Competitor Reviews Playbook

Two or three competitors with plenty of reviews, pulled from every site where their customers talk.

• Apify pulls reviews from G2, Capterra and Trustpilot, with each rating, date, role and company size.
• Serper finds the Reddit and forum threads where their customers complain in the open.
• Low ratings carry the complaints. High ratings show what you have to match.
• New reviews are pulled every week.

• Apify
• Serper

Claude Code reads every review and groups the complaints into the few themes that keep coming back.

• Claude Code tags each complaint and counts the themes, such as:
  • Support that takes days
  • An integration they needed and never got
  • Price rises at renewal
  • A setup that never finished
• Each theme keeps its real quotes and who wrote them: role, company size and industry.
• Only themes you actually solve are kept. A complaint your own customers share is a trap.
• Each theme gets its answer: the proof you handle it, such as a support SLA, the integration, or public pricing.

• Claude Code

Three ways to find accounts on the competitor's tool, and the ones already unhappy with it.

• Sumble: the company's job posts name the competitor's tool, which shows who runs it and how much they lean on it.
• Apify: reviewers who left a low rating and named their company.
• RB2B: a visit to your comparison or alternatives page, a sign they are already shopping.
• A Sumble match only counts when it lands on the account's exact domain.

• Sumble
• Apify
• RB2B

Anyone already covered comes off the list, your own customers first.

• Check every account in HubSpot before anything else happens.
• Your own customers sometimes run the competitor too. They go to their account owner, never into this campaign.
• Open deals stay with their rep, and active sequences are left to finish. Anyone who opted out never comes back.

• HubSpot

Each account gets a decision maker, a champion and a user, each with a work email.

• Map the buying committee at each account:
  • The decision maker
  • A likely champion
  • A day-to-day user of the competitor's tool
• The enrichment waterfall uses IcyPeas, Prospeo, LeadMagic and GetLeads.
• Each vendor only sees the contacts the ones before it missed.

• IcyPeas
• Prospeo
• LeadMagic
• GetLeads

Every email is checked twice before anything sends.

• MillionVerifier checks every address first, then BounceBan checks every address that passes.
• Sort each address by the result:
  • Valid: kept for the campaign
  • Catch-all: kept only if BounceBan marks it deliverable, and sent from its own campaign so its results read separately
  • Invalid, disposable or unknown: removed
• An enrichment vendor's own check never counts as one of the two.

• MillionVerifier
• BounceBan

Each account is scored on fit, then matched to the complaint theme that fits it best.

• Jev and OpenRouter score fit against your ICP, and pick each account's theme from its size, industry and signals.
• The reviewers are the evidence. A theme raised again and again by 50-person agencies fits a 50-person agency.
• They classify and score only. Neither one enriches.
• The tier comes from fixed rules on top of their answers:
  • Tier one: a strong fit that left a bad review or visited your comparison page
  • Tiers two and three: a fit that runs the competitor, with no sign of pain yet
  • No fit: left out

• Jev
• OpenRouter

A Slack alert with the complaint and your answer to it, then one-to-one work.

• A Slack alert gives the owner the account, the signal, the matched complaint and your answer to it.
• The owner then works it one to one:
  • A warm call on Salesfinity
  • A personal note on LinkedIn or Gmail
• Never quote their own review back to them. Name the problem the way anyone in their seat would.
• Whatever the rep does from the alert is written back to the CRM.

• Slack
• Salesfinity
• LinkedIn
• Gmail

Emails open on the complaint their peers keep raising, then show how you handle it.

• Emails in EmailBison open on the theme matched to them:
  • "[Competitor] reviews keep coming back to [complaint]. We [how you handle it]. Is that a problem at [company] too?"
• The competitor is named only when the account is known to run it.
• Every claim about your product has to hold up. They will check it against their own experience.
• Two emails in total, no link in the first, and open tracking off.
• New reviews every week bring new themes and new angles, so the emails are refreshed as they land.

• EmailBison