Competitive Intelligence Director
Job Summary
BlackLine's Product Marketing team is looking for a professional with experience in competitive and market intelligence, analysis, and research. The candidate will directly impact the business as we continue to grow and scale BlackLine's Competitive Intelligence program, as an influencer, as a driver and as a manager of critical components of the business. With many cross functional touchpoints, the candidate must have the ability to build trust and partnership with key stakeholders on an ongoing basis. The ideal candidate brings a strong combination of building relationships within and outside of the broad team plus core data analysis and presentation skills.
Roles and Responsibility (list in order of importance)
Competitive Intelligence:
- Deliver accurate, timely, unbiased, and contextual analysis by supporting and improving on ongoing competitive research, tracking and analysis of competitors' products and GTM strategy.
- Research ongoing tracking and analysis of key competitors in the financial close management space, emerging competitive threats, and trends that may come from adjacent areas.
- Deliver results of competitive intelligence to inform future product direction or future business opportunities aligned to growth strategies.
- Drive the Win-Loss analysis to inform the management of competitive changes.
- Support the vision of crowdsourced competitive intelligence by completing the rollout, and maintenance, of competitive intelligence software.
- Review market news daily and provide key updates to key business stakeholders and executive management team.
Market Intelligence:
- Analyze the competitive market landscape using analysis of product positioning, market share, and other trending data.
- Collect and synthesize competitive intelligence data from a variety of sources to stay abreast of industry and business trends in order to inform organizational strategies.
- Deliver results of competitive intelligence to inform future product direction or future business opportunities aligned to growth strategies.
- Working with Product Marketing, preparing and maintaining complete materials (Battlecards, how-to-compete documents) to educate and help the sales force to win contested deals.
Training/Enablement
- Collaborate and build credibility with internal business teams, staying up to date on new initiatives and working to understand their data and reporting needs.
- Drive creation of, and updates to, compelling, articulate, and creative competitive content and collateral geared towards various stakeholders, including sales, product management, and executive management.
- Lead, manage, plan, and execute monthly and quarterly sales enablement events, including webinars, SWOT analysis, white papers, battle cards and newsletters.
- Develop, present, and maintain regular sales training for global and regional field organizations and partners.
- Initiate and maintain tracking deals through various sales stages. Actively provide deal support through CI engagement to sales teams.
- Act as an owner with multiple functions (Marketing, Product Management, Customer Success, Sales, SE's, Partner Organization) to ensure domain knowledge is transferred at appropriate levels of depth.
Management Reporting & Analysis:
- Responsible for the data analysis and feedback processes to provide a quarterly view of the competitive landscape.
- Proactively identify opportunities to automate and/or optimize manual processes and reporting across marketing and sales.
- Document and validate project requirements, processes, and metric definitions; provide updates and request feedback on appropriate milestones.
- Create automated reports and dashboards that allow business owners greater ability to optimize operational performance.
- Prepare and give presentations that summarize key insights tailored to specific prospect marketing and sales audiences, from individual contributors to executive level, at a daily, weekly, and monthly cadence.
Required Qualifications
Years of Experience in Related Field: 5-10
Education: Bachelors or similar degree
Technical/Specialized Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- Excellent in synthesizing information from large variety of external and internal information sources. Ideal candidate should have excellent written presentation and slide communication skills.
- Strong interpersonal skills, including excellent writing and verbal communication are assumed. A self-starter and seeker of new ideas and initiatives.
- Previous enterprise SaaS or cloud related product sales, industry analyst, product management, product strategy, or product marketing background strongly preferred.
- Manage interactions with senior stakeholders across Product, Sales, Marketing, and the Executive Management Team. Ability to ask the right questions and push the thinking where required.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills. Able to present executive summaries of actionable insights and recommendations to executives.
- Collaborate with the immediate and broader functional team to help provide holistic actionable insights.
- Previous experience, including designing questionnaires and discussion guides, surveys, and conducting focus groups or 1:1 interview will be a plus.
- Independently exercises judgment within broadly defined practices and policies. Selects methods and techniques of obtaining solutions to problems of relatively routine to diverse scope and moderate to high complexity.
Preferred Qualifications
- MBA or graduate degree