In today’s dynamic business environment, understanding your competitors isn’t just helpful. It’s essential for sustainable growth. A strong competitor analytics kit helps you navigate market complexity, refine your strategy, and keep your edge. 

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HubSpot makes this easier because you can build and maintain your kit inside the same platform you already use for CRM, marketing, and sales. That means competitor insight doesn’t sit in a forgotten spreadsheet. It sits next to pipeline, customers, and campaigns, where it can actually influence decisions.

This guide walks you through a practical, step-by-step process to build a competitor analytics kit in HubSpot so your marketing and sales teams can act faster and win more often.

The Imperative of Competitive Intelligence in Today’s Market

  • The business landscape is crowded and fast-paced. Staying ahead requires more than internal focus. It demands awareness of external forces, especially competitors.

    Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of collecting and analysing information about rivals to understand their strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and likely next moves. Done well, CI helps you:

    • Anticipate market shifts
    • Spot opportunities earlier
    • Reduce the risk of being blindsided
    • Protect revenue and market share

    You’ll often see stats quoted about how widely CI is adopted in large enterprises. The main point still stands without overclaiming: many high-performing organisations invest heavily in CI because it improves decision-making and reduces strategic risk.

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The Power of Building Your Kit Within HubSpot

The advantage of using HubSpot for competitor analytics is integration. When competitor insight lives in the same system as your:

…you can connect competitive context to business outcomes.

Instead of switching between tools, you create one source of truth for competitor intel that supports:

  • Faster internal alignment
  • Cleaner workflows
  • Better collaboration between marketing and sales
  • More consistent messaging in the field

Laying the Foundation for Your Competitor Kit

Before you touch tools, get clear on two things:

  1. Who matters, and
  2. What you’re tracking

Step 1: Identify Your Key Competitors

Competitors typically fall into three buckets:

  • Direct competitors: Similar product/service, same target audience
  • Indirect competitors: Different offer, same customer need
  • Aspirational competitors: The benchmark brand your customers compare you to, even if they’re not a perfect match today

How to identify them:

  • Review sales notes and call recordings for competitor mentions
  • Ask your sales team what comes up most in deals
  • Scan your market and category pages (where buyers compare options)
  • Review industry reports and communities where your buyers hang out

Keep it focused. Most teams only need 3 to 5 core competitors to start. You can expand later once the kit is working.

Step 2: Define Your Core Competitive Metrics and KPIs

Choose metrics aligned to your business goals. Aim for data you can use, not data you can collect “just in case”.

Common categories:

  • Website traffic and engagement (directional trends, not perfect truth)
  • Content performance (topics, cadence, formats, distribution)
  • Social presence (engagement themes, positioning, consistency)
  • Product/service (packaging, pricing approach, key differentiators)
  • Customer sentiment (reviews, community chatter, recurring complaints)
  • SEO (keywords, content clusters, backlink profile patterns)
  • Market share indicators (proxy signals, not private revenue guesses)

Assembling Your Kit with Core HubSpot Tools

Now you’re ready to build this in HubSpot.

Step 3: Activate and Use HubSpot’s Competitors Tool

HubSpot includes a Competitors tool (availability depends on your subscription tier).

How to set it up:

  1. Go to Reports → Analytics tools → Competitors
  2. Add your competitors
  3. Review baseline benchmarks regularly

This tool can provide a fast comparative view across areas like:

Position it as a starting point, not gospel. Competitive web traffic estimates are notoriously imperfect, but they’re still useful for spotting trends and shifts.

Step 4: Structure Competitor Data Using Company Records and Custom Properties

This is where your kit becomes genuinely useful.

Create a company record for each competitor in HubSpot (yes, treat them like a company in your CRM). Then create custom properties to standardise how you capture intel.

Recommended custom properties:

  • Pricing tiers (dropdown / number)
  • Key features (multi-line text)
  • Target audience / niche (dropdown / text)
  • Positioning summary (multi-line text)
  • Recent launches (date + notes)
  • Key campaigns (multi-line text)
  • Strengths (multi-line text)
  • Weaknesses (multi-line text)
  • USP (multi-line text)
  • Sales motions (dropdown)
  • Notes / observations (multi-line text)

This means competitor info is searchable, reportable, and consistent. No more “where did we write that down?”

