How to Track Competitors Properly Using the HubSpot You Already Have
You already pay for the CRM that could be running your competitive intelligence. Here's how to make marketing, sales, service and the CRM itself do that job instead of adding another tool.
Most competitive intelligence lives in someone's head, not in a system. A rep remembers what a prospect said about a rival's pricing. A marketer half-remembers a competitor's last campaign. None of it is written down anywhere the rest of the business can use.
That is what competitive intelligence is meant to fix: turning what individual people happen to notice into something the whole business can act on. Most teams already have the tool to do it. They are just not using it for this job.
What competitive intelligence actually is
Competitive intelligence is the systematic process of gathering, analysing and acting on information about competitors, market trends, and what customers actually want. Done properly, it tightens your positioning, improves win rates because your reps are ready for the objection before it comes up, points at content and SEO gaps worth chasing, and helps you learn from where competitors are actually failing their customers.
Most businesses run this out of browser bookmarks, Slack messages and whatever a sales rep remembers from a call. That's how it goes stale and stays scattered. The fix is not a new piece of software. It's making HubSpot, which you're already paying for and already connected to campaigns, deals and support conversations, do this job too.
Using the hubs you already have
Marketing Hub: what competitors are actually doing to get attention
Marketing Hub can help you track the topics competitors focus on, the offers they promote, how their landing pages and calls to action are built, and which channels they actually show up on. Benchmarked against your own performance, that turns into real decisions: which topic clusters to build, where the content gaps are, which campaign angles are worth testing.
Sales Hub: intelligence that doesn't die in a call note
Reps hear competitor names every week, and most of it disappears into notes nobody reads again. Sales Hub can capture the objections prospects actually raise, which competitor strengths genuinely matter (not the ones the team assumes matter), where the openings are, and the deal patterns behind where you win and lose. That gives reps fewer surprises mid-deal and gives leadership real visibility into what's happening in the market, not a guess.
Service Hub: where the truth about a competitor shows up
Customers are blunt about what isn't working, including with your competitors. Service Hub can help you track the friction points customers keep raising, the specific problems they've had with a previous provider, and the onboarding or delivery gaps they actually care about. That turns into a service promise you can point to directly, and stronger retention and referrals as a result.
Data Hub: keeping it usable, not just collected
None of the above matters if it goes stale. Data Hub is what keeps competitor fields structured and consistent, syncs data across systems, and automates the reminders that stop competitive intelligence from depending on one person remembering to update it.
The CRM: where it all becomes searchable
Store competitors as Company records, and track them with custom properties: a positioning summary, target segments, high level pricing notes, strengths and weaknesses, key differentiators against you, the objections that come up most in deals, and a "last reviewed" date. Once it's in the CRM, sales can pull it up mid-deal, marketing can check it against messaging, and leadership can see the pattern without chasing anyone for an update.
Where AI actually helps here
HubSpot's AI tools can summarise customer conversations and notes, spot themes across sales calls, help draft messaging based on the real objections and language your team is hearing, and point at gaps in performance data worth a closer look. AI speeds up the analysis. Deciding what matters and what to do about it is still your team's job, not the model's.
Extending it without rebuilding the mess you're trying to fix
Where does your competitor intel actually live?
Usually a spreadsheet, a Slack thread, and someone's memory.
HubSpot's App Marketplace can add deeper social listening, analytics enrichment, or dedicated competitive tracking tools. The point of adding any of them is to feed insight back into HubSpot, not to build a second, disconnected system that recreates the exact problem you started with.
What good competitive intelligence looks like in practice
Marketing builds content around real gaps, not assumptions. Sales uses talk tracks that match what prospects are actually saying. Service fixes onboarding and support around the pain points customers keep repeating. Leadership uses the pattern across all three to set priorities rather than reacting late. That is the difference between competitive intelligence as a research exercise and competitive intelligence as something that changes revenue.
Keeping it current
To keep this useful rather than another abandoned spreadsheet: define what you're tracking and why, and keep it narrow. Standardise the competitor properties in the CRM. Set an update cadence, monthly or quarterly is usually enough. Build a simple workflow so a new piece of intelligence from a sales call actually becomes a property update, not a note that disappears. Build one dashboard that shows what's changing and what's showing up in live deals. And share it across marketing, sales and service, so all three are working from the same picture.
Why now, specifically
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) found that in 2024-25, around 12 per cent of Australian businesses reported using AI, and adoption is heavily skewed by size: 35 per cent of large businesses, up from 9 per cent in 2021-22, compared with 22 per cent of medium businesses and around 11 per cent of small and micro businesses. Most businesses, including most of your competitors, are still not running anything systematic with AI-assisted monitoring. Setting this up properly in HubSpot now, following the National AI Centre's Guidance for AI Adoption once you move from ad hoc checking to something governed, puts you ahead of that curve rather than catching up to it later.
Where to start
Sitting on competitor research nobody acts on?
Most teams collect it and then never change a single decision.
Competitive intelligence is about making better decisions with less guesswork, using systems your teams are already logged into every day. Want a hand setting it up so it's actually usable in real deals and campaigns, not just a properties list nobody fills in? Our RevOps and HubSpot team can build it with you, and our step by step guide to building a competitor analytics kit and turning that intelligence into battle cards your reps actually use are good next reads. Get in touch when you're ready.