Competitor Analysis Worksheet (Alex)

The Competitor Analysis Worksheet captures the client's competitive field and, more importantly, the angle Alex cares about: how the client's partner ecosystem sets them apart. It is a lightweight worksheet, but it feeds directly into how you frame the recommended partners, so treat the differentiation column as the real work, not the name column.

Per-competitor fields

Add one row per competitor. Each row carries:

Field	What you capture
Name	The competitor, named plainly.
Threat level (1 to 5)	How much pressure they put on the client, where 5 is a direct, well-resourced rival and 1 is a fringe or adjacent player.
GTM motion	How they go to market: direct sales, product-led, channel-led, marketplace, partner-sourced.
Positioning	The story they tell the market and the buyer they aim at.
Differentiation	How the client is different, framed through partnerships specifically.
Primary partner types	Which partner categories that competitor leans on (or conspicuously lacks).

If the live page exposes more fields than these, take the exact field set off the page rather than inventing extra columns.

The threat level scale

Threat level runs 1 to 5. Keep it honest and relative to the client's actual market, not to the biggest name in the category:

5 direct rival, same buyer, strong go-to-market, actively winning deals.
3 real competitor the client meets in cycles, but with gaps.
1 adjacent or fringe, rarely a deciding factor in a deal.

Inflated threat levels make every competitor look urgent and hide the one or two that genuinely shape strategy. Under-scoring a serious rival is worse: it lets a weak differentiation story go unchallenged.

The differentiation column is the point

For Alex, this worksheet is not a generic competitor grid. The differentiation you record should be partnership-specific: what the client's ecosystem gives them that the competitor cannot easily copy. Reach, integrations, co-sell motions, category coverage, a partner type the rival has ignored.

If the differentiation you write for a row would still be true with no partners at all, it is a product or brand claim, not a partnership one. Push it until it names the ecosystem advantage.

Shared with Sam

This worksheet is shared with Sam's competitor view. You are both looking at the same underlying data, so:

Do not fork it or keep a parallel copy. Edit the one worksheet.
Changes you make to threat levels, positioning or partner types show up on Sam's

side, so keep the entries clean and defensible.

If Sam has already populated competitors during the Align stage, build on those

rows rather than duplicating them.

Completing it

List the competitors that actually shape the client's deals, not an exhaustive

directory.

Set each threat level honestly, on the client's real market.
Fill positioning and GTM motion so the differentiation has something to contrast against.
Write the differentiation through the partnership lens, and name the partner

types each competitor relies on.

Reviewing before publishing

Threat levels are honest and spread. If everything is a 4 or 5, the scale is

doing no work.

Differentiation is partnership-specific. Every row names an ecosystem

advantage, not a generic product claim.

The shared view agrees. Because this is shared with Sam, spot-check that the

competitor set and threat levels read the same on both sides before you publish.