’s ninth annual survey of hundreds of competitive intelligence and revenue leaders, seven in ten teams said at least half of their sales opportunities are competitive. That is the backdrop, not the argument.
A Finding With No Owner Changes Nothing
The failure mode here is not a bad piece of research. It is a good one that nobody acts on.
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Any one of those can move a comparison further than the headline figure does. Which is why a number without its conditions attached is not a price yet, and why a pricing sheet built from published tiers is usually comparing the wrong column.
So the test at the end is one question, asked six weeks after delivery: did an artifact change, and can you name it?
If a pricing rule moved, a battlecard field got rewritten, or a demo path was reordered, the project earned its keep. If nothing moved, it did not, whatever the quality of the analysis.
Recordings are the evidence. Analysis is where evidence becomes a decision, which is roughly how Forrester frames it: the shift from delivering information to providing implications.
The evidence underneath has to be disciplined for any of that to hold. The research on this method is emphatic on the point: stringent quality controls are what separate evidence from anecdote.
What that produces, in practice, is a competitor comparison built from primary sources, alongside the vendor pages and the executive read that sit behind it.
If the method itself is still unfamiliar, start with what it is. For the wider picture on how teams use competitive intelligence, the numbers are collected here.
So: which decision are you currently making on a guess? Name the decision and we can price it, then run the evaluations that settle it and hand back the evidence they produced.
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