Why Competitor Research Is Draining Your Team's Bandwidth
Your competitor publishes a 40-page whitepaper on industry trends. You know your team needs those insights, but who has time to read it? You skim the executive summary during lunch, jot down three bullet points, and miss the strategic implications buried on page 23. Meanwhile, your sales team keeps asking "what's their positioning?" and your product team needs to know "what features are they emphasizing?" You've spent 90 minutes half-reading something that deserved 20 minutes of focused analysis.
Time saved: Reduces 60-90 minutes of document analysis to under 10 minutes of focused review
Consistency gain: Standardizes competitive intelligence extraction across all competitor materials, ensuring your team captures the same insight categories every time—positioning, features, pricing signals, target audience, and strategic differentiators
Cognitive load: Eliminates the mental burden of deciding what's important while reading, allowing managers to focus on strategic response rather than information gathering
Cost comparison: Prevents the false economy of having senior staff ($80-150/hour) perform tactical reading tasks, or worse, skipping competitive intelligence entirely and making decisions blind to market reality
This task is perfect for AI delegation because it requires pattern recognition across lengthy documents, extraction of specific information types, and synthesis into decision-ready formats—exactly what AI handles efficiently when properly briefed on what intelligence matters to your business.
Here's how to delegate this effectively using the 5C Framework.
Why This Task Tests Your Delegation Skills
Summarizing competitor content reveals whether you understand intelligence gathering versus reading comprehension. A competent analyst can't extract useful insights without knowing what your organization cares about, which competitive moves matter strategically, and what format makes intelligence actionable for different stakeholders.
This is delegation engineering, not prompt hacking. Just like briefing a new competitive intelligence analyst, you must specify:
- Intelligence priorities (What decisions will this research inform?)
- Strategic context (What are we watching for? What would change our plans?)
- Output requirements (What makes a summary useful versus just shorter?)
The 5C Framework forces you to codify these judgment calls into AI instructions. Master this SOP, and you've learned to delegate any research task—from patent analysis to customer review synthesis to academic literature surveys.
Configuring Your AI for Competitor Content Summarization
| 5C Component | Configuration Strategy | Why it Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Character | Competitive intelligence analyst with business strategy background, trained in Porter's Five Forces and market positioning analysis | Ensures AI extracts strategic implications not just facts—identifying threats, opportunities, and positioning shifts rather than creating book reports |
| Context | Your industry, your company's current strategy, specific competitors you track, and what business decisions this research informs (product roadmap/pricing/marketing messaging) | Different competitive moves matter differently depending on your strategy—a feature announcement means one thing if you compete on innovation, another if you compete on price |
| Command | Extract key takeaways across standardized categories (positioning, product strategy, target market, pricing signals, partnerships), then synthesize strategic implications for your business | Prevents generic summaries and ensures output directly answers "So what should we do differently?" rather than just "What did they say?" |
| Constraints | Limit to decision-relevant insights only; exclude marketing fluff and obvious information; flag direct quotes for verification; separate facts from AI's strategic interpretations | Stops information overload and ensures summaries focus on intelligence gaps rather than regurgitating what you already know from their website |
| Content | Provide examples of past competitor summaries your team found useful, including the insight format and strategic framing your organization uses for competitive intelligence | Teaches AI your company's analytical conventions—whether you track "jobs to be done" positioning, use specific strategic frameworks, or need insights mapped to internal initiatives |
The Copy-Paste Delegation Template
<role>
You are a competitive intelligence analyst with expertise in business strategy and market positioning. You understand how to extract
decision-relevant insights from competitor materials, distinguishing between marketing claims and genuine strategic shifts. You analyze content through frameworks like jobs-to-be-done, differentiation strategy, and market segmentation.
</role>
<context>
I need you to analyze competitor content for strategic intelligence.
Our company: [Your company name and brief description]
Our strategy: [Your core differentiation - e.g., "enterprise-focused with white-glove service" or "low-cost provider for SMBs"]
Competitor being analyzed: [Company name]
Our relationship to them: [Direct competitor / Adjacent market / Potential acquirer / etc.]
This research will inform: [Specific business decisions - e.g.,
"Q2 product roadmap priorities" or "sales battlecard updates" or "pricing strategy review"]
Intelligence priorities (what we're watching for):
- [e.g., "Signs they're moving upmarket into enterprise"]
- [e.g., "New feature announcements in AI/automation"]
- [e.g., "Partnership or integration strategies"]
- [e.g., "Pricing or packaging changes"]
</context>
<instructions>
Follow this analytical sequence:
1. **Document Overview**
- Document type and publication date
- Stated purpose and intended audience
- Core thesis or main argument (2-3 sentences max)
2. **Strategic Intelligence Extraction**
Extract insights across these categories:
**Market Positioning:**
- How do they describe their differentiation?
