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Competitors Slide & Competitive Analysis (Guide + Templates)

Learn how to research, write, and present a competitors slide in a pitch deck. Get tools to express and visualize your competitive landscape and advantage.

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Short answer

What is a competitor slide?

A pitch deck’s competitor slide gives an overview of key competitors. It highlights their strengths, weaknesses, market positions, and how your company’s product or service differs from theirs.

It’s added so investors understand your strategic advantages, business defensibility, and market understanding.

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What do investors look for in a competitive analysis?

Investors want details on potential threats, market gaps, and barriers to entry. They assess how well you understand industry dynamics, anticipate future trends, and prepare for potential challenges.

Knowing your indirect competitors and market shifts also reassures investors of your strategic foresight. So, it’s important to have all these pointers in the competitive landscape slides.

Why is a competitors slide importnat?

A strong competitive analysis slide prepares you for potential objections and helps highlight your unique value proposition more effectively.

Getting outcompeted ranks at #3 among and accounts for 20% of the top 12 reasons startups fail.

Why? Because it’s more than just knowing your competitors. These decks let you prove you understand the market and where your product fits.

What does a competitive analysis in a pitch deck include?

Competitor overview: List your key competitors, details on their market presence, and core offerings.
Market positioning: Show where your product stands relative to competitors in terms of market share and customer perception.
SWOT analysis: Summarize competitor strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to lay the foundation.
Feature comparison: Compare your product’s features directly against competitors to showcase your advantages.
Market share data: Present market data on how much your competitors control versus your position.
Competitive advantage: Highlight what sets your product apart and why it can succeed.
Barriers to entry: Discuss new entrants’ challenges so you can reinforce your market position.
Pricing strategies: Analyze how competitors price their products and where your pricing stands.
Recent developments or trends: Mention recent market shifts or emerging trends that could affect your business.

How to write and present a competitors slide in a pitch deck?

To present your competitive analysis slide, keep these points in mind:

1. Start with a clear market overview

Opening with this sets the stage for understanding where your business fits within the broader market space. Here, you should summarize the market size, growth trends, and the key players involved.

When you provide this context, investors can better grasp the scope of the opportunity and the competitive dynamics at play.

In fact, DocSend’s analysis found that almost 85% of successful pitches included market size, and over 65% mentioned competition-related information.

Remember to use reliable data sources to back up your claims. To make the information more digestible, consider incorporating visual aids like market share graphs or industry trend charts.

Let’s say you’re in the enterprise learning management system space. Your market overview should include:

Total addressable market (TAM)
The growth rate of the LMS industry
Major players in the market

This information shows investors that you’ve thoroughly researched the market, understand its potential, and can articulate how your offering fits within it.

Plus, this approach can build credibility and lay a strong foundation for the more detailed competitive analysis that will follow.

2. Highlight key competitors and their strengths

With the bird’s eye view details out of the way, you need to get closer to the subject.

So, in this stage, you’ll draw focus to your primary competitors and areas they’re acing. The goal of mentioning it is to show your awareness of your direct competition and what makes them successful.

Look at Shark Tank pitches. The sharks ask pointed questions about their competition to gauge scope and industry awareness. Pitchers who fumble at this stage rarely get investments.

That’s why, remember to include competitor details like:

Market positioning
Unique selling proposition
Customer satisfaction
Innovative strategies they’ve used to grow

For example, if you’re in the fintech space, you may include details about Stripe and PayPal.

From their seamless API integration to global trust and marketing success, mention all factors that show investors you know the competitive pressures and how you’ll strategically differentiate your business.

There are many sources from which you can collect information about competitor strengths.

Sites like G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and more can help you here. If your competitors share testimonials directly on their site, you can include those too.

Following the previous example, you can paste direct comments from review sites like below.

Take a look

3. Use visual comparisons to illustrate positioning

Visually highlighting key differences in your competition slide makes it simpler for investors to grasp how your product or service stands in relation to the competition.

So, add charts, graphs, and matrices to illustrate market positioning, feature advantages, or other critical comparisons visually.

Take a look at this graph from Statista showing Adidas, Nike, and Puma’s global revenue from 2006 to 2023.

And while a line graph is ideal for revenue growth, it won’t fit all topics. For example, to highlight the market share of each CRM software, Trust Radius uses a pie chart.

Remember, mixing up the visuals (while maintaining a consistent design language) is important to break the monotony.

Plus, adding media can make your data more engaging and help communicate complex information more clearly and concisely. Plus points if you can make the visuals interactive.

Getting these competitor slides right can be overwhelming, but nailing the design language can add to the stress, especially if you’re new to this.

Using a template for startups can simplify your work.

