A repeatable competitor research workflow for B2B SaaS

Stage 1: scope the question and the competitor set

Pick no more than five competitors and one question per run. Fieldnote's team asks: “How do Meridian and two other note tools position onboarding for agencies?” One question keeps the source list short enough to read.

Stage 2: collect sources by type

For each competitor, collect the same source types so the comparison is fair.

• Vendor: homepage, pricing page, onboarding or docs page, changelog.
• Customer: review pages and community threads, with the date of each.
• Third party: analyst notes or press coverage, if any exist.

Record the retrieval date for every source. When the next run comes, you need to know what you saw last time.

Stage 3: extract claims

Write one claim per checkable statement, using the same fields for each competitor: pricing model, entry price, minimums, onboarding time, target customer, headline promise. A shared set of fields is what makes the next stage quick.

Stage 4: compare and flag disagreement

Mark any cell where sources disagree, and leave it marked. A contested cell is a finding in its own right.

Stage 5: review, then act

A second person reads the claims behind each insight before it goes into a battlecard or positioning memo. Record the date of the review and set the date of the next one. Volatile pages such as pricing deserve a shorter interval than a company's about page.

What to carry into the next quarter

• The question, the competitor set and the field list.
• Every source with its retrieval date.
• The claims, with statuses.
• The insights, with their reviewers and review dates.
• A list of what was not found.

Common ways the workflow stalls

• The competitor set grows to ten and nobody finishes reading.
• Each competitor gets different source types, so the comparison is uneven.
• Review is skipped because the deck is due, and an unchecked claim reaches a customer.

Who this suits

The workflow suits a product marketer, a founder or a GTM consultant who answers competitor questions for sales, product and leadership more than once a quarter. If you answer a competitor question once a year, a document is enough.

Running it in Sigblaze

The workflow maps to a research goal, a plan of tasks and queries inheriting your workspace context, stored sources, claims, evidence relationships and reviewed insights. Competitor pages can also go on a watchlist, so the next quarter starts with the history of what changed.

Questions

This piece contains no external statistics. Fieldnote and Meridian are fictional companies, and the figures in the examples are synthetic.