Competitive Intelligence

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

Overview#

Coppermind can monitor your clients' competitors and bring you relevant news automatically. You configure a list of competitors per client mind, and Coppermind scans the web for recent activity. Findings are deduplicated, stored as memories, and included in your daily morning briefing.

This means you walk into every client meeting already knowing what the competition did this week -- without manually checking news sites or setting up Google Alerts.

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 Coppermind 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"

Coppermind 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"

Coppermind 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 Coppermind 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 for a client, the section is simply omitted -- no clutter.

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. Coppermind 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. Make it part of your client setup checklist so competitive tracking starts immediately.
• 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 right before a quarterly planning meeting gives you the most current competitive landscape.
• Review findings before sharing. Not every finding is relevant. Use the competitive intel as a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim report to the client.
• Stay within the caps. 5 competitors per client, 20 across your portfolio. If you hit the cap, remove competitors from clients where competitive tracking is less critical.