Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is an interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In this edition of Product Marketing Spotlight Series, we shine the light on Jake Godgart, Product Marketing Manager at Rapid7.
Bootstrapping a hacky solution to a complicated competitive intelligence (CI) problem is enticing. But, as a company grows, free software trials and bootstrap fixes wear thin. Your limited investments in appropriate tools can become embarrassing.
One cannot expect reliable growth if nothing is invested. A $0.00 budget for a competitive intelligence program is not enough to see real value from your CI program. You may consider hiring a full-time CI professional to address the challenge. According to PayScale, a competitive intelligence analyst can earn upwards of $100,000 / year. Companies will bleed that salary if they leave employees equipped with lesser tools. Exactly what sort of tools, you ask?
Here are six hacky tools limiting your competitive intelligence program’s growth. Each comes with costs and consequences you might not be able to endure.
The following post was written by Marissa Gbenro, the Sr. Content Marketing Strategist at Highspot. Prior to life at Highspot, she worked to drive corporate marketing strategy for TrueBlue across 600 locations in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico.
Think of the last time you made a significant purchase. You most likely started the process online, researching the benefits of the product. Once you were fairly convinced you needed to make the investment, you created a list of possible vendors to choose from. Finally, you put your detective skills to work, comparing the reviews and ratings of each brand before choosing to interact with your shortlist of favorites.
Engaging with a sales rep is far from a top priority for today’s buyers when traveling through their buying journey. This is especially true for B2B buyers considering that they navigate almost 60% of the buyer’s journey before reaching out to a sales rep.
87% of Competitive Intelligence (CI) professionals say that their market has gotten more competitive in the last three years, according to the 2019 State of Competitive Intelligence. In the same report, respondents also reported having an average of 25 competitors. So what does this mean? It means that markets are getting more competitive and will continue to do so, and enabling your sales team to sell against the competition is more important than ever.
