Entering the world of competitive intelligence

The truth is, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. In fact, I didn’t even think I was qualified for this job.

Three months earlier, I was getting ready to take the GMAT. I was working on applications, outlining essays, visiting schools and making plans for the next chapter of my life. I had spent nearly five years in public relations and knew it wasn’t for me in the long run. Like any other 26-year-old that’s lost sight of their career path, I figured that the answer must be found through grad school. I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and I had no discernable technical skills, so business school seemed like the logical answer. I figured that business school would teach me some “real skills” that I felt I lacked.

But if there was one thing that gave me more anxiety than a lack of direction, it was debt. And business school is not conducive to avoiding it. So the day before I took the GMAT, I decided that I’d start applying for new jobs that night. Worst case scenario, I would find a new job I hated as much as my current one, and I could fall back on applying to business school.

In my search, I came across a role at Sprout Social on the product marketing team. While in the world of public relations, I worked with Fortune 500 enterprise tech companies, so I had some exposure to product marketing and I felt confident that my skills could mostly translate. The challenge was that this role was specifically for competitive intelligence (CI), and the description did not look promising for my qualifications.

Lead sales team trainings to help them beat competitors across different segments. Coordinate intel collection and consolidation to share with product managers. Develop messaging for SDRs, BDRs, AEs and CSMs to handle competitive conversations. Leverage Salesforce data to help inform sales strategy.

First of all, I didn’t know what the hell any of those acronyms meant.

Second, I’d wager that I didn’t have experience doing 90% of the things the job description called for. But having spent my whole career in PR, I knew how to tell the right story. Somehow I managed to do just that and I found myself with an offer.

Fast forward two and a half months later, I was starting my first day as Sprout’s first hire for competitive intelligence. My job was straightforward: build a CI program from scratch.

After two weeks of product training and onboarding where the only expectation was that I absorbed as much about Sprout as I could, I found myself having a 1:1 with our head of sales in his office. He started asking me about my vision for the program and where I thought I could have the biggest impact on the sales organization. He wanted to know what my priorities were and if I’d identified any changes we could make. He’d come from Salesforce, where he had an entire team working on CI, so he knew a thing or two about what a successful program looked like.

And that’s when it dawned on me: I had no fucking clue what I was doing.

Somehow I had conned this company into hiring me for a role I knew nothing about. I didn’t just feel exposed; I felt like my time at Sprout was probably going to end sooner than I anticipated once everyone figured out what I knew about CI.

But I quickly figured out that many of the skills I developed in PR–strong writing, basic data analysis, trendspotting, storytelling–were easily repurposed in this new role. Sure, I had to learn some new things, but it turns out that there isn’t some secret sauce to being successful in this role.

And now three years into running Sprout’s CI program, I feel the need to demystify the practice a bit. When I tell people what I do, most respond like it’s a unique set of skills. But the funny thing is that it isn’t super complicated. With the right structure in place, CI is something that can work in nearly every organization. You just need to know the fundamentals to be dangerous.

So over the next few months, I’ll write a series of posts that will lay out what you need to know about building a CI program. Topics will include:

• Why do it
• Who benefits from it
• What department should it be in
• What data should you consider
• What isn’t CI
• What are the outputs
• How do you measure a program
• Ethical questions with CI
• Where do you start with limited resources

I’ll try to keep this as applicable as possible to all business types. However, my background is almost exclusively B2B SaaS, so it’ll likely skew more towards that audience.

My hope is that anyone who is interested in CI, whether as a career or just incorporating parts of it into your current role, will be able to understand where to begin and how you can leverage your existing skills to be successful. Specializing in this function has led to career growth that I didn’t anticipate when I first started. I’d like to see others experience the same.

Truth be told, there are still days where I don’t know what I’m doing. But the difference is that now I don’t feel as helpless. And my hope is that others won’t either.