How to Build a Competitor Tracking Kit Without Leaving HubSpot

A mid-market Australian business heading into tender season usually already knows who it's up against, two or three named competitors who show up in the same deals every time. What it doesn't have is anywhere reliable to keep what the team knows about them. The intel lives in one rep's head, or a spreadsheet last updated in March, and neither one is open when a deal review actually happens.

HubSpot fixes this because you can build and maintain a competitor kit inside the same platform you already use for CRM, marketing and sales. Competitor insight sits next to pipeline, customers and campaigns, where it can actually change a decision, instead of sitting in a file nobody opens.

Here's how to build it properly.

One base rate worth having before you start: the ABS put AI use among Australian businesses at around 12 per cent in 2024-25, and 22 per cent among medium businesses. When a competitor’s marketing implies everyone in your market has already moved, that is the number to measure the claim against.

Why this belongs inside HubSpot, not next to it

When competitor insight lives in the same system as your contacts, companies, deals and pipelines, and campaigns and content performance, you can connect competitive context to actual outcomes. Instead of switching between tools, competitor intel becomes part of the same record a rep is already looking at during a deal, so it gets used at the moment it actually matters.

Step 1: Identify your key competitors

Competitors usually fall into three groups: direct (same offer, same audience), indirect (different offer, same customer need), and aspirational (the name your customers compare you to, even if they're not a close match yet). To find them, review sales call notes for competitor mentions, ask the sales team what actually comes up in deals, and scan the pages your buyers use to compare options.

Keep the list short. Three to five core competitors, tracked properly, beats a long list nobody keeps current.

Step 2: Decide what you're actually tracking

Pick metrics that connect to a decision, not data you're collecting because it's there. The categories worth tracking: website traffic and engagement (directional, not exact), content topics and cadence, social positioning, product and pricing approach, customer sentiment from reviews and community chatter, and SEO patterns. Treat all of it as directional. Competitive traffic estimates in particular are rough, useful for spotting a trend, not a number to quote back to a client as fact.

Step 3: Turn on HubSpot's Competitors tool

HubSpot includes a Competitors tool under Reports, Analytics tools, Competitors, where you add competitors and review baseline comparisons on things like website traffic and social presence. Availability depends on your subscription tier. Treat it as a starting point: a fast comparative view, useful for spotting a trend, but not the record a rep pulls up mid deal.

Step 4: Build the real record with company objects and custom properties

This is where the kit becomes something people actually use. Create a company record for each competitor in HubSpot, the same as you would for a customer, and build custom properties to standardise what gets captured against it:

• Pricing tiers
• Key features
• Target audience or niche
• Positioning summary
• Recent launches, with date and notes
• Strengths and weaknesses
• Sales motion
• Notes and observations

This turns competitor information into something searchable and consistent, instead of scattered across a rep's notes app.

Step 5: Build battlecards reps will actually open

A battlecard only works if it's quick to scan, kept current, and sitting somewhere a rep is already looking: a deal record, a playbook, the knowledge base. The template worth building: who they are and who they sell to, strengths and weaknesses, key differentiators, the objections you'll actually hear, and pricing notes at a high level. Use the competitor company record as the source of truth and link the battlecard from there, so updating one updates the other. Here's how to turn that intel into battlecards reps actually use.

Step 6: Automate the parts that keep the kit alive

Keeping a competitor kit current is the hardest part, and it's where workflows earn their place. A deal property that includes "Competitor = X" can automatically create a task for the rep to review the battlecard. An update to a competitor's company record can trigger an internal notification. A monthly reminder task can prompt a review of the top competitor records.

Step 7: Report on it properly

Use HubSpot reporting to keep competitor insight visible: a dashboard showing positioning summaries and last reviewed dates, a report on deals where a competitor is tagged, by stage and close rate, and a view of which competitors show up most in late-stage deals. The questions worth answering: who are we losing to and why, where are we winning and what's driving it, and what's shifting in the market that affects pipeline.

Step 8: Feed it into marketing and sales, not just a dashboard

For marketing, the kit points at content gaps, where a competitor covers ground you don't, and at where your positioning is unclear. For sales, tagging a competitor on a deal shows which competitors show up in which segments, where the win rate is strongest or weakest, and which objections keep recurring.

Keeping it current

A competitor kit that isn't reviewed goes stale fast. Set a cadence: weekly for fast-moving items like sales intel, monthly for campaigns and pricing changes, quarterly for a proper review of the competitor list itself. Add a "last reviewed" property to each competitor company record so you can report on how current the kit actually is, and add or retire competitors as they start or stop showing up in real deals.

Want help building this inside your own portal, properly, and connected to the deals it's meant to inform? Here's how we set up RevOps systems in HubSpot, and here's the broader case for tracking competitors this way. Book a chat with us and we'll set one up with you.