CRAYON COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE BLOG

In this edition of Customer Corner, we caught up with Holly Jackson, Director of Competitive Intelligence at Talkdesk. Below she gives her best advice for any CI practitioner trying to make a splash ...

The hypercompetitive New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said it best: “Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing. Breathing first, winning next.” In business as in ...

There are several obstacles to building a successful competitive intelligence program—one of the biggest being the lack of consensus on what a successful CI program actually looks like. That’s why ...

It’s a typical Monday morning as you go through emails and catch up. Suddenly an urgent email arrives from the CEO: “Did you see this?”  Cue instant anxiety….palms sweaty, knees weak, arms are ...

It doesn’t matter if you’re building a strategy from scratch or overhauling tired practices established by marketers of yore: Sales enablement shouldn’t be an afterthought. In fact, if you aim to ...

Alec Baldwin wouldn’t be the patron saint of closing deals if, in perhaps the most cliche sales reference in cinematic history, he’d said “always be… enabling.”  Sellers are hired to sell.  It’s the ...

A competitive matrix is a visual resource that enables you and your colleagues to better understand your company’s position within the market—that is, to better understand how your company stacks up ...

Assembling a team takes more than just finding candidates with the right keywords on their resumes — company culture, soft skills, and communication styles are key to putting together the right ...

Imagine you lead the intelligence function at a CRM software company. One day, you notice that your closest competitor has recently published a couple blog posts about contracts and document ...

As we inch closer to the end of another month, you know what that means — a brand new episode of Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast has arrived!  In our latest installment, podcast ...

Just in time to kickoff Q4 — a brand new episode of Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast has arrived!  In our latest installment, podcast host, Erik Mansur (our VP of Product ...

After watching the new Amazon-meets-Middle-Earth show last week (it’s good!) I decided to watch the extended cuts of the Lord of the Rings movies. 10+ hours of whimsy and brimstone, what a delightful ...

In our fourth installment of the Crayon Customer Corner, we sat down with Zach Napolitano — Director of Product Marketing at Splash. As a first time CI practitioner, Zach took his role as a student ...

According to Harvard Business School, of the approximately 30,000 new products launched each year, about 95% fail. Of course, the product failure rate varies from one industry to another—for example, ...

Sales battlecards (also known as competitive battlecards, or simply as battlecards) give your sellers the facts, tactics, and materials they need to win competitive deals. Before we go any further, a ...

Imagine waking up and finding yourself in the driver’s seat of a car, parked on the side of a road that you don’t recognize. You’re alone, and your phone is nowhere to be found. A stranger walks up ...

When it comes to competitive analysis, scope is everything.  If you’re just starting out, you might go broad and deep on a dozen market stalwarts (like oil painters and SEC tailgaters, building a ...

Just in time to kick off the month — a brand new episode of Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast has arrived!  In our latest installment, podcast host, Erik Mansur (our VP of Product ...

Few things are more intimidating than the prospect of an audit. You know, those mildly invasive processes in which someone from an SEO consultancy or the IRS or some other authoritative three letter ...

What does the compete department at your company look like? Is competitive intelligence the responsibility of one person? Two people? A whole team? Odds are, your CI program is just a fraction of one ...

The Olympic podium. Bookish teens jockeying for valedictorian. The couples on the cusp of a $50K payday on British reality TV phenomenon Love Island. There is nothing more fundamentally human than ...

A couple weeks ago, when we sat down with Andy McCotter-Bicknell and Fouad Benyoub—leaders of competitive intelligence programs at ClickUp and Everbridge, respectively—we were expecting to talk about ...

Another month is here and you know what that means — a brand new episode of Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast!  In our latest installment, podcast host, Erik Mansur (our VP of ...

The last time I made an appearance on this blog, I showed you how to optimize your competitive intelligence program for both search mode and awareness mode. I showed you, in other words, how to ...

If you’re working with a sales team actively involved in competitive deals, you’re probably familiar with battlecards. Battlecards are a fundamental resource to help your sales team win more deals ...

When I was in 4th grade, my elementary school did an invention convention. Each student had to identify a problem in their everyday life and come up with a solution. My 9-year-old brain—which was ...

Competitive deals are emotional. How could they not be? You’re in sales because you like to win and make money. Competitors get in the way of both. I don’t care how senior you are—when a competitor ...

An account executive on your sales team, Jen, is chatting with a prospect. The conversation is going well. The prospect doesn’t seem to be evaluating any other vendors. And then they say this: “Talk ...

June is here and with it comes a brand new episode of Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast!  In our latest installment, podcast host, Erik Mansur (our VP of Product Marketing), sat ...

A lot of smart, creative people have taken the lead on competitive intelligence and found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle: It’s not an infinite cycle, of course—it does, eventually, come to an ...

