Are you struggling to stay ahead of your competitors in the B2B SaaS market? In this podcast hosted by Cassio Sampaio, Okta Head of Insights for Growth Kundan Kolhe will be speaking on building effective competitive intelligence strategies. Drawing from over 20 years of enterprise software experience, Kundan shares insider tactics on how top tech companies transform competitive insights into winning business strategies.
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Show Notes
- Competitive intelligence is not just tracking competitors, but creating an always-on feedback loop that shapes innovation and positioning
- CI teams should be the connective tissue between product and go-to-market organizations, not just data collectors
- Successful CI requires building trust and partnerships across sales, product, and marketing teams
- Technical audiences need specific, detailed insights – not generic marketing claims
- “Winners make winners” – sharing real customer success stories is more powerful than theoretical competitive comparisons
- The best CI professionals have curiosity, pattern recognition skills, and ability to translate complex insights
- AI is transforming competitive intelligence by surfacing signals and connecting unstructured data at scale
- Competitive content should be tailored to specific deal stages and customer use cases
- Internal transfers to CI teams work best with people who can create shared agendas and collaborate across functions
- CI teams should focus on being the most useful function, not the most visible
- Competitive benchmarking should go beyond feature comparisons to understand total cost of ownership and time-to-market
- Developing a CI chatbot can provide real-time competitive insights to sales teams
- Win-loss interviews are critical for understanding positioning challenges
- Competitive intelligence should help sellers build customer-specific positioning
- CI assets are most effective when created collaboratively with field teams
- Technical decision-makers are won through substance, not slides
- Competitive content should provide clear ROI and economic comparisons
- CI teams should listen deeply to product, sales, marketing, and support teams
- Competitive awareness is a cultural mindset, not just a departmental function
- The goal of CI is to influence winning strategy, not just deliver reports
About the speaker
Kundan is an outstanding and progressive Product Executive with over 20 years of experience in starting-up, and scaling Enterprise Software, Services, and B2B SaaS revenue across startups, mid-sized companies, and large enterprises. Kundan speaks the language of developers, architects, marketers, and sellers, with deep knowledge in Cybersecurity. He helps companies stand out in a crowded market by identifying unique product features and turning them into compelling, differentiated pitches for marketing and sales—leveraging buyer research, competitive intelligence, pricing analysis, product feedback councils, and win/loss analysis.
About the host
I am a product person with 20+ years of experience most recently with DigitalOcean, Apple, Auth0 and now running Customer Identity at Okta. I love technical products and my sweet spot is B2B SaaS / IaaS. I have done a bit of everything including running engineering teams, corporate development and marketing and lived and worked in Canada, US and Brazil.