Speaker: Ben Hoffman
Ben Hoffman: My name is Ben Hoffman and I'm a Senior Manager of Competitive Intelligence in the Adobe DX Competitive Center of Excellence.
What topic will you be discussing at the Competitive Intelligence Summit?
Ben Hoffman: So the upcoming Competitive Intelligence Summit, I'm really excited and humbled to be providing a keynote talking about why competitive intelligence programs fail. So thinking about things like forgetting about macro trends, forgetting that competitive intelligence software is not the end all be all. That there's still an analyst on your team that needs to provide that human intel element, and looking at competitive intelligence as sort of a cookie cutter methodology and not really considering the size of your organization or the vertical that your organization sits in. So we'll be talking about all that and much more, at the upcoming summit, looking forward to it.
What other sessions are you looking forward to watching at the Competitive Intelligence Summit?
Ben Hoffman: So I'm looking forward to all the sessions at the summit, but a couple that really jumped out at me were the session on the three different types of competitive intelligence. I thought that sounded really interesting and then the session on writing a really crispy news briefing, I think there's a lot that I can personally learn from that. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to the entire agenda during that day.
If you could share one piece of advice to competitive intelligence specialists who are just getting into the industry, what would it be?
Ben Hoffman: So this is a really great question. One piece of advice to CI specialists, That are just getting into the industry. There's a lot of different elements that I think we could talk about, but one that really jumps out at me right away is that if you're just getting into the space, there's so many aspects of competitive intelligence, from the strategy to the tactical, to content, writing to sales, enablement, program management, there's so many different aspects, which is part of why it's a very exciting field to be in. I would just say, you know, let yourself try all those different things if you can master all of it, that's amazing. But, you know, more realistically, you'll find that there's a couple areas that you really like, and maybe a couple of areas that you don't like as much, and then um you know, really, really harness those, those areas that you like, or that you love, and um really try to master those. That would be my piece of advice. But it's an exciting field to be in, and um you know, congratulations on taking those steps of getting into that field
