Principal, Strategic Market Intelligence

Job Description

Who we're looking for:
We are seeking a dedicated and astute Business Strategy Principal to join our growing team, reporting to the Director of Market Intelligence. You will be part of an impactful team chartered with providing executive leadership with continuous, relevant market information to actively advise strategic business decisions and provide detailed insights that can be actioned upon.

The Principal will be instrumental in driving decision-making processes through regular deliverables produced from accurately analyzing the global market opportunity for Zendesk. This role requires a strong analytical mind and the ability to work across various business units (e.g. Office of Strategy, Corp Dev, Sales, Finance, Operations, Marketing, Product).

What you'll be doing

Market Model: Build, maintain and own our market models, including
- Top Down market model using data sources such as Gartner, I.D.C, Forrester reports, D&B and competitive install information.
- Bottom up market model regularly validating all assumptions through a planned research program.
- Interact with cross-functional groups (e.g., Sales, Finance, Product Strategy and Analytics) in support of an accurate and evolving market model. Advise groups looking to use market model information for investment decisions.

Macro Environment Assessment: Product a quarterly business environment analysis based on independent thinking on macro and micro trends impacting SAM and SOM or surfacing emerging trends.

Competitive Analysis: Assemble strategic competitive intelligence reports (e.g., understanding market share, positioning, GTM and partner strategies, product/services mix and acquisition strategies) resulting in a verifiable assessment of competitive threat and areas of opportunity

Buyer behaviors: Examining the changing buying landscape and individual needs of Customer support and employee experience software buyers.

Product Evaluation: Assess product market fit for current and planned product line offerings across segments and regions.

What you bring to the role
- You have the hands on skills to perform primary and secondary analyses but also excel at developing recommendations that go beyond the numbers in pursuit of concrete outcomes such as improving market share.
- You love to generate hypotheses, independently analyze complex data and make strategic recommendations despite uncertainty and ambiguity.
- You can operate independently and build out new programs, and love working in a multifaceted environment where flexibility and agility are critical.
- You are a self-starter who wants to design, plan and lead the execution of ongoing deliverables to inform leadership about the market and competitive landscape.
- You aspire to hold a leadership role.
- You have the ability to travel 5% of the time for team meetings.

Basic Qualifications:

- Experience: Minimum of 5 years of prior work experience in market analysis to support strategic decision-making or a data analytics role, preferably in management consulting or private equity environment.
- Research Savvy: Ability to lead or execute primary and secondary research on a limited budget. This could involve conducting expert interviews, creating research surveys using Qualtrics, and/or effectively managing internal staff or external market research vendors or consultants.
- Data Analysis Skills: Ability to lead or perform activities such as data joining of dispersant datasets, data exploration using statistical tools, and occasionally analysis of textual data using excel.
- Data Visualization Skills: Ability to conceive of and create highly relevant dashboards and reports that could be applied in real time by leadership to inform decisions.
- Operations Skills: Ability to work closely with Sales Strategy and Sales Ops to develop and help drive actionable recommendations (involves a thorough understanding of data sources and tools used in the sales process).
- Interests: Willingness to become an expert in software industry / SaaS

Preferred Qualifications:

- Education preference
- Bachelor of Science or equivalent (with formal training or expertise in International or General Business, Economics, Math/Statistics, and/or Psychology) preferably with MBA/MS level coursework or vast experience with standard business analysis toolkits (e.g., SWOT, PESTEL, BMC).
- Familiarity with using resources of external technology research (e.g., Gartner, I.D.C., Forrester, Investor reports, 10ks/Qs, etc) for market understanding.
- Exceptional problem-solving skills: proven track record in leading multiple priorities, structuring complex problems, performing deep analytics, deriving business insights/scenarios, and developing solutions
- Demonstrated ability to efficiently prioritize and deliver results to all levels of the organization.
- Highly collaborative, teammate who can independently work cross-functionally and build trusted peer relationships across the company with internal co