What counts as a move
Five categories cover almost everything that changes how you sell against a competitor:
- Price or packaging. A tier added or removed, a limit tightened, a feature moved up a plan, a number changed.
- Product. A capability announced, documented or deprecated.
- Positioning. The words on their homepage and category page. A quiet repositioning often precedes a product change.
- People. A new function head, especially in product or sales.
- Structure. Funding, acquisitions, market entries and exits.
Dating a move properly
Every move needs two dates: when it happened according to the source, and when you observed it. They are frequently weeks apart, and conflating them is how a team convinces itself a competitor moved recently when the change is six months old.
For page changes the honest form is a range: the page said A on this date and B on that date. Unless a company announces a change, that is the most anyone can truthfully say, and it is enough.
Where the record should live
One record per competitor, with each line carrying its date and its link, and the artefacts people actually use - battlecards, the sales wiki page - generated from it rather than maintained separately.
The moment those two diverge, the battlecard becomes fiction, because the person updating the record is not the person who wrote the battlecard, and nobody is measured on keeping the second one current.
A review rhythm that survives a quarter
Weekly: read what arrived, and delete what was not a move. Monthly: reread the top three competitors records end to end and mark anything older than a quarter as needing reconfirmation. Quarterly: ask whether the competitor list is still the right list, which it often is not.