GO-TO-MARKET PRODUCT COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

We find out who the customer is, what they will pay, and what it costs to serve them. Then we can build it.

You’re building for a customer your team hasn’t sold to before. Your roadmap depends on three key answers, but right now they’re all guesses. Your product manager gets a brief. It defines a customer no one has talked to, sets a price for something the product can’t measure yet, and ships by a date picked before any of this was clear. Then, defend it all at a board meeting where the investment decision depends on your answers.

At this stage, most of what you see is just opinions in a slide deck. You need real evidence you can show to engineering, finance, and your CRO—and it needs to stand up to scrutiny. That’s where we come in. We interview real buyers, mystery shop your competitors, and work with your engineers and finance team to get the numbers right. Then it’s your choice. You can take the evidence and build on your own, or we can stay and help you build it through launch with real customers.

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What we do

Learn what’s really true about a segment before you start building for it.

Octopus runs field research for product teams entering new markets, launching new tiers, or moving into segments your company has not sold to before.

Our analysts use HUMINT techniques from military intelligence and real product management experience. We create accurate buyer personas, reach out to competitors as real prospects, and dig as deep as needed. Then, we turn that evidence into decisions your product, pricing, engineering, and revenue teams can use.

Most go-to-market support stops at a positioning document. But the decisions that make your proposition succeed come after that.

What does the product need to measure before you can bill?
Is the new tier just a configuration or a whole new product?
What happens to your costs when sales conversations stop?

We keep commercial and technical questions together. If you separate them, plans often get lost in the backlog.

Product, pricing, RevOps and strategy teams use our work at SaaS platforms and vertical software businesses across the UK, Europe, MENA and North America.

What product go-to-market intelligence is

We run the competitive insight programme that sits underneath six connected decisions.

Who the customer is. Interviews with target buyers, and with the prospects and accounts you lost to a competitor, including why they left in their own words.

Which position you lead on. Candidate positions scored against six criteria, using buyer data in place of internal opinion, and what competitors say about you when your name comes up in their sales process.

What you charge, and on what unit. Willingness-to-pay research, plus competitor quotes gathered and modelled once setup, consumption and per-transaction fees are in.

What the product must count. A telemetry and event specification written with your engineers, so the pricing model you choose can work at all.

What it costs to serve. A cost-to-serve model built with your finance team.

Whether the tier forks the platform. An architecture and entitlement review, including whether your packaging fences hold up against a larger buyer with a reason to game them.

These answers are all connected. Change one, and the others are affected. That’s why they should be part of one program, not split into six separate reports from different people.

Who uses product go-to-market intelligence?

Product managers who own a roadmap for a segment nobody in the business has sold to, and who need an ideal customer profile they can defend at a review.

Pricing and monetisation teams who need to choose a value metric and know, before the decision is made, whether the product can meter it to the standard an invoice needs.

Product and platform leaders facing the packaging question, who want the entitlement position settled before the first new package reaches engineering.

RevOps and finance teams who have to bill, meter, provision and report on a model that was designed without them in the room.

Strategy teams running a segment entry, a tier launch or a pricing review, who need primary evidence rather than a competitor feature grid.

Founders and boards deciding whether a segment is worth the investment at all, and who would rather find out in a fortnight than in two quarters.

Our win-loss work shows what buyers thought after they decided. Our B2B mystery shopping shows what competitors say during the process. For product programmes we use both, along with your own data.

When a competitor’s product is what you are measured against, we go inside it. We acquire the platform the way a buyer would, by demo, trial or purchase, and test it in a controlled environment. Architecture, deployment, performance, onboarding, integrations, security posture, and where the AI is real work rather than a claim. Your name appears nowhere in any of it. You end up with what the product does, not what the website says it does, which is what a positioning decision has to survive.

The questions we put to your team

Two of them, on day one.

Why does your product not work for this customer right now? Not in theory or in the past, but today, for a real buyer. It could be price, minimum seats, setup, configurability or the lack of a self-serve option. Each one needs a different fix.

How many of your current customers started small and then grew? That number sits in your own billing history.

Your team already has both answers. Most of the time, though, no one has brought them together.

How we work

We design every project around your questions. Before we start, we agree on the intelligence questions, competitor shortlist, and buyer personas together.

What you end up holding:

A customer profile with the interviews behind it, and the findings that changed our view
Candidate positions scored against six criteria, including the ones we rejected and why
A value metric, its banding, the event specification and a named fallback
An entitlement and packaging position your CTO has agreed
A cost-to-serve model your finance team helped build and can run again without us
A business case with confidence ratings and the conditions that would overturn it

Going one step further

You still need to build the product. We can stay and help you do that. The same two people who gathered the evidence will work with your team, three or four days a week, joining your backlog, planning, and steering group.

You commission the evidence first. It runs to a fixed price and a fixed date, and it ends at a gate. At that gate, you decide: proceed, adjust or stop. If you stop, you keep every deliverable, and we leave. No notice period. No exit fee.

We set the price for the build phase before you start the research so that you can see the full commitment up front. If a supplier is already inside your business and quoting for the next phase, they have an advantage you can’t verify. We prefer to remove that advantage for ourselves, in writing.

We sequence the build by risk, starting with what is most likely to sink the launch. For most segment entries, that is getting customer data across from the system they use today.

The first increment builds one thin slice that works end to end. One migration route, one customer journey, one payment path, one metered event. That slice goes in front of a small group of design partners who use it in real work.

The second increment widens it. More migration routes. Billing is live and audited against the unit you chose to charge for. A controlled launch to real customers.

Launch isn’t just a date—it’s a set of criteria. We wait for open launch until the unit economics work for real customers and the support model can handle the volume.

The work we take on in this phase:

Entitlement and packaging, so a new package is a configuration change and not a code branch
Telemetry and metering, built to a standard that will stand behind an invoice
Migration-in as a product feature, owned by the product team and not by a services team
Billing and provisioning your finance team can run and audit
The self-serve journey and the support model that hold cost to serve where your pricing needs it
The operating model, so the new segment stops competing with your main business for engineering time

Then we hand everything over. You get the evidence function, growth mechanics, and platform work, each with a named owner in your business.

Why Octopus Intelligence

We’ve delivered primary competitive intelligence for over twenty years across SaaS, financial services, industrial, healthcare, and professional services. We plan each project, adapt as we go, and report accurately.

We also handle the technology side. Entitlement design, telemetry, migration, and security all determine whether your go-to-market plan will work with engineering. If your partner can’t manage these, you risk ending up with a plan that quietly fails.

We finish when you’re ready to run the next expansion on your own—whether that’s a new tier, a new customer type, or a new country. That’s how we measure success.

Case studies

If you’re building for a customer your business hasn’t sold to before, we can help you figure out who they are.

Let’s discuss your project

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