Sadly, the impact of good product marketing is often obscured. A flawless product launch, an inspiring positioning statement, a face-melting slide deck—you and I both know that each of these things ...

For most of April, an indie pop band called shallow pools was touring the East Coast of the United States, making stops at legendary venues like Irving Plaza and Toad’s Place. For now, the band is ...

Even the greatest product will be overlooked if it lacks a captivating message that resonates with its target customer in a way that no competitor can match. Doing this isn’t easy. It requires ...

The freedom to be yourself is an amazing thing. It’s powerful and fundamental. It’s something everyone deserves. Life is short and everyone should be proud to be himself, herself or themselves. Given ...

There’s a lot of things I should do. I should stretch in the morning. I should go to the dentist every six months. I should stay off Twitter for the rest of my life. But just because I should do ...

In recent years, the financial services industry has undergone massive and near-constant change. First, the COVID-19 pandemic altered our spending habits completely. In response, businesses that had ...

A few weeks ago, we showed you how to make the case for an official competitive intelligence program. We showed you, in other words, how to convince an executive decision-maker (EDM) that CI is a ...

In our third installment of the Crayon Customer Corner, we chatted with Geoffrey Gibson — Vice President of Sales at Mend and a three-time (!!) Crayon user. After successfully leveraging Crayon at ...

We all know your stakeholders can benefit from competitive intelligence, but let’s talk about the real problem: They have so many places to look for information that, rather than looking, they’ll ...

So, you’ve gone through all the work of implementing competitive intelligence. You’re off to the races — tracking, analyzing, and activating valuable intel left and right… now what? Implementing a ...

If it seems like your industry is getting more competitive, it probably is.  Why is that you ask? There are a few factors at play here. A big one is that it has never been easier to start a company. ...

To create a competitive culture is to convince your colleagues that competitive intelligence is essential—to shift the perception of CI from nice-to-have to need-to-have. What does that mean? It ...

You just lost a customer. Let’s call her Sarah. No, she didn’t churn. In fact, she’s never seen your product, let alone used it. Sarah just signed a contract with your competitor—without so much as a ...

May has arrived. Do you know what that means? We have a brand new episode on Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast!  In our latest installment, podcast host, Erik Mansur (our VP of ...

It’s 8:32am. An account executive on your sales team opens up their laptop to get their day started. Yesterday was crazy. Back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls. Lots of follow-up for them to tackle ...

9,932   As of 2022, there are 9,932 martech solutions according to Scott Brinker’s latest marketing technology landscape. From email marketing to social media monitoring to ABM and everything in ...

Things could be going better. You’re working hard to deliver on the competitive intelligence requests that come through your inbox, but as far as you can tell, very few people are consuming the ...

We touched on it in our guide to penetration pricing, and today we go deep on one of the most polarizing pricing strategies out there: loss leader. In this post, we’ll define loss leader pricing, ...

Canada is south of Detroit. There’s nothing you can do with this information, but it’s pretty cool, right? Sometimes, learning for the sake of learning is perfectly appropriate. But when it comes to ...

Over the last two and half years, people have experienced tremendous change. It’s shown up in everything from our daily routines and rituals to our ability to travel and see friends and family. It’s ...

Trust me. We get it.  Your competitors are always on the move–from constant website updates to new product features and maybe even new funding rounds. That’s why companies find Crayon’s Competitive ...

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is a video interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In ...

It's Monday morning. You haven’t even taken the first sip of your coffee. You touch your right index finger to the magical biometric scanner thing on your MacBook. Your company-approved desktop ...

In our second installment of the Crayon Customer Corner, we sat down with the Product Marketing Team at Bonterra (formerly Social Solutions). The team recently purchased Crayon and discussed how the ...

I have two kids – Reagan, 18 months and Jimmy, 4 months. If you are doing the math, which is not hard, you will notice they are incredibly close…some might say too close… I certainly didn’t ...

I don’t think I’ve ever walked up a basement staircase. If I’m feeling courageous, my ascension might look something like a casual jog. Most of the time, though, I’m climbing that thing as fast as I ...

Sometimes it pays to be the new kid on the block. Every few years it seems as if there is a hot new role that catches like wildfire in organizations of all sizes. Can you remember the days before ...

New month, new quarter, new… podcast episode. We’re kicking off April with a fresh episode on Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast!  In case you missed our last blog, the podcast is ...

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of capturing, analyzing, and activating information related to your competitive landscape. Done right, CI empowers everyone at your organization to make ...

March Madness is coming to an end. This high-stakes NCAA tournament has been filled with fierce rivalries and plenty of upsets. Take Saint Peter’s, for example–the first No. 15 seed in tournament ...

In our first installment of the Crayon Customer Corner, we sat down with Carolyn Klinger, Director of Market and Competitive Intelligence at Affinity. Carolyn recently purchased Crayon for the second ...

