Earning a Seat at the Table, Nailing and Scaling Your Program, Listen up Vendors!

🪑 Please, Take a Seat 🪑

Pop quiz!

Should competitive enablement live under:

a) Product?

b) Marketing?

c) Strategy?

d) Somewhere else altogether?

Well, Jennifer Roberts has experienced all of the above throughout her career in competitive intelligence. 

As someone who lives and breathes competitive strategy, that’s where Jennifer feels most at home. 

“At ServiceTitan…the role was hired into strategy — marketing strategy specifically. So there’s a lot of factors that set me up for success there.” 

No matter where you sit in the organization, Jennifer says that taking care of her primary stakeholder is always priority number one. 

By diving deep and understanding her stakeholders’ motivations, broader ambitions, and KPIs, she can deliver her best work. 

From there, you can expand your efforts — and earn that all-coveted strategic seat at the table. 

Here are three takeaways from Adam’s conversation with Jennifer

🗑️ Doing the CI ‘grunt work’ (battlecards, sales decks) lays the foundation for broadening your compete program’s reach

🕵️‍♀️ Setting up a win-loss program provides the kind of hard data you need to resonate across the org

🚗 Bringing your key findings on an org-wide ‘roadshow’ allows you to get in front of people and drives home the value of your program. 

Dive deeper into these takeaways and a whole lot more on the latest episode of the Competitive Enablement Show.

🔨 Nail it and Scale it  🔨

Proving yourself as the dependable competitive enablement professional you are has a small downside.

You’re going to get a lot of requests for intel and deal support from different functions across the org. 

But the best CI pros all know that this is in fact a cause for celebration — even if ad hoc requests can feel burdensome in the moment. 

When Clara Smyth — Sr. Product Manager at Slack and host of the Compete Network’s Back Office to Boardroom — finds herself in that situation, she leans on the wise words of her VP: Nail it and Scale it. 

“If you nail it for one customer, if you get that template, that battle card, that external champion content deck ready, you could scale it across the enterprise and prevent future requests. That’s how the cycle goes from tactical to strategic.” 

This is the same approach Alex McDonnell encouraged on his appearance on the Competitive Enablement Show.

1️⃣ Make yourself visible among stakeholders

2️⃣ Encourage ad hoc requests and deliver on them

3️⃣ Use the content born of these requests to build a killer compete program

So don’t treat in-the-moment requests as a burden, use them as an opportunity to build the competitive content that lays the foundation for your compete program.

But how do you prioritize which ad hoc requests to tackle right away? 

Well, Clara’s mentor, and guest on episode one of Back Office to Boardroom, Alysse Nockels says all requests should be treated equally. 

“It’s really balancing all of the requests equally and treating everyone as equal humans. Just because you have a C in your title doesn’t make you more entitled to have more information faster.” 

There are oodles more golden nuggets like these found in the first episode of Back Office to Boardroom. 

Listen to episode one on the Compete Network — and keep an eye out for episode two dropping very soon. 

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