Description
The Competitive Intelligence (CI) team at Salesforce is looking for a strategic leader to define our competitive efforts focused on the highest-priority Strategic Competitors in the AI and Platforms ecosystem. These vendors are reshaping the enterprise landscape across cloud, productivity, and CRM with deep investments in foundational models, generative AI, and data platforms.
In this position, you will serve as the functional lead for the team covering these competitors. You will partner closely with stakeholders to ensure Salesforce is ready to respond to these threats. Your focus will be on defining the strategy, surfacing predictive insights, and delivering impactful competitive assets and enablement for Salesforce’s internal teams.
This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of strategy and action. You will lead a pod of analysts to deconstruct not only the technical architectures of these massive platforms but also their commercial strategies, including pricing, packaging, contracting, and business models.
Responsibilities
Subject Matter Authority & Predictive Insight
Deep Ecosystem Expertise: Serve as the company-wide subject matter expert on the Strategic Competitors ecosystems. Develop and establish a mastery of how these vendors integrate IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS to create stickiness.
Anticipate Market Moves: Move beyond reporting on what happened to predicting what will happen. Use your deep knowledge of competitor investments to forecast their future product and pricing moves before they hit the market.
Define the Narrative: Own the creation of the high-level strategic narrative against these vendors. You will be responsible for defining how Salesforce wins, distinct from the feature-level comparisons handled by the broader team.
Technical Competitive Intelligence & Innovation
Architectural Analysis: Deconstruct competitor technology stacks, focusing on the differentiation between Salesforce’s metadata-driven platform (Data Cloud, Agentforce) and the "DIY" composition models of Strategic Competitors.
AI & Data Deep Dives: Lead technical research into foundational models, RAG architectures, and data platform capabilities to identify performance gaps and integration weaknesses in competitor offerings.
Product Roadmap Influence: Translate technical competitive threats into tangible engineering requirements, ensuring our product leadership understands the "ground truth" of competitor capabilities versus marketing claims.
Commercial Competitive Intelligence
Pricing & Packaging Deconstruction: Lead the analysis of complex competitor commercial constructs, including Enterprise Agreements, consumption-based AI pricing, and bundled licensing strategies.
Financial & TCO Strategy: Partner with Corporate Strategy to build defensible Total Cost of Ownership models that expose the hidden costs of DIY AI and competitor cloud infrastructure compared to Salesforce’s integrated value.
Counter-Negotiation Tactics: Equip the Sales leadership team with commercial counter-tactics to neutralize aggressive discounting and bundled inclusions used by these competitors.
Functional Leadership & Team Development
Lead the Strategic Competitors Pod: Act as the functional captain for the team covering these key competitors. You will be responsible for setting the research agenda, reviewing work quality, and driving the team’s strategic focus.
Mentorship: Elevate the depth of the junior team members by mentoring them on advanced research methodologies, commercial analysis, and executive communication.
Executive Influence & Strategic Enablement
C-Suite Advisory: Regularly present findings and recommendations to the C-suite and Product EVPs. You must be able to debate competitive trade-offs with Engineering leaders and commercial strategy with Sales leaders.
High-Stakes Enablement: Personally oversee the creation of advanced enablement materials for the most critical competitive deals and strategic account planning, helping teams succeed in competitive situations.
Cross-Functional Orchestration: Partner cross-functionally with stakeholders in Corporate Strategy, Marketing, and Distribution to deliver timely intelligence and sales-facing content.
Required Skills & Experience
10+ years of experience in enterprise SaaS or cloud platforms, ideally in competitive intelligence, product management, or strategy.
Technical Acumen: Deep familiarity with the modern AI stack (LLMs, Vector Databases, RAG), cloud infrastructure (Compute, Storage, Networking), and enterprise software development lifecycles. Ability to discern "marketing-ware" from actual technical capability.
Authority on Major Cloud Ecosystems: Strong understanding of the AI and data platform market, including DIY AI tools, cloud infrastructure, and gen AI product integration.
Commercial Fluency: Demonstrated ability to analyze complex pricing models, licensing terms, and deal structures.
Executive Presence: Excellent communication and research skills with the ability to turn market signals into actionable insights for senior leadership.
Strategic Agility: Curious, proactive, and passionate about shaping how Salesforce competes in the AI era.
Deal Support Experience: Experience supporting GTM and field organizations with competitive tools and messaging for high-stakes commercial negotiations.