Should you hire someone dedicated to competitive intelligence?
Almost certainly not yet. The honest threshold is when you can name what competitive losses cost you last year, and the number is bigger than a salary.
The honest answer for almost everyone reading this is no, not yet, and the reason is not budget.
The number test
A competitive intelligence hire is justified by a number.
What did competitive losses cost you last year? Not roughly. Actually. Deals lost to a named rival, with values attached.
If you cannot answer that, you are not ready to hire, because you do not yet know whether the problem is worth a salary. You are hiring on a feeling, and the feeling is usually anxiety rather than evidence.
If you can answer it, and the number comfortably exceeds a fully loaded salary, then the conversation is real.
The failure mode of hiring early
Here is what happens when a company hires a CI specialist before it is ready, and it is bleak in a very specific way.
They hire someone good. That person does excellent work. They produce genuinely sharp weekly intelligence: this competitor is going downmarket, this one is struggling, here is the pricing move you should make.
And nothing happens. Leadership reads it, finds it interesting, and does not change any decisions, because the organisation has no habit of acting on this kind of input and nobody built one.
Within a year the specialist is demoralised and gone, and the company has concluded that competitive intelligence does not work, when what actually did not work was the company.
A CI hire without an executive who acts on the output is a very expensive newsletter.
What you probably want instead
Most companies who think they want a CI specialist actually want a CI system.
They want to stop being surprised. They want the pricing change to reach them in a day rather than a quarter. They want somebody to have noticed.
That is a tooling and habit problem, not a headcount problem, and it costs two orders of magnitude less.
The test before you hire
Run it yourself for a quarter. Three competitors, five signals, an hour a week.
At the end of the quarter, ask one question: did any of this change a decision?
If yes, and if the volume of it is now genuinely more than an hour a week can handle, then hiring makes sense. You are scaling something that demonstrably works.
If no, and if nothing you learned changed anything you did, then hiring a specialist will not fix that. It will just produce more unread intelligence, more expensively, and eventually somebody will get blamed for it who was doing their job perfectly well.
The hire scales the habit. It does not create it.