Healthy Competition: Product Marketing | Competitive Intelligence | Strategy · Andy McCotter-Bicknell

How HubSpot Does Competitive Intelligence w/ Jessica Davis (Manager of CI @ HubSpot)

·41 min·2 clips

HubSpot moved to Clue last year, ran a six-week pilot, and rebuilt battle cards before a full launch.

1. Healthy Competition: Product Marketing | Competitive Intelligence | Strategy focuses on how HubSpot runs competitive intelligence under Jessica Davis. 2. Jessica Davis is the manager of competitive intelligence at HubSpot, and Andy hosts the show and asks the operational questions. 3. The episode asks how a CI team at HubSpot builds battle cards, measures impact, and stays useful to sales and product teams. 4. Jessica says she started in Army intelligence, deployed to Afghanistan, then moved into sales strategy at Lutron Electronics. 5. She says an MBA at K-State and later strategy work at TE led her back to CI after a recruiter reached out about HubSpot. 6. Jessica describes wanting to work at HubSpot for two or three years before joining, because she already used and liked the product. 7. She says the CI team at HubSpot began with just Sam Rinaldo, then added an analyst, then expanded to three analysts plus her as manager. 8. Jessica says her role shifted from individual contributor work to management, budget planning, stakeholder management, and platform strategy. 9. She explains that HubSpot's CI team is split by product buckets, with one analyst on marketing hub, CMS, and operations hub, another on sales hub, service hub, and commerce, and a third on buyer enablement. 10. She says buyer enablement means updating buyer-facing comparison PDFs and self-serve CI materials for people who are not on sales calls. 11. Jessica says HubSpot bought Clue last year, ran a six-week pilot with sales and CS reps, and rebuilt the battle cards from feedback. 12. She says the launch included a full-scope rollout, role-play sessions, and custom training offered to sales managers who wanted it. 13. Jessica says the team used a scavenger hunt with blue paw prints, a competitive digest, and HubSpot automation that sends battle card links when reps fill in a competitor field. 14. She notes that the automation currently reaches only reps with under 12 months' tenure, which leaves room to raise engagement further. 15. Jessica and Andy compare note-building at HubSpot, ClickUp, and ZoomInfo, and she says people should read battle-card copy out loud. 16. Tracy, a guest from an earlier June episode, argues that product marketing is not the right home for CI because product marketers tend to see everything through rose-colored glasses. 17. Jessica says CI goals should be viewed in layers: win rate, content engagement, and influence on launches or strategic decisions. 18. She says HubSpot works closely with PMM, corporate strategy, customer experience measurement, and product managers, while trying to create a single source of truth for win-rate data. 19. The tone is practical and collaborative, with long operational examples, audience questions, and direct comparisons to other tools and teams. 20. People who run CI programs, battle cards, or sales enablement will get the most value; listeners looking for a narrative story arc may skip it.

As heard by us

A practical conversation about where CI belongs and what it should be able to say.

This episode offers a practical look at how competitive intelligence works inside a company, with Jessica Davis tracing a path from Army intelligence to sales strategy and then to HubSpot.

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Why you'd press play

See how a HubSpot CI manager thinks about team placement, budget, and calling out the ugly.

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