You are a Product Manager for a B2B enterprise product. You need to do a competitor analysis but the products of your competitors are not openly accessible without a long drawn sales negotiation. How do you go about it?

Thanks for your question.

For doing a competitive analysis of my B2B product, I would like to gather all the information I can about my competitors based on the overall product as well as competitors in a specific feature/use case of my product. Post this, I will use a competitive analysis framework such as SWOT for my product vs every other competitor.

There are five sources from where I can gather information related to my competitors.

1. Competitor's website: Websites of B2B products have information regarding their solutions, features, vision, and especially the mission. It can inform me about not only what solutions my competitors provide in the present but also what path will they take in future with regard to their product features.
2. News articles: News articles provide details about latest offerings (or features), funding, mergers, and acquisitions related to my competitors.
3. Surveys: I may also carry out surveys targeted at employees of business customers of my competitor's products. While I may ask questions such as which ERP tool do you use? and what do you like/dislike about it?, I will not ask questions specific to the features.
4. Product demo/conferences: My sales team can also attend public demos of my competitors' products such as during their conferences
5. Customer discussions: While targeting new customers, my sales team can talk about what do the customers like/dislike about their existing ERP tools.

That's how I would approach the competitor analysis in case of B2B products.