Sofia L. is a competitive intelligence analyst at a B2B SaaS company. She's not in finance, and she doesn't trade stocks. But she reads earnings calls every quarter, because her public competitors say more about their strategy on those calls than anywhere else. We talked about how she uses a tool built for investors for competitive strategy, and why she cares most about the Q&A.

Interview recorded on July 31, 2026. Plans and prices mentioned are the ones the interviewee was on at the time; current plans are on the pricing page.

Sofia, you're not in finance. Why does a competitive intelligence analyst need earnings call transcripts?

Because public companies reveal more about their strategy on earnings calls than anywhere else. I work for a B2B SaaS company, and I track what our public competitors say about product roadmap, pricing strategy, customer acquisition costs, and competitive positioning. The earnings call is where executives are forced to answer analyst questions about exactly these topics.

Before earningscalls.dev, I'd read the press release and maybe a news summary. But the real gold is in the Q&A. An analyst asks "how are you thinking about pricing pressure from new entrants" and the CEO gives a rehearsed but revealing answer. That's not in the press release.

Walk us through your quarterly workflow.

During earnings season, I get alerts when a competitor's call lands. I read the full transcript on the free tier, highlighting anything about our market segment. Then I pull the speaker segments through the API and feed them into a shared database where I track themes over time. How has this competitor's language about "enterprise traction" evolved? Are they mentioning a specific feature area more often? It's pattern recognition across quarters.

What's something specific you learned that way?

A competitor's CEO was asked directly about a new pricing tier. The prepared remarks didn't mention it at all. In the Q&A, the CEO said the tier was "in pilot with select customers" and deflected a follow-up about general availability. Two quarters later they announced the tier broadly. We had six months of warning because I was reading the Q&A.

How does the speaker segmentation help you?

It separates management's scripted narrative from the unscripted reality. Executives in prepared remarks are selling. In Q&A, they're responding. The API lets me isolate executive segments in Q&A and compare them to prepared remarks. When the two don't match, when the Q&A is more cautious than the script, that's a signal.

You mentioned the free reading tier. Do you use the API too?

My company pays for Pro. I use the API for the structured extraction that feeds my database. But the free tier is what I use for the first read. I open the transcript on the site, search for keywords, and read the relevant segments. No login, no friction. It's the fastest way to get oriented before I start the structured work.

What about the AI summaries?

They're useful for the initial triage. When a competitor reports and I'm not sure if the call is worth a deep read, the summary tells me whether there's anything new. But for competitive intelligence, the summary is never enough. The detail is in the Q&A, and the summary condenses that away. I use the summary as a filter, not as a source.

Any limitations for competitive intelligence use?

Private companies, obviously, since they don't have earnings calls. And some smaller public competitors don't have transcripts available. But for the major players in our space, all of whom are public, the coverage has been complete. The 2020 start date is fine for me. I care about recent trends.

How has this changed your standing within the company?

I'm the person who knows what competitors said before anyone else reads it in the news. When our product team asks "what is Competitor X doing with pricing," I can pull the exact quote from the most recent call in minutes. That kind of responsiveness changes how people perceive the CI function. CI used to be a quarterly report. Now people can ask me any day.

Would you recommend this to other CI analysts?

If your competitors are public, they talk about your market on earnings calls, and this is the easiest way to listen. The $24.99 is less than a business lunch, and that pricing-tier heads-up alone was worth years of it.

Want to try the same workflows? You can search a whole sector, pull speaker-tagged transcripts as JSON or connect Claude through the MCP server. Plans and coverage are on the pricing page, and the full reference is in the API docs.