Happy Thursday 👋 and welcome to a new series in this newsletter!

Every now and then, I’m gonna share micro interviews with the top minds in Competitive Intel. My goal is to make these equally valuable to both new and tenured CI folks.

Let’s jump in!

“How did you get into competitive intel?”

After spending most of my career in strategy, always focused on things 2-3 years out in the future, I wanted to have a more tangible impact on the day-to-day business. Shifting to a CI role was an easy and natural transition to do just that.

“How do you describe what you do for work?”

Understand why we win and lose in order to help sellers win more, help product develop a differentiated roadmap, and help leadership de-risk the path to winning the category.

“What are you working on that you're excited about?”

Spending more time on thought leadership narratives that frame our differentiation in ways that win the hearts and minds of executives at large enterprise organizations.

“What's one thing you do now that you didn't do a year ago?”

Scaling my impact with a custom GPT trained on just internal, non-public competitive intelligence and enablement. And exploring other ways to save time and amplify my value with AI.

“What resource has helped you the most in your career?”

The storytelling scaffolding of Context, Motivation, Tension, Change, Meaning. It's a universal framework for turning data and intelligence into narratives that spark action with customers and colleagues alike.

“A new CI practitioner asks for a tip to getting started, what do you tell them?”

No one wants your research. It's the opinionated so what?/now what? that keeps people coming back for more. But, people believing and taking action on those opinions requires trust, which takes time. So be patient, meet people where they are, always show your work, and don't exaggerate or share hot takes not backed by data.

Hope you enjoyed our first micro interview!

Who should I cover next? Reply to this email and let me know :-)

Or if you’ve ever wondered “how the heck does [insert company here] do competitive intel?? ” then tell me the company. I’ll do my best to find the person leading their CI program and get them to share the goods

JUICY SCOOPS 🧃

What’s happening now

• 🧑‍⚖️ | The FTC banned noncompetes nationwide [more]

• 🤖 | Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $6B to take on OpenAI [more]

• 🥤 | The cola wars are back and… healthier than ever? [more]

• 🧑‍💻 | Meta’s big bet with Llama 3 might help them overtake their rivals [more]

• ☕️ | Dripos raised $11M to help coffee shops replace Toast, Square, Quickbooks, and others [more]

Class Is in Session 🍎 

We ran a survey to figure out how much Competitive Intelligence practitioners get paid. 100+ responses later, the results are in!

In May's Healthy Competition session, we're diving into the details and answering your burning questions:

• "what's the average salary of a competitive intel practitioner?"

• "how much do years of experience impact a salary?"

• "does company size matter?"

• "and what about bonuses? are people getting those? if so, how much?"

And plenty more!

But we're not stopping there. In addition to sharing survey results, we'll talk about some negotiating tips to help ensure that you get paid what you're worth.

COMPETE GEEKS ONLY 🛑✋

From the Community

Here are a couple threads that got folks talking this week.

“Wait, what’s the Healthy Competition Community again?”

It’s where 100+ Product Marketers and Competitive Intel practitioners connect and share tips to help each other win.

Peachy Memes 🍑

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy