Salary Survey Results

Also: how to disrupt a category

Author

Andy McCotter-Bicknell
May 16, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Big day today!

Our competitive intelligence salary survey results are in 🤑

Let’s cut to the chase. I teamed up with my friends Mindy and Farhan to pull some interesting takeaways from the 103 submissions we received:

  • Salary by job function
    Competitive Intelligence responsibilities lead to higher salaries for Product Marketers. And CI is especially lucrative as you gain experience. Specifically, 8+ years of experience can net you a notably higher salary if you specialize in CI.

  • Salary by gender
    Women are now making more than their male counterparts. However, there are some outliers in our data that could be attributed to CI folks outside of the United States where salaries are generally lower.

  • Hybrid vs. remote vs. in-office salaries
    100% remote employees have the highest salaries across the board.

  • Team size
    Generally, CI practitioners get paid more if they’re on a team vs. if they’re solo. And those are most common at companies with 1,000+ employees.

There’s plenty of more you can dig into though. I’ll link the raw data below. Hopefully it’s helpful for you!

TIPS FROM THE TOP 🧠

How RevenueHero is disrupting the “Lead-to-Account Matching and Routing” category

“Tell me the origin story of RevenueHero and the gap that you saw in the market”

The founders were early employees of Freshworks and saw the company go from <100 employees to IPO. But when growing Freshworks, one big issue they saw was super long sales cycles even for high-intent buyers. It made buying feel like a headache and hurt their bottom line.

Nobody should have to endure tedious inbox monitoring and back-and-forth email exchanges during the purchasing process. So they started RevenueHero to solve it.

“How do you differentiate RevenueHero from established competitors in your space?”

RevenueHero’s three primary differentiators are:

Product: Superior product with capabilities that competitors don’t have. To name a few…

  • See everything about a meeting with a potential customer without stressing about why a meeting wasn't booked or how it got scheduled with the wrong person.

  • Give customers the flexibility to route and distribute meetings based on what their GTM motion and ACV demands.

  • Match prospects to owners based on any property, not just domain.

  • Always up-to-date data synced back to your CRM. For example, meetings are marked as completed automatically so that you don't have to run behind reps to update fields.

Service: We offer 24/7 live support for all tier customers. We’ve heard from our customers that they did not get this level of quality, instant support from our competitors.

Price: We’re much more reasonably priced, making it easy to drive higher ROI than from our competitors.

“What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced while trying to disrupt the market? How have you tackled them?”

Like any startup going against a more well-known brand, we face credibility challenges. Even though we have product parity, our competitors have landing pages saying we don’t, and many prospects trust the bigger brand.

To combat this, we ran a cheeky competitive campaign called #SpicyMysterySeries— it was a fun way to share what we offer with the world and dismiss inaccuracies.

It was only possible because our product supports the claims, and is backed up by our customers. Nothing beats happy customers who’ve switched to you from incumbents.

“What's one insight or lesson learned that's been critical to your competitive success?”

There's a couple of things:

  1. Most companies just bid on competitors’ keywords, publish SEO landing pages, then call it quits. At RevenueHero, we've not shied away from being vocal about our competitors, especially when we’re up against them in a deal. The key, however, has been to stay respectful, state the facts, and help prospects understand the differences between us.

  2. I think the industry as a whole has lost track of this SaaS ideal: be a partner and easy to do business with. At RevenueHero, we believe SaaS should be reasonably priced, companies should be a partner instead of a vendor, and customers should get more value from a product every single month. Our customers love us for this.

JUICY SCOOPS 🧃

What’s happening now

  • Your competitive landscape is probably expanding:

    • 📈 | Chief Martec published their annual Marketing Technology Landscape—it now contains 14k+ products (27% YOY growth) [more]

    • 🤯 | Software review marketplace, G2, added 19k products to their directories last year (12% YOY growth) [more]

  • 🗣️ | OpenAI and Google Gemini launched “voice modes” within 24 hours of each other. Who did it best? [OpenAI vs. Google]

  • 🍔 | Uber and Instacart partnered to give Doordash a run for their money [more]

  • ❎ | The X / Twitter competitor that no one’s talking about is… [more]

EXAMPLES 🍊

Your weekly dose of vitamin C(ompete)

The browser wars saw Netscape and Microsoft vying for internet supremacy in the '90s. It began with Netscape's Navigator launch in 1994 and Microsoft countering with Internet Explorer.

The rivalry peaked with stunts like Microsoft's team dropping off their IE logo at Netscape's campus. The Netscape team toppled the logo with their own Mozilla mascot, holding signs that read "Netscape 72 Microsoft 18” (their market share at the time).

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 🍑

Here are some more goodies if you want to keep the party going:

Stay Healthy, my friends.

💚Andy

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