There’s no denying that 2021 was a troubling year for the supply chain (2022 hasn’t been much better). Catastrophic events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal blockage disrupted supply ...

Product marketing is easily one of the most cross-functional (and busy) roles in an organization. Product marketers have to juggle the messaging and positioning of products, lead product launches and ...

Your product team has spent the last 18 months cookin’ up something shiny. Prospects are going to love it. There’s just one problem: You’re entering a saturated market. There’s the old guard. The ...

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is a video interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In ...

It’s that time again: the monthly marketing staff meeting where the growth team, content team, web team—you get the idea—will showcase their latest metrics. How are our efforts in these respective ...

Read the 2022 State of Competitive Intelligence Report and you’ll find tons of encouraging insights: 33% of CI teams are making time for win/loss analysis on a monthly basis. 66% of growing CI teams ...

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is a video interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In ...

Battlecards. They can be your organization’s secret weapon or just another outdated file buried in the shared drive. But while every PMM worth their salt knows they should be creating, updating, and ...

Competition is fiercer than ever before. According to our 2022 State of CI Report, 59% of CI practitioners say their markets have gotten much more competitive while 98% of stakeholders say CI is ...

In a world where the most talked about 60 seconds of the Super Bowl involved a $7M black screen emblazoned with nothing more than a bouncing, polychrome QR code, the road between market leader and ...

98% of the stakeholders we surveyed for the 2022 State of Competitive Intelligence Report said that CI is at least somewhat important to their success. That’s up from 86% in 2020—a handsome increase ...

Five years. When David Bowie sang those two words, over and over again, in the final moments of Ziggy Stardust’s opening track, his point was that five years is not a lot of time. And, sure, in the ...

We recently published the 2022 State of Competitive Intelligence Report—the 5th installment in the CI industry’s largest and longest-running survey series. Here’s my favorite finding: Compared to ...

This Sunday, the “David vs. Goliath” matchup we’ve been waiting for will hit TVs all across America. No, we’re not talking about the head-to-head battles on Big Brother.  We’re talking about the ...

Picture this: It’s Tuesday afternoon and yet another request just got added to your to-do list in Airtable. You take a look and immediately think to yourself, “There’s no way I can get to this. In ...

When your market is competitive, being an insights-driven business becomes imperative. Companies that have a pulse on their competitors stay on top.  Competitive intelligence (CI) software makes the ...

Q: How much is a product worth? A: Whatever people will pay for it. In some cases, that’s nothing (not great!). In others, it means charging a premium because, well, you can. Today, we’re focusing on ...

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is a video interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In ...

Over the past decade, marketing organizations at enterprise companies have grown from being perceived as cost centers built around soft metrics to being highly respected drivers of measurable ...

Competitive intelligence is only as good as what it yields: better preparedness, happier customers, stronger revenue growth, and so on. In order to yield these results, you need to activate the intel ...

The space race. SATs. Where the best barbecue hails from. Nothing is more American than competition. Forgive me—that’s not true. Nothing is more American than the desire to win. And what holds true ...

Product marketing managers (PMMs) hold one of the most pivotal and collaborative roles at companies – they sit at the intersection of marketing, product, sales, and customer success.  PMMs are the ...

I have been working in the B2B SaaS world for over five years now. As a competitive intelligence (CI) professional, I help companies define and build their CI programs so that they can be one step ...

Blogs. E-books. White papers. Reports. The list goes on and on. Behind every great piece of content is a team that strategized, planned, and executed an idea with one goal in mind – to share their ...

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 ...

We’ve all found ourselves lured by the siren song of some irresistible silver bullet. The adtech tool that automates away hours of mundane account optimization. The martech tool that automates away ...

As a practitioner of competitive intelligence, you have to make trade-offs. You can’t gather intel and activate intel at the same time; every minute spent on the former is a minute not spent on the ...

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 ...

Regardless of industry or available resources, brand is the north star for product teams the world over. Stop what you’re doing and thumb through your LinkedIn feed; every third post is extolling the ...

Time and time again, companies’ yearning desire to be the best gives way to fierce rivalries.  For some rival companies, the feud is public-facing – think comparative advertisements and competitor ...

Venmo. Walmart. Warby Parker. Xfinity. Supreme. Apple. Obviously, each of these companies is a massive success story. But as it turns out, the drivers of their success—although not without ...

Product marketing interviews are tricky—it’s inevitable, given the interdisciplinary nature of the role. If you’re a hiring manager, it can be overwhelming trying to narrow down the list of potential ...

When it comes to user experience (UX) design, competitive analysis should be an integral part of your strategy, to stay ahead of trends and make your website stand out against the rest within your ...

Picture this: You’re a sales rep at an email marketing software company. One day, you hop on a discovery call with a prospect. As you’re chatting with them about their goals, they say this: “Easy ...

