20-Minute Competitive Research Workflow Using Copilot in Edge

A Director of Product Marketing at a SaaS company spends four hours a week manually reading competitor websites, taking notes in a spreadsheet, and turning those notes into competitive intelligence briefs for the sales team. The output is valuable. The process is not. Copilot in Edge compresses that four-hour process into 20 minutes per competitor.

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The 20-Minute Workflow

What you need: Microsoft Edge (free at microsoft.com/edge), a Microsoft account (free), and a list of 3-5 competitors.

Output: A structured competitive brief covering positioning, value propositions, pricing signals, target customer, and key differentiators. Ready to share with sales teams or paste into a strategy document.

Minutes 0-3: Setup

Open Microsoft Edge. Sign in with your Microsoft account. Navigate to your first competitor's main website. Click the Copilot icon in the top right corner to open the sidebar in Chat mode.

Minutes 3-8: Homepage and positioning analysis

Based on this website homepage, describe the company's positioning in 3-4 sentences. What is their primary value proposition? Who is their target customer based on the language and imagery? What three benefits do they lead with?

Minutes 8-12: Pricing and packaging signals

Navigate to the competitor's pricing page. Then use this prompt.

Analyze this pricing page. What are the pricing tiers? What are the key features that differentiate each tier? Who is the primary buyer at each tier? Note any free trial or freemium options.

Minutes 12-16: Customer and use case signals

Navigate to the competitor's case studies or customers page. Then use this prompt.

Based on the customer logos, case studies, or testimonials on this page, what industries and company sizes does this competitor primarily serve? What business outcomes do they highlight most frequently?

Minutes 16-20: Competitive brief assembly

Based on everything we discussed about this competitor in this session, produce a one-page competitive brief with these sections: Company Overview (2 sentences), Core Value Proposition (1-2 sentences), Target Customer, Key Differentiators (3-5 bullets), Pricing Model (what is known), and Potential Weaknesses (based on what is emphasized versus absent from their messaging). Base this only on what was on their website.

Scaling to Multiple Competitors

For 3-5 competitors, the workflow takes 60-100 minutes total. After completing all competitors, open a new Copilot session and paste in all briefs. Use this final prompt.

Based on these competitive briefs, produce a comparison table with columns: Company Name, Primary Value Proposition, Target Customer, Pricing Tier Structure, Key Differentiator, Biggest Observable Gap. Then write a 2-paragraph executive summary of the competitive landscape.

Time Savings

Previous manual process: 3-4 hours per competitor per research cycle. Copilot in Edge workflow: 20 minutes per competitor. For teams that track 5 competitors quarterly, this is 50-70 hours per year returned from manual research to strategic analysis. Save the four prompts as a template in your note-taking system and reuse them every research cycle.