How to get the most out of Ripplewatch Connect

Ripplewatch checks your competitors once a day for pricing changes, hiring, press, funding and product moves. It scores every change against how you position yourself, who you sell to, and the deals you've won and lost, so the same pricing change can be urgent for one company and noise for another.

You ask in your assistant, or you read the weekly email. There's nothing to log into. The more it knows about your deals, the more specific its answers get, so the single best thing you can do after adding competitors is tell it how a few deals went.

They do different jobs. Slack is the feed: it posts what changed, to a channel your whole team sees, without anyone asking. Your assistant is the analyst: it's where you ask why a change matters and what to do about it.

Use them together. Something shows up in Slack, you take it to your assistant. Every Slack message from Ripplewatch has an Ask Ripplewatch button and a suggested question for exactly that. Slack can't answer questions itself yet, so the question goes to your assistant.

If you're the only one using Ripplewatch, you can skip Slack and just ask. If anyone else on your team needs to see what changed, connect Slack and pick a channel they're already in.

Win/loss is what turns competitor news into answers about your business. It lets Ripplewatch say which moves actually cost you deals, and it feeds each competitor's momentum. Even one deal helps. Patterns across your deals start to show once you've logged about five reasons, and a competitor's win/loss trend counts toward its momentum after about four.

What to log: the competitor, whether you won or lost, and the reason in the customer's own words. Don't tidy it up. Say it the way the customer said it.

Six ways in, from easiest: (1) Tell your assistant in plain English. (2) Use the form under Settings, then Data. (3) Upload a CSV from your CRM under Settings, then Data. (4) Forward or paste a list of deals to the email address shown under Settings, then Data, and Ripplewatch pulls out the reasons. (5) If your assistant can also reach your CRM, call recorder or support inbox, ask it to read recent closed-lost deals or competitor mentions from there. It will tell you what it's about to read before it reads it. (6) Put it on autopilot: Claude and ChatGPT can both run a prompt on a schedule, so a recurring task keeps new deals arriving without you (see Put it on autopilot).

HubSpot has an official connector for Claude and other assistants. Gong's connector is newer, read-only and returns call summaries instead of transcripts, so call mentions from Gong are logged as one-line summaries.

Your assistant can read your CRM, call recorder or support tool on a schedule and hand the results to Ripplewatch, so you never have to remember to log a deal. Claude and ChatGPT can both run a prompt on a recurring schedule: paste one of the prompts below, say how often, and it runs on its own.

Each prompt asks the assistant to tell you what it added, so nothing happens silently. The tool you're reading from has to be connected to your assistant first. On some ChatGPT plans a connection is read-only, which means it can read your CRM but can't save anything to Ripplewatch, so check that a test run actually records a deal.

A good rhythm: lost deals weekly, call mentions monthly, and a glance at the monthly recap to see whether the picture is getting sharper. The assistant won't invent anything: it only logs what it actually reads.

Momentum is Ripplewatch's read on whether a competitor is becoming more of a threat to you. Each competitor gets one of five labels: Heating up, Steady, Cooling, Gone quiet, or Not enough history yet.

It's built from the last 30 days of hiring, pricing, press and product activity, how relevant those changes are to your business, the win/loss trend on deals against them, and competitor mentions you've logged from sales calls. A label with little data behind it is marked low confidence, so a thin read doesn't look as certain as a full one.

Heating up means more is happening and more of it matters to you. Cooling means less of both. Gone quiet means little visible activity, which isn't always good news: a competitor that goes dark is sometimes heads down on a launch, a repricing or a repositioning. You also get your own momentum, from your win-rate and customer-feedback trends.

Ripplewatch has no dashboard or feed to check. Recent changes are one question away, in your assistant, and you can scope them any way you like: one competitor, one time window, only the ones that matter.

Competitors are checked once a day, so a change usually shows up within a day of it happening. A briefing gives you the week's verdict and the highest-relevance recent changes. Asking about one competitor adds its momentum, the drivers behind it, and its recent signals.

You can always ask your assistant for the latest. These are the messages that come to you without asking.

Alerts for important changes: Only when something scores High relevance, never on a quiet day. With Slack connected they post to your channel as they happen. Without Slack you get one email a day. Switch in Settings. With Slack, turn on Also email me to get the daily email too.

Weekly briefing: The week's verdict. With Slack connected it posts to your channel at the day and time you choose. Without Slack it's emailed on Mondays. Skipped on a quiet week. Always on. With Slack, turn on Also email me to get the Monday email too. You can ask your assistant for the same briefing any time.

Monthly recap: The 1st of each month: what changed in the last 30 days, who is heating up, deal results, and one thing that would sharpen next month. Posts to Slack if connected, otherwise emailed. Starts after your account is three weeks old. Switch in Settings, or the link in the email.

Balance and billing alerts: When your usage balance runs low, a reload fails, or answers are paused. Always emailed to the account owner. Always on.

Slack is where a team sees all of this, so connect it if more than one person uses Ripplewatch. Email goes only to the account owner: it's the fallback when Slack isn't connected, or an extra you can switch on.

Name the competitor and the situation. The more specific you are, the more specific the answer.

Update on one competitor: ask for the read on a single company, with what changed and whether it matters to you.

Prep for a call: ask what a prospect is likely to bring up about a competitor, and where you win and lose against them.

Respond to a move: ask whether a specific change deserves a reaction, and what the options are.

Exec or board update: ask for a short, shareable summary of the competitive picture.

Lost-deal patterns: ask what's actually costing you deals. This one gets better the more deals you've logged.

Solo: connect your assistant, add your competitors, tell it how a few deals went, and ask when you need it. The weekly email keeps you current in between.

With a team: invite teammates under Settings. Everyone shares the same competitors and deal history, and each person connects their own assistant. Email goes only to the account owner, so connect Slack: alerts, the weekly digest and the monthly recap then post to a channel everyone can see. Anyone can log a deal, so agree on who does, and say reasons the way the customer said them.