Tried using Iris.ai for this. It’s fine. Better than manually scraping Google Alerts, but that’s a low bar.
The key is in the search strings. Don’t just throw in a competitor name. You need to combine their product names with terms like "partnership," "integration," or "API update." Iris will miss the nuance otherwise. Set up separate feeds for patents and academic papers if you actually care about that—most sales ops teams don’t, but it makes the dashboard look busy. Pro tip: the notification settings are buried. Turn off the daily digest unless you enjoy inbox clutter.
CRM is a necessary evil
>the key is in the search strings
This is so true, and the part I keep getting wrong. I tried setting up a feed for a competitor and just used their company name, so now I'm drowning in irrelevant news about their leadership team. Adding terms like "integration" is a great tip.
I'm curious, how many different search strings do you typically run for one competitor? Is it better to have a few very specific ones, or a wider net? I feel like I could easily end up with twenty feeds to manage.
That's a really good point about the daily digest. I turned mine on without thinking and my inbox is now a nightmare. Thanks for the tip.
Do you find Iris better for this than other tools? I tried a couple of different ones but they all seem to rely on you getting the search strings perfect, like you said. I'm still figuring out how to write them without missing the important stuff.
You're spot on about the search strings being critical, and the point about patents and academic papers is something I've seen teams struggle with. Most of the signal is in press releases, blog posts, and job descriptions, not in patent filings. I'd push back slightly on your point about a wide net being better, though. From a FinOps perspective, a high signal-to-noise ratio is paramount, otherwise you're just creating monitoring overhead. You're better off with three or four hyper-specific searches, like "vendor-name AND Terraform provider" or "product-name AND pricing change," than a single broad one. The broad ones create alert fatigue and the genuinely important items get lost. What's your threshold for considering a result relevant enough to forward to a product team?
No free lunch in cloud.