- What customer problems are they claiming to solve?
- What language/framing do they use? (note specific phrases)
**Product Strategy:**
- What capabilities are they emphasizing?
- What's new or changing from their previous positioning?
- What are they NOT talking about? (notable omissions)
**Target Audience:**
- Who is this content written for? (buyer persona, seniority, industry)
- Are they expanding/shifting their addressable market?
**Competitive Positioning:**
- Do they reference competitors directly or indirectly?
- What alternatives are they positioning against?
**Business Model Signals:**
- Any pricing, packaging, or go-to-market clues?
- Partnership or integration announcements?
3. **Quote Extraction**
Identify 3-5 direct quotes that reveal strategic thinking or positioning.
For each quote:
- Provide exact text in quotation marks
- Note page number or section
- Explain why this quote matters strategically
4. **Strategic Implications**
Based on the intelligence gathered, answer:
**What's Changed:**
- How does this compare to their previous positioning/strategy?
- What signals a strategic shift versus business-as-usual?
**Threat Assessment:**
- Does this move threaten our differentiation or target market?
- What competitive pressure does this create for us?
**Opportunity Identification:**
- What gaps or weaknesses does their approach reveal?
- What are they NOT doing that we could exploit?
**Recommended Actions:**
- What should we verify or investigate further?
- What tactical responses should we consider?
- What does this mean for the specific business decision this
research was meant to inform?
5. **Intelligence Quality Notes**
Flag:
- Claims that seem inflated or unsubstantiated (marketing hyperbole)
- Statements that would benefit from third-party verification
- Information gaps where you'd need additional sources
Format as a structured intelligence brief ready to share with stakeholders. Keep strategic implications section actionable—focus on "what this means for us" not just "what they said."
</instructions>
<input>
Paste the competitor content below (whitepaper text, article, webpage copy, etc.):
Example input:
"[Full text of competitor whitepaper, press release, or content piece]"
If the document is very long (20+ pages), you may provide just the most relevant sections or indicate which sections to prioritize for analysis.
[PASTE COMPETITOR CONTENT HERE]
</input>The Manager's Review Protocol
Before sharing AI-generated competitive intelligence, apply these quality checks:
- Accuracy Check: Verify that direct quotes are accurate and properly attributed—did AI correctly extract exact language versus paraphrasing? Cross-reference any statistics, dates, or factual claims against the source document. Confirm that the "What's Changed" analysis actually reflects shifts from their prior positioning, not AI speculation.
- Hallucination Scan: Ensure AI didn't invent strategic implications that aren't supported by the content. Check that "Threat Assessment" and "Opportunity Identification" sections logically derive from actual intelligence, not AI's assumptions about your competitive landscape. Verify that recommended actions address real insights, not generic competitive advice.
- Tone Alignment: Confirm the analysis matches your organization's competitive intelligence standards—some companies prefer neutral documentation ("They announced X feature"), others want strategic interpretation ("This signals their move into enterprise, threatening our Q3 pipeline"). Adjust framing to match how your team discusses competitive moves internally.
- Strategic Fitness: Evaluate whether the intelligence actually informs the business decision it was meant to support. Does it answer the questions your product/sales/marketing team actually asked? Is the summary actionable or just informative? Strong delegation means recognizing when AI correctly prioritized insights versus when you need to reframe based on organizational context that AI can't know.
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When This SOP Isn't Enough
This SOP solves single-document competitive analysis, but managers typically face ongoing competitive intelligence programs—tracking multiple competitors across various content types, synthesizing patterns over time, and distributing insights to different stakeholders who need different views of the same intelligence.
The full 5C methodology covers competitive intelligence workflows (connecting document analysis to battlecard updates and strategic planning cycles), custom analytical frameworks (building industry-specific intelligence extraction templates), and multi-source synthesis (combining competitor content with customer feedback, market research, and win/loss data into comprehensive competitive assessments).
For one-off competitor document analysis, this template works perfectly. For building systematic competitive intelligence operations, market monitoring systems, or cross-functional competitive response programs, you'll need the advanced delegation frameworks taught in Sorai Academy.