Strategy & Planning

How to run competitive research as Small Marketing Teams

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Marketing Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your three-person team is supposed to be doing competitive research, but 'research' currently means one person spending half a Friday manually checking competitor websites, reading their LinkedIn posts, and cross-referencing G2 reviews — then dumping notes into a Notion doc that goes stale within two weeks. You don't have a dedicated analyst, you don't have a CI tool budget, and you definitely don't have time to do this every quarter, let alone monthly. Meanwhile the CEO asks 'what are our competitors doing on paid?' and you have to pull something together from memory or last quarter's ad library screenshots. Your HubSpot loss reasons aren't connected to anything systematic. You're flying partially blind.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Small Marketing Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live competitive intelligence tracker that pulls competitor mentions from X, monitors their public pages via browser automation, and surfaces changes to your team on a set schedule — no manual checking required.

A structured competitive briefing app that joins your HubSpot loss-reason data (synced directly from HubSpot) with external competitive signals, so you can tell the CEO exactly where deals are being lost and to whom.

A weekly competitive digest that your team actually reads — delivered to Gmail, written in plain language, with three specific things that changed since last week and what you should do about them.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

X Mentions Tracker Growth Analyst CRM

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule — contacts, companies, deals, and deal properties including loss reasons and competitor fields pull automatically. Connect Gmail from the integration catalog so the weekly digest lands in your inbox. Starch tracks X mentions through browser automation — no X API key required. Competitor public pages (pricing pages, changelog pages, blog) are monitored through browser automation as well, so even tools with no API are covered. Notion is connected from Starch's integration catalog so summaries can be written directly into your team wiki.

Prompts to copy

Track daily mentions of [Competitor A], [Competitor B], and [Competitor C] on X. Log each mention with the author, follower count, sentiment, and whether it's a complaint, a feature request, a comparison post, or a win announcement. Email me a summary every Monday morning.

Connect my HubSpot deals and filter for Closed Lost in the last 90 days. Pull the loss reason field and the competitor field, count how often each competitor appears, and build me a table showing which competitors we lose to most by deal size and industry segment.

Every Friday at 4pm, pull the competitive mention log from this week, the HubSpot loss-reason summary, and any price or feature changes detected on [Competitor A]'s pricing page. Write a two-paragraph competitive brief I can paste into our weekly marketing standup notes in Notion.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot — Starch syncs your deals, contacts, companies, and deal properties (including Closed Lost reasons and competitor tracking fields) on a schedule. This takes about two minutes; no API key configuration on your end.

2 Start the X Mentions Tracker from the App Store and configure it with your top three to five competitor handles and relevant branded keywords. Starch monitors X daily through browser automation — no X API needed — and logs each mention with author, context, and sentiment.

3 Tell Starch to build a competitive loss analysis: 'Look at all HubSpot deals marked Closed Lost in the past 90 days. Group by the competitor field and loss reason. Show me a breakdown by deal size bucket and the industry segment of the lost account.' Starch queries your synced HubSpot data and builds the view.

4 Set up browser automation to check your top two or three competitors' public pricing pages weekly. Tell Starch: 'Visit [Competitor A pricing URL] every Monday and compare it to last week's snapshot. Flag any pricing tier, feature list, or CTA change.' Starch runs this without needing their API.

5 Wire the weekly competitive brief automation: Starch pulls the X mention log, the HubSpot loss summary, and any detected page changes, then writes a structured brief and sends it to your team's Gmail every Friday afternoon.

6 Build a competitive positioning dashboard in Starch — describe it as: 'Show me a table of our top five competitors, columns for win rate against them from HubSpot, their most common complaint themes from X mentions this month, and the last detected change on their pricing page.' Starch assembles this from your connected sources.

7 Connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog so competitive briefs and positioning updates are written directly into your team wiki — not buried in someone's email thread or Google Doc.

8 Use the Growth Analyst app to cross-reference competitive activity with your own traffic and conversion trends. If a competitor launches a big campaign, you'll see if it correlates with dips in your branded search conversions or trial signups that week.

9 Set up a monthly Closed Lost debrief automation: 'On the first Monday of each month, pull all deals lost in the prior month, group by competitor, and draft a one-page summary of patterns I should bring to the sales team sync.' Starch runs this on schedule and posts to your Notion workspace.

10 Share the competitive positioning dashboard with your CEO as a read-only link — so the next time they ask 'what are competitors doing on paid?' you send a link instead of rebuilding something from memory.

