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Competitive Intelligence

3 min read

How to track competitors for each client and surface their latest moves in your morning briefing.

Overview

Armbrain monitors client competitors and delivers relevant news automatically. You configure a list of competitors per client mind, and Armbrain scans the web for recent activity. Findings are deduplicated, stored as memories, and included in your daily morning briefing.

Walk into every client meeting knowing what competitors did this week.

When to Use This

  • During client onboarding, to start tracking their competitive landscape from day one
  • When a client mentions new competitors entering their market
  • Before quarterly strategy sessions, to gather fresh competitive data
  • When you want to proactively bring competitive insights to a client meeting

Setting Up Competitors

Switch to a client mind, then tell Armbrain who to watch:

"Switch to Acme"
"Configure competitors: HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot"

You can also specify what topics to watch for each competitor:

"Configure competitors for Acme:
 - HubSpot: watch for pricing changes, new features, partnerships
 - Marketo: watch for enterprise deals, product launches
 - Pardot: watch for news, acquisitions"

Armbrain stores this in the client mind's configuration. Each client mind can track up to 5 competitors, and your total across all clients is capped at 20.

Running a Scan

To manually trigger a competitive scan:

"Scan competitors for Acme"

Armbrain searches the web for recent activity (last 7 days) related to each competitor and the topics you configured. Results are:

  1. Filtered for recency -- only news from the past week
  2. Deduplicated -- if Armbrain already stored a finding, it skips it
  3. Stored as memories -- findings become permanent competitive_intel memories in that client's client mind

You can run scans as often as you want. The deduplication ensures you never get the same finding twice.

How It Appears in Morning Briefings

When you run /cmo-brief, competitive intel shows up as its own section in the briefing:

### Competitive Intel
- HubSpot: Announces new AI-powered content assistant at INBOUND conference
- Marketo: Partners with Snowflake for enterprise data integration
- Pardot: Releases updated pricing tier for mid-market segment

If there is no recent competitive intel, the section is omitted.

Real-World Example

Monday morning:
"Switch to Acme"
"Scan competitors"

Result:
  Competitors scanned: 3
  Findings: 5 new items stored
  - HubSpot: New pricing tier announced for startups
  - HubSpot: Partnership with Shopify for e-commerce integration
  - Marketo: Q2 product roadmap leaked via analyst briefing
  - Pardot: Hiring surge in enterprise sales team
  - Pardot: New case study published with Fortune 500 client

Wednesday client meeting:
"Prep for Acme meeting"

Your briefing includes these findings under Competitive Intel,
giving you talking points your client did not expect.

Requirements

  • Web search MCP must be connected. Armbrain needs access to web search to find competitor news. If no search tool is available, it will tell you to connect one instead of failing silently.
  • Competitors must be configured per client mind. The scan only runs for the active client mind. Switch to the right client before scanning.

Tips

  • Set up competitors during onboarding. Add it to your onboarding checklist.
  • Keep watch topics focused. Broad topics like "news" work, but specific topics like "pricing changes" or "product launches" give more actionable results.
  • Run scans before strategy sessions. A fresh scan before planning meetings gives you current competitive data.
  • Review findings before sharing. Not every finding is relevant. Use competitive intel as discussion points, not a verbatim report.
  • Stay within the caps. 5 competitors per client, 20 across your portfolio. If you hit the cap, remove competitors from less critical clients.