Guide · 2 min read
Set up competitor monitoring in one afternoon
You do not need a big programme to start watching competitors well. With a clear list, the right pages and a weekly habit, a single afternoon gets you most of the way.
VeoCue team ·
Competitive intelligence programmes often stall before they start, waiting for the perfect framework. Starting small works better. Here is a plan for one afternoon.
Hour 1: decide who you are watching
List the competitors you actually meet in deals, not every company in your category. For most teams, that is three to eight names.
- Direct competitors: same kind of product, same buyers.
- Indirect competitors: overlapping solutions, broader suites, or "do nothing".
If you are unsure, ask your sales team which names came up in the last ten deals. Comparison and review sites in your category are also a good source of names you may have missed.
Hour 2: find the pages worth watching
For each competitor, the most useful public sources are usually:
- the pricing page;
- the changelog or release notes;
- the careers page;
- the blog or newsroom;
- review sites where buyers compare products.
Note the URLs. These are what you will watch for changes.
Hour 3: decide what you care about
Write down which kinds of change matter to your team: pricing, product, hiring, leadership, partnerships, expansion. This is your filter. Without it, monitoring becomes reading everything.
Decide who needs to know about what. Pricing changes might go to sales and pricing owners; launches to product and product marketing; funding and acquisitions to leadership.
Hour 4: set the habit
Pick a weekly slot, thirty minutes, to review what changed. Decide where the output goes: a short note to the team, a battlecard update, a line in a leadership update.
After the first month
- Remove sources that never produce anything useful.
- Add competitors that started appearing in deals.
- Start a simple win/loss record so you can connect what competitors do with how deals end.
Where tools help
Checking a dozen pages by hand every week is tedious, and changes get missed. A monitoring tool that watches the pages, records what changed with the date, and filters out noise turns the weekly review from searching into reading.
VeoCue can suggest competitors from your website, finds the pages worth watching for each one, and sends a weekly digest of what changed.