Companies win more when they get specific about their buyers, the market opportunity, where they compete, and where they don’t. This work, generally under the umbrella of “market intelligence” is critical to sustained growth, but is often a mystery to organizations that haven’t built out the function.
We sat down with Alex McDonnell, head of market and competitive intelligence at Airtable, to discuss how he approaches market intelligence, how it differs from competitive intelligence, the value companies gain from this work, and much more.
Ryan Detwiller - Scalepath: Ok, let’s cover some background. How did you get into competitive and market intelligence?
Alex McDonnell - Airtable: Some of my early career jobs were general-purpose, traditional market research roles, doing things like surveys, looking at product usage data, and going wherever there was uncertainty or questions in the organization.
Shifting to competitive intelligence and market intelligence, I could immediately pull together qualitative snippets and insights from within the organization. You can take information from the web, and layer in some primary qualitative research as well to get a picture of a competitor, or particular customer segment.
Someone would say, “I've got a call tomorrow afternoon that I need information for,” and by the end of the day, I could give them a sense of what's working or what's not.
That plugging in with sales opened up new opportunities for me in my career, despite not ever having a sales quota-carrying role. I've really enjoyed it. The sales enablement side is where I still spend 40-50% of my time and energy.
It keeps me grounded; keeps me sharp in reality. You can't be in abstract, strategic thinking all the time.
Market sizing and intelligence puts me in a different mindset where I'm not just looking at competitors but looking at the whole market ecosystem. I can ask, where do we want to play and compete to give ourselves a chance to win?
Market intelligence and competitive intelligence go hand in hand. But market intelligence is what sets everything up.
Market sizing and intelligence puts me in a different mindset where I'm not just looking at competitors but looking at the whole market ecosystem. I can ask, where do we want to play and compete to give ourselves a chance to win?
Ryan: A lot of marketers start by understanding the difference between TAM, SAM and SOM. How have you looked at different market segments you want to compete in and decided where the company should be playing?
Alex: There's so many ways to look at your market opportunity.
A common starting point will be something like market size. It’s deceptively simple. People often think they can just pick one number as if, that’s the size of the market. But there's so much more nuance to it than that. Market size isn’t static - what's happening to the size needs to be considered.
Are we talking about the current spend of a market, or are we talking about the potential market as we believe it to be growing into?
Is the market growing, or to be more precise, is spending growing? Is it stagnant?
People often think they can just pick one number as if, that’s the size of the market. But there's so much more nuance to it than that. Market size isn’t static - what's happening to the size needs to be considered.
When you bring in the competitive lens as well, you ask, “is this market dominated mostly by one player? Is it a player that may be resented but their customers, but people use them because they have to? That could be a compelling opportunity to try to be the disrupter in that space.
Is the market more fragmented and no one player has emerged as the winner? That could be an opportunity as well.
Ultimately you need to ask yourself, if you had 100% market share in this market, however you define it, and you could sell to customers at your list price, what could your revenue be? But the hard part is understanding what those numbers should be.
If you're at an inflection point where you're deciding which markets to pursue, it’s likely because you have a bit of traction in nine. You then have to ask, “who are our signature customers or clusters of customers? Do we believe there are more out there like them that give us a signal and crucially? And in that Crossing the Chasm way, will they be referenceable?”
There may be markets where you have signature, brand name customers that are willing to be a references for you, and may be willing to co-create with you to help navigate through the rest of this market! That's crucial to capture your early adopters before making it to the more conservative buyer.
To sum up, the important factors are:
Ryan: What do companies gain when they invest in market intelligence?
Alex: This work is all about creating clarity. All strategy work is about creating clarity.
Great strategy work should make every following decision teams and individuals make 10 times easier. People shouldn’t have to go back to those first principles of, ‘what markets are we playing at again? Is this really what we're targeting? Is this why we believe will win? Are these the strengths and opportunities that we're pursuing? These are the things that we're not doing.’
If you want to lead your market, it takes initial focus and clarity. That is the way to win: to be amazing and unmissable for a group of people, and then do it again and again.
If teams around the organization has to ask the product marketing or sales manager for every functional or tactical plan that they're writing, it's an incredible tax on the entire company.
The clarity of market intelligence – “this is where we're competing,” and “this is our thesis for why we believe we will win”– can help rally each function. The benefits of focus and speed of execution creates cultural cohesion. That level of clarity gets people excited about gaining traction in a market. They don’t have to revisit basic assumptions all the time.
It then shows up on both on the cost and revenue sides.
If your functional mid-level planning processes are getting bloated due to unclear strategy, that's a lot of burn time on engineering or marketing on the cost side.
On the revenue side with that clarity, the effect of clarity is that you can become the category winner, ignorable. If you're the one company to create initial traction in a market, it compounds. It's exponential from there. When you're player number four or five, you might still be able to find your niche, but it's, very hard to have two or three category winners over time.
If you want to lead your market, it takes initial focus and clarity. That is the way to win: to be amazing and unmissable for a group of people, and then do it again and again.
If you'd like to learn more from Alex, you can find him sharing great competitive and market intelligence content on LinkedIn or learn from him through the PMA Alliance Competitive Intelligence Certified course.
Understanding your market size, growth dynamics, and best opportunities to grow revenue is challenging, but we’re making it easier for B2B teams to get foundational knowledge about their market. To get started, check out Scalepath’s market sizing software or more B2B market analysis resources to gain clarity on your market opportunity.
