Most product teams treat competitive intelligence as a tab in Notion that gets updated when someone notices a launch. Public companies hand you a structured update every 90 days for free — your competitors literally read their roadmap to investors out loud, then field questions about it from people whose job is to find the holes. If you're a PM or strategy lead at a SaaS company with public competitors, earnings calls are the highest-density CI source you have.
This post walks through what to extract and how to operationalize it.
What competitor calls actually contain
Quarterly calls are three documents in one:
- Prepared remarks — the CEO/CFO version of the roadmap. Includes ARR/revenue mix shifts, product launches, geographic expansion, partnerships, pricing changes. These are corporate-PR-vetted but rarely contain falsehoods (too much SEC risk).
- Guidance — forward-looking statements about next quarter and the year. The language around guidance tells you how confident management is. A move from "we expect" to "we now anticipate" is a hedge.
- Q&A — sell-side analysts ask the questions you'd ask. Common: "What's your win rate vs. [your-product]?", "How do you think about pricing pressure in the upper segment?", "What's driving the deceleration in enterprise net new ARR?"
The Q&A is where the gold is. Analysts pre-share questions through buy-side meetings, so the question itself is a market consensus on what's interesting.
A 30-minute weekly CI ritual
Pick 5 named competitors. Once a week:
- Pull the latest call for each via
/companies/ticker/:ticker/latest. - Read the prepared remarks for product/pricing announcements.
- Read the Q&A blocks for any mention of your product name, segment, or shared customer accounts.
- Note the three most-asked-about themes — those are what your shared market is paying attention to.
Most teams stop at step 1. The compounding signal comes from doing it every week for a quarter.
Specific things to extract
- ARR or revenue mix shifts — are they moving up-market, down-market, into adjacent products?
- Pricing actions — explicit ("we raised list prices 8% in Q3") or implicit ("we expect ASP to lift 12% on the back of the new tier").
- Win-rate commentary — sell-side regularly asks "what's your win rate against X" by name. The answer tells you exactly what they're saying internally.
- Churn / NDR / NRR — particularly which cohorts they're losing. They'll often disclose the segment ("SMB churn elevated") without disclosing customer names.
- Geo or vertical expansion — first mention of a new geography is usually 1-2 quarters before the product team there is staffed up.
- Headcount commentary — flat or declining R&D headcount with rising revenue is a confidence signal; opposite is a worry signal.
- AI mentions — for any 2026 SaaS company, the way they frame agentic AI tells you whether they're positioning to defend or to expand.
Doing it at scale across a category
If you cover a category (CRM, observability, payments) with 10–30 listed competitors, the manual ritual breaks down. Switch to text search across the whole set:
# Every competitor's mention of "win rate" this quarter
GET /api/v1/search/by_ticker
?q=%22win+rate%22
&tickers=CRM,NOW,HUBS,FRSH,...
&date_from=2026-01-01
That gives you a table of "who's defending against whom and how often" in a single request.
You can do the same for pricing, churn, NDR, AI, and any other category-specific theme. We've seen PMs build a 20-row weekly Notion table that updates from a single Python script — 200 lines, covers the entire category.
Pricing it
The temptation is to subscribe to AlphaSense / Sentieo / Visible Alpha. They're excellent products but cost $20–50k/year per seat and the contract cycle alone burns a quarter. If you just need the transcripts + search + speaker segments, our Pro tier is $24.99/month with no minimum, no seat fees, no procurement.
The trade-off: we don't bundle the sell-side analyst reports. But for product/strategy work, the transcripts themselves are 80% of the value.