Step 5: Build Competitor Battlecards for Sales

Battlecards only work if they’re:

  • Quick to scan
  • Updated
  • Actually available where reps work

Your battlecard template should include:

  • Overview (who they are, who they sell to)
  • Strengths and weaknesses
  • Key differentiators vs you
  • Common objections you’ll hear
  • Suggested talk tracks and proof points
  • Pricing notes (high-level only)

Tip: Use your competitor company record properties as the single source of truth, then link battlecards from wherever your sales team lives (deal records, playbooks, knowledge base, etc.).

Step 6: Automate Competitive Intelligence with HubSpot Workflows

Automation keeps the kit alive, which is the hardest part.

Workflow ideas:

  • Deal tagging support: If a deal property includes “Competitor = X”, auto-create a task for the rep to review the battlecard.
  • Internal alerts: Notify a Slack channel or internal email list when a competitor record is updated.
  • Content monitoring process: Trigger a task for the marketing team when you log a competitor content drop (this may require an external signal source, but HubSpot can still manage the workflow).
  • Regular reminders: Monthly tasks to review top competitor records and update key fields.

Leveraging Your Kit for Strategic Action and Insights

A kit that doesn’t influence decisions is just an admin with better branding.

Step 7: Create Reports and Dashboards for Competitive Oversight

Use HubSpot reporting to keep competitor insight visible.

Examples:

  • A dashboard showing competitor positioning summaries and last-updated date.
  • A report showing deals where a competitor is tagged, by stage and close rate.
  • A view of which competitors come up most in late-stage deals.
  • A content gap tracker (manual properties + reporting).

Your goal is to answer:

  • Who are we losing to, and why?
  • Where are we winning, and what’s driving it?
  • What’s shifting in the market that affects pipeline?

Step 8: Inform Marketing and Content Strategy

Use the kit for:

  • Content gap analysis: what competitors cover that you don’t.
  • Messaging and positioning: where your story is weak or unclear.
  • SEO direction: topics and clusters, not just random keywords.
  • Channel decisions: where competitors are investing and where customers are responding.

Keep it “why” focused: competitor insight should help you create clearer differentiation and better demand generation, not just more content.

Step 9: Empower Sales with Actionable Intelligence

Competitor intel matters most when it improves outcomes in real deals.

Use battlecards to support:

  • Better objection handling
  • Clearer differentiation
  • Deal strategy based on what prospects are comparing

Also, tagging competitors on deals gives you valuable insight into:

  • Which competitors show up in which segments
  • Where your win rate is strongest or weakest
  • Which objections are recurring

Maintaining and Evolving Your Competitor Analytics Kit

A competitor kit is never “done”. It’s either updated or it’s wrong.

Step 10: Regular Review and Updates

Set a cadence:

  • Weekly: fast-moving items (sales intel, messaging shifts)
  • Monthly: campaigns, content themes, pricing changes
  • Quarterly: strategic review of competitor list + metrics

Add a “Last reviewed” property on competitor company records so you can report on freshness.

Step 11: Adapt to Market Shifts and New Competitors

Keep your kit flexible:

  • Add new entrants when they start appearing in deals
  • Remove competitors that stop showing up
  • Add new fields when your market changes (for example, AI features, compliance requirements, integration ecosystems)

If you introduce new tools or sources, integrate them intentionally. More data is not always better. Better decisions are better.


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Conclusion: Stay Ahead with Your HubSpot Competitor Analytics Kit

Building a competitor analytics kit in HubSpot is a strategic investment. Done well, it helps you move from reactive to proactive by giving your teams shared, up-to-date intelligence they can act on.

The value isn’t in collecting competitor facts. The value is in using competitor insight to:

  • Sharpen your positioning
  • Improve sales conversations
  • Prioritise marketing effort
  • Win more of the deals that matter

Want help building this inside your HubSpot portal (properly, not “we’ll tidy it later”)? Book a chat with us and we’ll set up your competitor analytics kit with you.