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 are 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 covers 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.
- In the 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
- Watch ARR or revenue mix shifts: are they moving up-market, down-market, into adjacent products?
- Pricing actions can be explicit ("we raised list prices 8% in Q3") or implicit ("we expect ASP to lift 12% on the back of the new tier").
- For 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.
- On churn / NDR / NRR, look at which cohorts they're losing. They'll often disclose the segment ("SMB churn elevated") without disclosing customer names.
- For geo or vertical expansion, the first mention of a new geography is usually 1-2 quarters before the product team there is staffed up.
- In headcount commentary, flat or declining R&D headcount with rising revenue is a confidence signal; opposite is a worry signal.
- For AI mentions at 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, covering 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.
Get a key → · Browse recent transcripts →