Where competitive intelligence sits in an organization

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 the Sales department (today)

Suffice to say, there’s no right or wrong answer for where competitive intelligence sits in your organization. There are pros and cons for each situation.

I’d like to take you through my journey to understand how the role and responsibilities have evolved as I’ve moved around Sprout. I am focusing on my own experience because I think we’ve taken the right approach with CI at Sprout. We’ve allowed the practice to grow, adapt, pursue new opportunities and even fail at times. And I believe that Sprout’s willingness to let CI change departments and teams has allowed it to flourish in a way it couldn’t if it were confined to a single team.

Product Marketing Operations reporting into the Product team

When I first joined Sprout in 2017, it wasn’t entirely clear where this role should report. It was a need that our SVP of Sales identified when he joined Sprout a few months prior. However, since CI is often a product marketing (PMK) responsibility, Sprout decided that the role would sit in PMK. But because our existing go-to-market (GTM) team wasn’t responsible for CI holistically, I ended up in product marketing operations instead.

One of the benefits of landing on a team that is a little removed from those that primarily consume CI is that it allows you focus your efforts with objectivity. I wasn’t beholden to the needs and wants of any specific department. I didn’t have to prioritize only their requests. This gave me the time I needed to identify where the best opportunities for change were.

But, most importantly, it gave me more power to say “no” to requests from other teams. Because Sprout had never had someone solely focused on CI, there was a lot of excitement about the role. As you might expect, there were a lot of requests as soon as I started. If you’re just getting started with CI, you’ll need to get used to this. But it is critical that you are empowered to say no. This gave me the time I needed to build the foundation for how our CI program would expand.

But as Sprout’s needs evolved, so, too, did my role. And as PMK operations became more focused on project management as we moved into the marketing department, this meant that my role needed to shift.

Product Marketing Go-to-Market reporting into the Marketing department

This was my shortest stint, though not because it didn’t work. As PMK moved into the Marketing department, I swapped PMK ops for PMK GTM. At this point, Sprout had developed more of a competitive-focused culture and this meant that I needed to help other teams understand how to uncover insights on their own.

As I mentioned before, CI is often PMK’s responsibility. While I was able to funnel competitive insights to our GTM team, most of it was high-level about the market rather than specific to their product areas. This didn’t mean the information wasn’t valuable; rather, it was just not as granular as they would need.

I worked with my manager to think about how we could arm this team with the requisite skills needed to get valuable competitive insights. Teach a team to fish and so on. Consequently, I genuinely believe now that our PMK team is well-equipped to handle much of their own CI without my team’s help.

As this was happening, I was also working with my manager to build out a new team where we could take our competitive insights and use them to help the team at that time that would have the most impact: sales.

Sales Readiness reporting into the Marketing department

This stage of my journey at Sprout definitely deviates the most from how most companies leverage CI. But its emblematic of how CI can live where it is needed the most in an organization.

As our sales department scaled from a little more than 70 people when I joined to over 250 people in late 2018, we needed to invest more time in helping our reps tell the Sprout story through our content. I partnered closely with our sales content writer and our PMK team to overhaul the way that we think about how we position Sprout’s products, values and market footprint.

CI proceeded to influence how we thought about our pre-demo deck, product slides, sell sheets, product guides, thought leadership, etc. It became a critical part of our sales content strategy as we put more time into creating it and training sales how to use it.

It wasn’t that the other departments stopped needing CI. It was simply that we needed to invest more heavily at that time in our content strategy. It was all about priorities. And, not surprisingly, those priorities shifted again as Sprout enters the next stage of its journey as a public company.

Market Strategy reporting into the Sales department

Now, a little over three years later, CI is being rolled into a broader Market Strategy team that reports into the sales department. We’re investing more time and effort into our analyst relations and pricing initiatives, both of which benefit immensely from strong CI. I’ve only recently move into this expanded role, so I’m not sure how CI will continue to evolve. But I can assure you that it won’t be static.

The point is this: in over three years, CI at Sprout has lived where it was needed the most and adjusted from there.

CI can and should influence most parts of your business. But what department it is in shouldn’t be an be-all end-all discussion. It often means that you need to plug into the parts of the organization where there’s the greatest need at any one time.

So why do you need to be in different departments to do this? Couldn’t you help the organization without moving around?

I’m not necessarily advocating for CI to move as frequently as it has at Sprout. Rather, I want to show you that there’s a lot of different ways that it can succeed in a variety of departments. And it just also so happens that I got to experience all this first-hand.

I would discourage you from falling prey to the trap of thinking that CI *must* live in one department because, ultimately, it is all about your company’s needs. CI professionals must spend time with the entire organization to identify where there are shortcomings and then tackle those head on. And those efforts shouldn’t be dictated only by what department you sit in.