Segment, don't scramble: The smarter way to compete

I love getting surgical with competitive analysis. Digging deep to find a rival’s narrative weak spots is one of my favorite aspects of product marketing.

But I’ve found it doesn’t scale well, especially in crowded markets.

Trying to prepare your teams for battle with a laundry list of battlecards isn’t just a lot of work for you—it’s also difficult for people to retain the information.

And the advent of AI-powered business is only going to make markets more crowded, not less.

This is where segmentation really helps. By spotting patterns and putting your competitors into buckets, you get a broader sense of where your product fits in the market.

And this makes it so much easier for sellers to compete in the field, even when they don’t have a lot of intelligence.

In this article, I’ll explain why segmentation makes competitive positioning more useful and actionable for your company—and how to do it.

The problem with competitive head-to-heads

There have been many times in my career where a seller has asked me “do we have any information on Competitor X?”

Sellers don’t need information, they need a narrative. In fact, the faster and easier they can dismiss a rival company, the better chance we have of winning the deal.

And this is why I believe it can be overkill to create individual battlecards for every competitor.

Of course, it’s essential to go deep on your biggest challengers.

But for fringe players, it might not be needed. Even in the age of ChatGPT, where we can pull up a competitive teardown in seconds, the reality is that your teams don’t need detailed information about each company.

Many of your competitors have similar products and target customers. The position you take against one might be identical to the position you take against another.

That’s why I suggest tiering, or otherwise categorizing, your competitors. I group competitors by strategy, not just feature overlap. I flag the ones that matter right now and put the rest in context. When a niche competitor shows up in a deal, I simply map it to a category instead of bombarding teams with information about it.

I’ve found this helps people to speak more clearly about our position, sell more confidently, and make faster roadmap decisions.

Why segmentation makes things easier

Segmenting your competitors forces you to zoom out. It’s no longer, “How do we beat Vendor X?” It becomes:

• Who actually competes with us most often?
• Who do our customers think we compete with?
• Who is shaping buyer expectations in our category?
• Who are we likely to encounter in new segments or use cases?

This shifts your competitive thinking from reactive to strategic. It helps you define your market landscape, not just your next battle.

And most importantly—it makes competitive intel actionable.

Start with tiering your competitors

The tier system we use looks like this:

Tier 1: Direct, like-for-like competitors

These are the names we hear most often in deals. Feature overlap is high, buyers are genuinely deciding between us, and messaging is critical. These competitors shape our website copy, sales battlecards, objection handling, and much of our product roadmap alignment.

Tier 2: Niche or scenario-specific competitors

These show up occasionally—but they win in specific industries, regions, or use cases. They’re often weaker overall, but strong within a defined segment. These are useful for enabling sales with "when/where they win" patterns and keeping an eye on segment-based product gaps.

Tier 3: Fringe or aspirational competitors

These are names that come up in analyst briefings or long-term strategy discussions. Maybe they’re category-adjacent. Maybe they’ve entered through M&A. You don’t see them in your pipeline often, but they influence perception—and may shape future buyer expectations.

This structure helps us:

• Prioritize sales enablement (Tier 1 gets a full playbook, while tier 3 gets assigned a category with pre-existing positioning)
• Focus win/loss analysis
• Avoid knee-jerk reactions to random mentions
• Spot upcoming shifts in the market

It also gives every team—from sales to product—a shared vocabulary for talking about the market.

Other useful ways to segment

The tier system is just one lens. Depending on your company’s stage, motion, or product type, here are some other segmentation strategies you can overlay:

1. By Go-to-Market Motion

• PLG-first: Freemium or self-serve-heavy tools (e.g., Notion, Figma)
• Sales-led: Traditional enterprise platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Oracle)
• Service-heavy: Tools that require consultants or onboarding firms to implement

Why it matters: Helps your sales team understand what kind of experience the buyer is used to—and where you can differentiate on friction, speed, or support.

2. By Use Case or Department

• Primary functional competitor (e.g., Asana vs. Monday)
• Budget-line competitor (you compete for the same spend, but different problem)
• Tool-stack conflict (you’re part of a larger debate: build vs. buy, point solution vs. platform)

Why it matters: Helps marketing craft stories around real buyer trade-offs—not just feature tables.

3. By Threat Type

• Replacement threat: They can swap you out directly.
• Alternative path: They solve the same problem in a different way.
• Category distortion: They shift how buyers define the problem altogether.

Why it matters: Helps product and marketing teams frame your narrative—not just "why us," but "why this approach."

How segmentation makes teams smarter

Let’s talk execution. A good segmentation model makes it easier for every team to do their job:

Marketing

• Knows which competitors to name, and which to ignore
• Can tailor campaign messaging to different threat types
• Can build clearer comparison pages or positioning docs

Sales

• Understands which competitors show up in which segments
• Has clearer trap-setting guidance (“If they’re evaluating Vendor X, ask this…”)
• Learns how to qualify fast, not memorize feature gaps

Product

• Can see which competitors are truly influencing roadmap demand
• Avoids chasing one-off edge cases from noisy-but-irrelevant competitors
• Spots gaps that matter by segment, not by sheer number of requests

When you segment your competitors, you start to see your market position with fresh eyes. You’re not just the alternative to Vendor X—you’re the modern option for [this persona] who’s tired of [that approach].

It becomes easier to:

• Define your ideal customer
• Build resonant win stories
• Draw sharper boundaries around what you are (and are not)

This is where you start playing your own game, not theirs.

One of the best examples of this is how Linear positioned itself against tools like JIRA. It didn’t try to win on feature depth—it won on speed, elegance, and respect for developer workflows.

Segmentation traps to avoid

Even with segmentation, competitive work can still go off the rails. A few common mistakes:

• Confusing internal anxiety with real market threat: Just because the CEO saw a competitor launch on Product Hunt doesn’t make them Tier 1.
• Letting segmentation go stale: Revisit tiers at least quarterly. Growth changes who you’re up against.
• Trying to track everything: You’ll never keep tabs on every feature. Focus on positioning, not surveillance.

Focus on the bigger picture

Most early-stage companies treat competitive intel as an inbox—“What came in this week?” But as you scale, that approach collapses. You need a way to see the bigger picture.

Competitor segmentation doesn’t just clean up your documentation. It helps your org graduate from reactive to proactive. From improvising responses to owning the narrative.

Because when you know who you’re really up against—and what makes them different—everything sharpens.

And the next time someone asks, “How do we compare to [random tool]?”, you’ll be able to say with confidence: “We don’t. They’re not even in our quadrant.”