Your competitor just lost a customer. That customer spent the last two weeks researching alternatives, reading comparison articles, checking G2 reviews, and visiting pricing pages across your category.
You didn’t know about any of it. Neither did your sales team. The customer quietly evaluated three options and picked one of them. It wasn’t you, because nobody on your team knew this person was in-market.
That’s the competitive intelligence gap Orbit closes. Instead of reacting to lost deals after the fact, you can track who’s actively researching your competitors in real-time - with their name, email, company, and intent score - and reach them while they’re still deciding.
What “Competitive Intelligence” Means in Orbit
Traditional competitive intelligence is about tracking what your competitors DO - their pricing changes, product launches, messaging shifts. That’s useful background information.
Orbit’s competitive intelligence is about tracking who’s researching your competitors. That’s actionable sales data.
| Traditional CI | Orbit CI |
|---|---|
| Competitor launched a new feature | 47 people researched that feature this week |
| Competitor raised their prices | 112 people searched for competitor alternatives |
| Competitor’s G2 ratings dropped | People reading those negative reviews, identified |
| Competitor hired a new sales VP | People evaluating your competitor, with contact data |
The difference: traditional CI tells you what competitors are doing. Orbit CI tells you who’s paying attention - and gives you a way to reach them.
Step 1: Find Competitor-Named Topics
Open Orbit’s topic browser and search for each competitor’s product name. Orbit covers 20,735 topics, and most established B2B products have dedicated topics.
Here’s what a typical competitor topic search looks like for a marketing automation company:
| Search Term | Topics Found | Example Topics |
|---|---|---|
| ”HubSpot” | 8+ | HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing, HubSpot Alternatives |
| ”Marketo” | 5+ | Marketo, Marketo Alternatives, Adobe Marketo |
| ”Pardot” | 3+ | Pardot, Salesforce Pardot, Pardot Alternatives |
| ”Mailchimp” | 4+ | Mailchimp, Mailchimp Alternatives, Mailchimp vs |
| ”ActiveCampaign” | 3+ | ActiveCampaign, ActiveCampaign Alternatives |
Select all relevant topics for each competitor. The more specific the topic, the higher the intent. “HubSpot alternatives” is higher intent than “HubSpot” alone - someone searching for alternatives has already decided to look elsewhere.
Using Website Analysis
Orbit has a website analysis feature that accelerates this process. Paste a competitor’s URL and Orbit scrapes the page, extracts keywords, and matches them to relevant topics automatically.
Try pasting:
- Your competitor’s homepage
- Their pricing page
- Their product comparison pages
- Their G2 or TrustRadius listing
Each URL generates a set of matched topics you can add to your audience with one click.
Step 2: Analyze Topic Trends
Before building audiences, check if competitor topics are growing or declining. This tells you whether the market is moving toward or away from a specific competitor.
| Trend Signal | What It Means | Your Action |
|---|---|---|
| Competitor topic growing | They’re gaining mindshare | Aggressive positioning needed |
| Competitor topic declining | They’re losing momentum | Opportunity to capture switchers |
| ”[Competitor] alternatives” growing | Dissatisfaction is rising | Build a “switcher” audience immediately |
| Your topic growing relative to theirs | You’re winning mindshare | Double down on current messaging |
Rising “alternatives” searches for a competitor are the strongest signal. It means their customer base is actively looking for the exit. This is exactly when intent data becomes most valuable.
Step 3: Build Competitor Research Audiences
Now create audiences for each competitive scenario. Here are three audience configurations every company should run:
Audience A: Active Competitor Evaluators
People researching your competitor’s product name.
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Topics | [Competitor name], [Competitor product] |
| Seniority | Director, VP, CXO |
| Company Size | Your target range |
| Department | Relevant buying department |
| Refresh | Daily |
This audience captures people in active evaluation. They might be current users doing renewal research, prospects comparing options, or decision makers being pitched by your competitor.
Audience B: Competitor Leavers
People specifically researching alternatives to your competitor.
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Topics | ”[Competitor] alternatives,” “[Competitor] vs” |
| Seniority | All levels (dissatisfaction spans org) |
| Company Size | Your target range |
| Contact Availability | Has business email |
| Refresh | Daily |
This is your highest-intent competitive audience. These people have decided to look beyond the competitor. They need a replacement, and you want to be first in their inbox.
Audience C: Category Comparison Shoppers
People researching your broader category alongside competitor names.
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Topics | [Category name] + [Competitor name] (overlap) |
| Seniority | Manager+ |
| Company Size | Your target range |
| Refresh | Daily |
People showing intent on BOTH your category AND a specific competitor are in the most active evaluation phase. The topic overlap indicates they’re comparing vendors right now.
Step 4: Filter to Your ICP
Raw competitor research audiences can be large. A well-known competitor might have 10,000+ people researching them. You don’t want to reach all of them - you want the ones who fit your ideal customer profile.
Apply filters aggressively:
Seniority matters. A junior analyst researching competitors is doing homework for their boss. A VP researching competitors is making a buying decision. Filter for decision-maker seniority.
Company size qualifies budget. If you sell to mid-market (50-500 employees), don’t waste outreach on enterprise prospects or one-person shops. The audience builder handles this natively.
Department reveals role. Someone in Finance researching your CRM competitor might be looking at financial reporting features. Someone in Sales researching the same competitor is evaluating the core product. Filter to the department that actually buys.