11 As the competitive picture evolves, fork and update your Starch apps in natural language — add a new competitor handle to the tracker, update the HubSpot field mapping, or change the brief format. No rebuilding from scratch; just describe the change.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q1 2026 Competitive Review — February Loss Spike

Sample numbers from a real run

HubSpot Closed Lost deals referencing Competitor A (Feb)	14
HubSpot Closed Lost deals referencing Competitor A (Jan)	6
Avg deal size lost to Competitor A in Feb	28,000
X mentions of Competitor A flagged as 'pricing' or 'cheaper' in Feb	37
X mentions of Competitor A same category in Jan	11

In early March, the weekly competitive brief flagged something your team hadn't noticed in the noise: losses to Competitor A doubled in February, from 6 to 14 deals, and the average deal size was $28,000 — larger than your typical loss. Starch's X mentions tracker had already logged 37 posts in February mentioning Competitor A in the same breath as 'pricing' or 'cheaper', up from 11 in January. The browser automation watching their pricing page caught a change on February 3rd: they had added a new 'Starter' tier at $299/month — a price point you don't have. When your CEO asked 'why did MQL-to-close drop in February?' you had a two-paragraph answer with actual numbers within 10 minutes, sourced directly from your HubSpot data and the competitive monitoring automations. No analyst hours. No manual G2 trawling. The brief was already in Notion before the Monday standup.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Competitor appearance rate in HubSpot Closed Lost reasons (% of lost deals referencing each competitor, tracked month-over-month)

Competitive mention volume on X by week (volume and sentiment trend per monitored competitor)

Pricing and feature change detection cadence (number of detected changes per competitor per quarter)

Win rate delta in competitive deals (HubSpot won vs. lost when a specific competitor is in the deal)

Time to competitive brief (how quickly the team can answer a competitive question with sourced data — currently measured in hours or days for most small marketing teams)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Crayon or Klue

Purpose-built competitive intelligence platforms with richer features, but typically $15,000–$40,000/year — a hard sell for a three-person marketing team at a 120-person company that also needs budget for paid, tools, and contractors.

Manual Notion doc + weekly Googling

Free and flexible, but goes stale within weeks, depends entirely on whoever remembers to update it, and produces no structured data you can tie back to HubSpot loss reasons.

G2 / Capterra review monitoring (manual)

Good for feature perception, but you have to check it yourself, it doesn't connect to your deal data, and it misses real-time competitive moves on social and pricing pages.

A BI tool like Looker or Metabase connected to HubSpot

Can surface the HubSpot loss-reason analysis if you have budget, an engineer to set up the connector, and time to build the report — most three-person marketing teams have none of the three.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — x mentions tracker, growth analyst, crm all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We track Closed Lost reasons in HubSpot, but the data is messy — reps fill it in inconsistently. Can Starch work with that?

Yes, and Starch can help clean it up. You can tell Starch to 'group Closed Lost reasons by semantic similarity and flag deals where the reason field looks incomplete or inconsistent' — it'll read the raw HubSpot data and surface the patterns even through the noise. It won't force reps to fill in the field, but it can show you where the gaps are so you can fix the process.

We want to monitor competitor blog posts and LinkedIn pages, not just X. Can Starch do that?

Yes. Any public web page a human can visit — a competitor's blog, their LinkedIn company page, their changelog — Starch can automate through your browser. You'd describe it as: 'Check [Competitor A's blog URL] every week and summarize any new posts.' No API required. LinkedIn monitoring uses browser automation the same way.

Does Starch store a historical archive of competitor pricing pages so I can diff them over time?

Starch is built for live data surfaces, not long-horizon data warehousing. If you want a persistent archive going back 12 months, you'd need a dedicated archiving tool. What Starch does well is flag changes as they happen and log them into your competitive tracker — it's forward-looking, not a retroactive historical archive.

We use Customer.io for email, not Gmail. Can the competitive brief still be delivered to our team?

The weekly digest automation sends to Gmail by default (Starch syncs Gmail directly). For Customer.io, you'd connect it from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live — you can route outputs there, or just have the brief written to your Notion workspace so the whole team sees it without an email dependency.

Is this SOC 2 certified? We'll have to answer that question from our security team.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing upfront. If your security team requires SOC 2 Type II as a hard requirement for any new tool connection, that's a blocker to flag before you start. It's on the roadmap but not available now.

How is this different from just asking ChatGPT to summarize what our competitors are doing?

ChatGPT gives you a general summary based on training data, which can be outdated and doesn't know about your specific deal history. Starch connects to your actual HubSpot loss reasons, monitors your specific competitor pages on a schedule, and logs real X mentions as they happen. The brief it produces is grounded in your data, not a general description of the competitive landscape.