A Competitor Research Template You Can Fill In an Afternoon

Most competitor research templates are spreadsheets with 40 tabs and a “last updated” date from eleven months ago. The competitor research template below has eight fields. You can fill it for one competitor in about 30 minutes, and a full set of three in an afternoon, because every field tells you exactly where to source the answer.

The reason the 40-tab version dies is not laziness. It dies because nobody can keep it current, and a competitor profile that’s a year stale is worse than no profile at all. It gives you false confidence in a snapshot the market already moved past. Speed is the whole point. A template you can refill in an afternoon is a template you’ll actually refill, which means it stays true.

So this is built for the founder or PMM who has three to seven competitors that matter, no analyst, and no appetite for a research project that eats a week. Eight fields, each with a source. Copy it, fill it, move on.

The competitor research template (copy this)

Here’s the whole thing. One block per competitor. Below it, what to put in each field and where to get it without paying for a data subscription.

COMPETITOR: [name + URL]
Last refreshed: [date]

1. POSITIONING (one line)
   Their homepage hero, in their words. Then yours, in one line.

2. ICP & WHO THEY SELL TO
   Company size, role, industry. Pulled from case studies + pricing tiers.

3. PRICING SHAPE
   Model (seat / usage / flat), entry price, top published price,
   what the value metric is. Note what's hidden behind "Contact us."

4. THE WEDGE (why they win deals)
   The one thing they're clearly better at. Be honest.

5. THE GAP (why they lose deals)
   The one thing they're clearly worse at, or don't do at all.

6. RECENT MOVES (last 90 days)
   New features, pricing changes, repositioning, notable hires.
   Source: changelog, pricing page, careers page, LinkedIn.

7. PROOF & MOMENTUM
   Funding, headcount trend, G2 rating + review volume, notable logos.

8. YOUR MOVE
   One sentence: what this competitor's existence changes about
   what you do next.

That’s it. No SWOT quadrants, no weighted scoring matrix, no “threat level: medium.” Those frameworks feel rigorous and produce nothing you can act on. The eight fields above each force a decision or a fact, not an adjective.

Field by field: what goes in and where to source it

1. Positioning (one line)

Copy their homepage hero headline verbatim. Then write your own positioning in one line directly underneath it. The contrast is the insight. If the two lines could be swapped without anyone noticing, you have a differentiation problem, not a research finding. Source: their homepage, 60 seconds. If you want a sharper read on what a good one-liner looks like, see positioning statement examples.

2. ICP and who they sell to

You’re inferring this, not guessing. Two sources tell you almost everything: their case studies (what size companies, which roles are quoted) and their pricing tiers (a $2,000/mo floor means they’re not chasing solo founders). Read three case studies and the pricing page. Write down the company size, the buyer role, and the industries. Five minutes.

3. Pricing shape

Don’t transcribe the whole pricing page. Capture four things: the model (per seat, usage-based, flat platform fee), the entry price, the top published price, and the value metric they charge on. Then note what’s hidden behind “Contact sales.” That gap tells you where they make their margin. Source: their pricing page. If it’s opaque, the how to track competitor pricing workflow covers reconstructing tiers from the public surface.

4. The wedge

The one thing they’re genuinely better at. Write it even if it stings, especially if it stings. “Better brand,” “deeper integrations,” “faster onboarding,” “the incumbent everyone already uses.” If you can’t name a wedge, you haven’t researched enough or you’re being defensive. Every competitor that wins deals wins them for a reason. Source: their G2 reviews (read the 4-star ones, not the 5-star ones) and your own lost deals.

5. The gap

The mirror of field 4. What do they not do, or do badly? This is the field that turns into your sales talk track and your roadmap pressure. Source: their 2- and 3-star G2 reviews are gold here, the reviewer tells you exactly what frustrated them. Also your own won deals: why did the customer pick you?

6. Recent moves (last 90 days)

This is the field that goes stale fastest, which is why the refresh cadence matters. Check four surfaces: their changelog or release notes (features), pricing page (changes), careers page (where they’re investing: five backend hires in payments means something), and the founder’s LinkedIn (positioning shifts show up there first). Twenty minutes for the first pass, five minutes on every refresh after.

7. Proof and momentum

Are they growing or coasting? Quick signals: latest funding round and date (Crunchbase, free tier), headcount trend (LinkedIn shows employee count over time), G2 rating plus review volume (a 4.6 with 800 reviews beats a 4.9 with 12), and two or three logos they lead with. You’re not building a financial model. You’re answering one question: is this competitor accelerating or stalling?