4. Discuss potential market disruptions and trends

Being informed about recent market changes can help you stay ahead of your competition. Why?

It impacts your industry
It lets you show how your business will navigate these changes

So, it only fits these factors that need to be included. It also lets external stakeholders understand that your company thinks ahead and can capitalize on the disruptions when the time comes.

Let’s say you run an online clothing store. Currently, the print-on-demand business model is disrupting the retail and e-commerce sectors.

These companies are reshaping how products are designed, produced, and sold.

As a result, they’ve received funding, with some even reaching unicorn status.

These milestones can encourage new players to enter the market and cater to niche audiences.

So, in your pitch, discuss how your business will use this momentum and cash in on the growth your sector is seeing since it may inspire confidence in your investors.

5. Include a deep dive into niche segments

What’s one thing big players tend to overlook? Niche segments. Adding this to your competition pitch deck can help stakeholders know you’ve identified it and are ready to capitalize on these opportunities.

So, focus on sub-markets to carve out a space for your product to dominate.

Here, you’ll include the characteristics, needs, industry stats, and potential growth of these niche segments.

Then, share how you’ll tailor your offerings to meet these demands.

Let’s take a look at an early competitor analysis pitch deck from Airbnb:

While the above slide emphasizes the market share, the slide below shows how their business model was viable even with a smaller share from 2008 to 2011.

Post this, they raised a Series B round of 2.1 million at a valuation of $1.3 billion.

All this to say, niche segments let you target a more defined customer base and reduce competition, which can lead to higher customer loyalty, stronger brand identity, and more sustainable growth.

This will ultimately lure external stakeholders to your business.

6. Address feature gaps and opportunities

This stage involves recognizing where your competitors fall short and how your business can fill those gaps.

Doing so emphasizes your strengths and shows VCs and investors that you have a well-thought-out plan to capitalize on unmet market needs.

Take Ooomf as an example. Mikael Cho, the founder, made the investor presentation accessible, which helped the company raise 2 million.

His presentation showed why Ooomf is the premium marketplace they needed to invest in.

Without any frills and by highlighting simple features of the platform, he showed why users trusted their company to source quality talent.

Moreover, this quality control gave them a 30% MoM growth with 10x the industry average project budget.

They even promised to find the right contractor match within 24 hours to double down on the industry gaps.

7. Emphasize your unique value proposition

At this stage, you can truly seal the deal by convincing external stakeholders why you’re the right business to invest in.

Here, you need to clearly articulate what makes your offering distinct and how it meets customer needs in a way that others don’t.

Is it a groundbreaking feature? Superior customer service? A more cost-effective solution? Your USP should be front and center.

With an interactive pitch deck, Banging Bargains aces this slide.

Owing to this, they built a strong community, which they presented clearly in the sales deck to stand out from their competition.

Pitch deck templates for your competitive analysis slide

You don’t need to start from square one to create a compelling competition pitch deck.

All you need are competitor analysis pitch deck templates that you can tweak to your liking.

Since these templates follow the strategies outlined in this article, work on any device, and come equipped with built-in analytics, you can be prepared from the get-go.

No templates found

Essential tools for creating a competitor slide

Before you embark on the journey of creating a standout competitor slide, ensure you have the essential tools to complete the job.

1) Competitive analysis tools

Software like Unkover or platforms like SWOT or Porter's Five Forces helps assess competitors' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

When assessing a competitor’s market strength you can use website analysis tools like aHrefs or similar to aHrefs.

2) Data visualization software

Tools such as Tableau or Microsoft Excel slidescreate compelling and insightful graphs, charts, and visuals for your slide.

3) Current market reports

Updated industry reports or market research studies to gather the latest data on growth rates, market shares, and industry trends.

4) Pitch deck software

It’s best to avoid the legacy pitch slide format such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides when designing your competitor slide. Instead use tools that specialize in making engaging data visualization slides or a dedicated pitch deck creator that ties it all together.

5) Feedback mechanism

A system or platform, like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey, to gather feedback on your slide (and pitch deck) from colleagues or industry peers.

Taher Batterywala

Taher Batterywala is an SEO and Growth Content Marketer at Ranking Bell. With over 7 years of B2B marketing experience and a diversified skill set, he helps craft winning strategies and execute end-to-end campaigns for B2B and SaaS companies to achieve scalable organic growth. Outside of work, he enjoys watching movies, photography, and dabbling in design.

Table of contents

What is a competitor slide? What do investors look for in a competitive analysis? Why is a competitors slide importnat? What to include in a competitive analysis slide? How to write and present a competitors slide Pitch deck templates Best tools for making a competitor slide

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