I was recently talking with a product marketer from a company that I have a lot of respect for and he asked me what my general philosophy for competitive intelligence was. As I’ve written about before, I was thrown head first into CI, and much of my early efforts were…

I’ve written about the topic of ethics in competitive intelligence before. While I didn’t expect it to get much traction, I’ve had more readers for that post than any other topic. My guess is that it is a tricky topic for even the best CI professionals. …

I spend most of my time here writing about competitive intelligence. Obviously that’s because it is a core component of my role at Sprout and it is one of the topics I feel best equipped to write about authoritatively. …

When I joined Sprout five years ago to build the competitive intelligence program, sales seemed to collectively scream at me, “WE NEED BATTLECARDS.” But CI wasn’t a centrally owned responsibility at Sprout so our battlecards had sparse details and weren’t easily accessible to our reps. …

Sprout Social has more than 700 employees. We have more than 350 people on our Sales and Customer Success teams alone. We have dozens of competitors in nearly every region of the world. We have thousands of trials every single month. …

A few months ago, one of our sales reps reached out and asked for some help on a deal. The prospect was evaluating Sprout and Competitor A (CA)for their social media suite. They already had deployed Competitor B (CB), which was firmly a best-of-breed product but shared some similar features…

How far are you willing to go to collect competitive intelligence for your company? When does acceptable information gathering turn into something more sinister? How do you maintain a strong sense of ethics when you’re trying to create a competitive advantage? To succeed in competitive intelligence, you need a relentless…

“Do we have access to [competitor XYZ]’s products? I have something I want to test.” I get this question a few times a quarter. It is usually from an overzealous salesperson. They want to know exactly how our competitors’ products work so that they can use that information against them…

In my three years at Sprout, here’s where competitive intelligence (CI) has lived in the organization: Product Marketing Operations reporting into the Product team (16 months) Product Marketing Go-to-Market reporting into the Marketing department (4 months) Sales Readiness reporting into the Marketing department (16 months) Finally, Market Strategy reporting into…