8. Your move

One sentence. Not analysis, a decision. “Their new usage tier undercuts our entry price, so we add a starter plan.” “They just lost their head of product, so we lean into roadmap reliability in deals against them.” If field 8 is blank, the whole profile was an academic exercise. The point of competitor research is the next move, not the document.

How to fill three in an afternoon

The trick is to go wide before you go deep. Don’t complete one competitor end to end before starting the next. Instead, run one field across all three competitors at a time. Open all three pricing pages, fill field 3 for each, close the tabs. Then all three changelogs, field 6. You hold the context once instead of three times, and the comparison writes itself because you’re looking at them side by side.

A realistic afternoon:

• Fields 1–3 (positioning, ICP, pricing) across all three: 45 minutes. All public, all on their site.
• Fields 4–5 (wedge, gap): 45 minutes. This is the G2 reading and the honest internal reflection. The slowest part, and the most valuable.
• Fields 6–7 (recent moves, momentum): 45 minutes. Changelogs, careers pages, LinkedIn, Crunchbase.
• Field 8 (your move): 15 minutes. By now the moves are obvious because you’ve seen everything.

Two and a half hours, three competitors, done. The output is short enough to paste into a Slack channel and have your team actually read it.

Where this template fits in the bigger picture

A filled template is an input, not an end state. It feeds two things. First, your battlecards: fields 4, 5, and 8 are the raw material for the talk tracks your sales team needs, and the battlecard template for SaaS shows how to turn them into something a rep uses live on a call. Second, your ongoing process: a one-time template is a snapshot, and the lightweight competitive intelligence operating system covers how to make the refresh a weekly habit instead of an annual scramble.

The mistake to avoid is treating the template as the deliverable. Nobody is grading your competitor profiles. The deliverable is the decision in field 8 and the fact that you can refresh the whole thing fast enough to keep it true.

The one move worth making this week

Pick your single most threatening competitor and fill all eight fields for them today. Just one. Time yourself: it should take under 30 minutes. If it takes longer, you’re over-researching fields 1 through 3 and under-thinking field 8. The discomfort you feel writing field 4 honestly is the actual value of the exercise. Everything else is reference material.

Then put the filled profile somewhere your team can see it, and set a reminder to refresh field 6 in 30 days.

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Filling a template once is easy. Keeping it true is the hard part, and it’s the part that decides whether competitor research changes any decisions. Outmano does the refresh for you: an AI-powered platform tracking pricing, SEO, content, roadmap, and review moves across the competitors you choose, so fields 6 and 7 stay current without you reopening a single tab.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should you refresh a competitor research template?

Field-level, not document-level: recent moves (field 6) every 30 days, pricing and positioning quarterly, and everything immediately when a competitor raises money, changes pricing, or ships into your category. A full rebuild from scratch should almost never be necessary. If it is, you waited too long. The 30-day reminder is the single highest-leverage part of the whole system.

Is a SWOT analysis good for competitor research?

Not for operators. SWOT produces adjectives (“strong brand,” “limited resources”) that nobody can act on, and its four quadrants come with no owner and no deadline. The wedge and gap fields do the useful part of SWOT’s job (forcing honesty about where you actually win and lose) while a “your move” field forces the decision SWOT never asks for.

What free tools help you fill in a competitor research template?

Four cover almost everything: G2 reviews (read the 2- to 4-star ones), LinkedIn for headcount trends, Crunchbase’s free tier for funding, and the Wayback Machine for how a pricing page has changed over time. The Wayback Machine is the most underused of the four: comparing a competitor’s pricing page today against twelve months ago shows you their strategy shift in one diff. None of them require a subscription.

What’s the difference between competitor research and market research?

Market research studies buyers: what they need, how they decide, what they’ll pay. Competitor research studies rivals: how they position, price, and win. Teams routinely substitute one for the other (usually doing competitor research because rivals are easier to observe than buyers) and end up positioning against companies instead of for customers. You need a slice of both, in that order.

Should sales reps see the full competitor research doc?

No. They need the wedge, the gap, and your current play turned into a talk track, not the whole profile. Reps read battlecards seconds before a call; an eight-field research doc is the input, not the artifact. Give them the wedge (concede it honestly), the gap (attack it specifically), and one line on what changed this month.