I’m sitting at my desk as I write this intro—a desk that I assembled over the course of a snowy Saturday afternoon last winter. Had the box in which the parts were shipped not included an instruction ...

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 ...

Making cold calls. Running demos. Persuading decision-makers. The life of a seller isn’t an easy one. But that doesn’t mean you—whether you’re a product marketer, sales manager, revenue leader, or ...

For the second time this year, allow us to kick off a blog post with our favorite declaration: It’s a great day for the Crayon community! Back in May, the cause for celebration was our $22M Series B. ...

All successful companies have brand messaging that is clever, strategic, and relevant to their target audiences.  Think Nike: “Just do it.” Or, Walmart: “Save money. Live better.” Smart, persuasive, ...

In recent years, point of sale (POS) systems have become a key differentiator for restaurants across the globe. These systems allow restaurateurs to meet many practical needs such as growing profits, ...

Whether you’re a marketer or a sales manager, there are innumerable ways you can empower sellers to do their jobs more effectively. You can provide content that helps them personalize emails. You can ...

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 ...

There’s more than one way to measure the success of your content marketing strategy. Traffic. Lead volume. Revenue. The list of KPIs is long, and it spans the entirety of your funnel. No matter what ...

While your company may have a strong grasp of what’s happening internally, understanding what’s happening externally in your marketplace is critical for sound decision-making. This is where ...

Unless you’re subscribed to the Crayon blog, you’re most likely reading this because you Googled “pre-call planning.” If that’s the case, you probably noticed that there are a lot of blog posts on ...

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 ...

B2B competitive analysis is the process of critically assessing your company (or business unit) in relation to one or more competitors. Broadly speaking, the objective is to identify opportunities ...

As your market saturates, connecting with your target audience becomes increasingly difficult. With each new competitor that pops up, you have to work that much harder to say something ...

If you want to win in a competitive market, you need to position and promote your solution in a way that makes prospects think, That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Put differently, you need to do a ...

Back-to-school season is always an exciting time of year. Classmates come together to trade tales of summertime adventure (and, eventually, employment). Teachers brainstorm new ways to engage and ...

We talk a lot about branding and messaging on the Crayon blog. Specifically, we’re interested in how companies can leverage messaging to position themselves as unique, best-in-class players in their ...

No matter how experienced you are as a product marketer, one aspect of the role that’s often a challenge is properly conveying the difference between features and benefits. You yourself may see the ...

As Crayon fiercely commits to our diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, it has furthered our discussion around women in sales. Women represent only 39% of the workforce in sales despite women ...

Right off the bat, let’s make sure we’re on the same page in terms of definitions. In its simplest form, a market consists of buyers and sellers. Technically, we could also include suppliers, ...

There are tons of moving parts when it comes to keeping up with your competitors’ digital footprints. Tracking your rivals’ social media movements, in particular, is critical due to its widespread ...

At all business levels—and especially at the enterprise level—product pricing can be a challenging yet vital activity. How much should your company’s products cost? Should you go with tiered ...

More than two-thirds of competitive intelligence professionals say their in-house team is responsible for win/loss analysis. Translation: A lot of folks—perhaps yourself included—are tasked with ...

Teams are constantly looking for ways to stand out in crowded markets. Customer case studies may be just the differentiator companies have been seeking to give them that competitive edge. Not only do ...

Win/loss analysis—the process of determining why deals are won or lost—yields insights that practically everyone across your organization can use to their advantage. Sales reps get insights that they ...

For your company’s new product to succeed, a lot of dominoes need to fall. It needs to relieve the right pain points. It needs to be priced appropriately. It needs to stand out—functionally or ...

No matter your industry or your product, your company likely has dozens of rivals (if not hundreds)—some of them direct competitors, some of them indirect competitors, and some of them aspirational ...

Crafting a home run of a B2B value proposition is no easy task. Maybe your company is gearing up to launch a new product. Needless to say, you’ve got a lot on your to-do list: interviewing customers, ...

Did you check out our post on messaging hierarchies? If so, you know a little bit about brand promises. On the matrix of vital messaging for brands trying to convey their unique value proposition, ...

To be successful in a crowded marketplace, it is important to understand the competitive advantages of your company’s solution against its alternatives. Enterprises must be well-versed in their ...

According to our 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report, 99% of survey respondents found value in monitoring their competitors' website changes. Between messaging and team changes, pricing and ...

Work is stressful.  At times, we all feel overwhelmed, be it because of a growing workload, a shrinking deadline or a hefty quota. What if, in addition to those traditional workplace worries, ...

We’ve talked at length about brand positioning on the Crayon blog—from creating positioning maps to identify where your brand exists in the competitive landscape, to crafting messaging hierarchies ...