Geography focuses effort. If your sales team is US-only, don’t include international prospects. Orbit supports US state-level filtering.
After filtering, a competitive audience of 10,000 typically narrows to 500-2,000 qualified prospects. That’s a manageable number for personalized outreach.
Step 5: Reach Them with Switching Messaging
The outreach for competitive audiences is different from cold outreach. These people are already interested in your category. They’re already considering a change. Your messaging should acknowledge that.
What Works
Reference the problem, not the competitor. Instead of “I see you’re looking at HubSpot alternatives,” try “If you’re evaluating marketing automation tools, here’s something most comparison articles miss.” The former is creepy. The latter is helpful.
Lead with differentiation. What does your product do that the competitor doesn’t? For Leadpipe, that’s deterministic matching (8.7/10 accuracy vs competitors’ 4-5/10) and person-level intent data.
Offer a side-by-side test. The strongest CTA for competitive audiences isn’t “book a demo.” It’s “try us alongside [Competitor] and compare the results.” For Leadpipe, that means 500 free identified leads to run a real comparison.
Time it to the intent spike. Orbit refreshes daily. When someone’s intent score jumps from 45 to 90 overnight, that’s when you reach out. Stale intent signals (weeks old) produce worse response rates. Check your competitive audiences daily, not weekly.
What Doesn’t Work
Don’t trash the competitor. “HubSpot is terrible, switch to us” backfires. The prospect might still like the competitor - they might just need features the competitor doesn’t have.
Don’t be obviously surveillance-y. You have the intent data. They don’t know that. Lead with value, not “I tracked your browsing behavior.”
Don’t mass-blast. These are high-value prospects with proven intent. Personalized one-to-one outreach outperforms mass email by 3-5x. Take the time to reference their specific company, role, and likely use case.
Advanced: Layering Competitive Audiences
Once you’ve built basic competitor audiences, you can layer them for deeper intelligence.
Layer 1: Competitor + Category Overlap
People researching BOTH a specific competitor AND your broader category are in the most active evaluation phase. Create an audience with both topic types selected and look for high overlap scores.
For example, someone researching “Salesforce” AND “CRM alternatives” simultaneously is more likely to switch than someone just researching “Salesforce” (they might be an existing user looking for help docs).
Layer 2: Multi-Competitor Research
Someone researching two or more of your competitors is doing a vendor bake-off. They’re comparing options and will make a decision soon. Orbit lets you select multiple competitor topics and find people researching several at once.
These multi-competitor researchers are the highest-value targets in your competitive intelligence program. They’re past the “do I need a solution?” phase and deep into “which solution do I pick?”
Layer 3: Competitor + Dissatisfaction Signals
Combine competitor name topics with topics like “[Competitor] pricing,” “[Competitor] limitations,” or “[Competitor] alternatives.” The overlap between brand research and problem-oriented research is a strong signal that someone is unhappy with their current solution and actively exploring options.
This is where person-level intent data dramatically outperforms company-level alternatives like Bombora. You’re not just seeing that “Acme Corp is interested in CRM” - you’re seeing that Sarah Chen at Acme Corp researched “Salesforce pricing too high” and “Salesforce alternatives for mid-market” in the same week.
Competitive Intelligence Cadence
Here’s a weekly routine that takes 30 minutes:
| Day | Action | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Review all competitive audiences for new high-intent entries | 10 min |
| Monday | Route top 10 prospects to reps with context notes | 5 min |
| Wednesday | Check for topic trend changes (rising/falling competitor interest) | 5 min |
| Wednesday | Export weekly batch for email sequences | 5 min |
| Friday | Review outreach response rates by competitor audience | 5 min |
This cadence keeps your competitive intelligence fresh without consuming your team’s time. The daily Orbit refresh means you’re always working with current data, not stale signals.
Feed the exports into your AI SDR workflow or Clay waterfall for automated enrichment and sequencing. The combination of intent data + visitor identification gives your outreach the context it needs to convert.
Real-World Example
A mid-market SaaS company selling project management software set up three Orbit competitive audiences: Asana researchers, Monday.com researchers, and “project management alternatives” searchers.
In the first month:
- Audience A (Asana researchers): 1,847 people identified. After ICP filtering: 312 qualified prospects.
- Audience B (Monday.com researchers): 2,103 people identified. After ICP filtering: 287 qualified prospects.
- Audience C (Alternatives searchers): 934 people identified. After ICP filtering: 156 qualified prospects.
The alternatives audience (C) had the smallest volume but the highest response rate to outreach - 14% reply rate vs 6-8% for the broader competitor audiences. These people had already decided to switch. The only question was where they’d land.
Total cost: $147/mo (included in their Leadpipe plan). Previous Bombora contract for similar data: $45,000/yr, company-level only.
Why This Beats Traditional Win/Loss Analysis
Most companies do competitive intelligence after the fact - win/loss interviews, deal post-mortems, quarterly competitor reviews. By the time you learn that prospects are considering Competitor X, the deals are already decided.
Orbit flips the timeline. You see competitive research behavior while it’s happening, not weeks or months later. That turns competitive intelligence from a retrospective exercise into a real-time pipeline generation engine.
The combination of Orbit’s cross-web competitive signals with Leadpipe’s on-site visitor identification gives you complete coverage: who’s researching competitors across the web (Orbit) and who’s comparing you directly by visiting your website (Leadpipe). Together, you have visibility into the full competitive evaluation cycle.
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