Crayon AI: Capture and Summarize Critical Competitive Insights In Minutes
Few activities are more tedious than sifting through Google Alerts in search of important competitive insights.
Not only is it tedious, it’s detrimental to your CI program — because the time you spend sifting through Google Alerts is time you don’t spend on high-impact activities, like training your sales team on the latest versions of your battlecards.
But what choice do you have? You can’t afford to not search for important competitive insights. If you miss something big, you’re in the hot seat.
Good news: You can have your cake and eat it too. You can keep your company informed about major pieces of ...
Start Small and Don’t Surprise People: Tips From Our Win/Loss Webinar with Scott Frost
For the second installment of our new Win/Loss Wednesdays series, we had the pleasure of chatting with Scott Frost, who’s led competitive intelligence at Stripe, Adobe, and New Relic. By the end of ...
Value + Variety: How CI Leaders Can Capture Mindshare and Drive Adoption
When I was a kid, car commercials puzzled me. I remember asking my dad: Why do they make these? No one is gonna get off the couch and buy a Camry after watching a Toyota commercial. Which is true — ...
Guest Post: We Need Win/Loss Insights Even More During an Economic Downturn
This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, Goldpan. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! Win/loss analysis isn’t a nice-to-have. Understanding your buyers and prospects is ...
Some Competitors Don’t Deserve Your Time: Why Gong and Crayon Are Better Together
There’s a trope in teen movies where the protagonist’s mom prepares an extraordinary breakfast — eggs, bacon, bagels, fresh fruit, coffee, orange juice — only for said protagonist (annoying, ...
Crayon AI: Capture and Summarize Critical Competitive Insights In Minutes
Few activities are more tedious than sifting through Google Alerts in search of important competitive insights. Not only is it tedious, it’s detrimental to your CI program — because the time you ...
3 Takeaways From Our Win/Loss Webinar With Egencia’s Jayde Phillips
For the first installment of our new Win/Loss Wednesdays series, we had the pleasure of chatting with Jayde Phillips, who manages market and competitive intelligence at Egencia, an American Express ...
How Salsify and Dropbox Reap the Benefits of Crayon + Slack
Slack is the communication backbone of tens of thousands of companies around the world because while it’s true that knowledge is power, we all know that the true power comes only once that knowledge ...
The Future is Here: Testing out ChatGPT with Win/Loss Analysis
This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, PSP Enterprises. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! “Let’s talk about how I can use GPT to help me with competitive intelligence.” ...
Improve Battlecard Adoption by Creating an Awards Ceremony for Your Sales Team
Competitive intelligence leaders are often so focused on improving the content of their battlecards that they overlook a simple yet vital responsibility: reminding their sales teams that the ...
The CI Leaders at Akamai and Deltek Want You to Do These 3 Things
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mimi An and August Jackson — who run competitive intelligence (CI) at Akamai and Deltek, respectively — about the top insights from Crayon’s 2023 ...
The Worst Thing a Seller Can Do In a Competitive Situation (+ More Takeaways From Our Latest Webinar)
A few days ago, I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar that featured Crayon’s VP of Strategy, Chris Pope, and Aircall’s Director of Sales, Tommy Jester. We talked about the mistakes that sellers ...
How Alteryx Increased Battlecard Adoption 40% in Just 60 Days
According to the 2023 State of Competitive Intelligence report, 58% of those who measure their battlecards think they’re well-adopted. Among the ranks of that majority is Spencer Hong, Senior ...
Guest Post: Understanding Competitive vs Competitor Intelligence
This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, Atlantic Intelligence. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! What separates competitive from competitor intelligence? Simply put, ...
Customer Corner: How Intellum Used Crayon to Renew an At-Risk Customer
After successfully enabling the sales organization with competitive insights at Intellum, Kaitlyn Smith — Product Marketing Manager and competitive intelligence practitioner extraordinaire — set her ...
Hey, Product Marketer: Your Battlecards Shouldn’t Be Perfect
In high school, my economics teacher loved to remind us that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It’s an old-timey way of saying “everything comes at a cost.” Oftentimes, the cost of something ...
Customer Corner: How SafeGuard Cyber Increased Win Rates with Battlecard Adoption
In our fifth installment of the Crayon Customer Corner, we sat down with Dan Dearing — Senior Director of Product Marketing at SafeGuard Cyber. As a competitive intelligence team of one who maintains ...
NEW DATA: Field Intel Is Vital to Your Competitive Program. Here Are 5 Tips to Help You Capture It.
Here at Crayon, we recently published the 2023 State of Competitive Intelligence, a benchmark report based on a survey of CI leaders and stakeholders. We gave CI leaders a list of 11 sources of ...
NEW DATA: The Secret to Earning Your CI Stakeholders’ Trust
Here at Crayon, we recently published the 2023 State of Competitive Intelligence, a benchmark report based on a survey of CI leaders and stakeholders. “Stakeholders” refers to people who need CI to ...
Guest Post: How B2B Companies Use Competitive Intelligence to Improve Retention
This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, Satrix Solutions. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! You’ve probably heard the saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” It’s ...
Find Your Perfect Competitive Intelligence Partner:Crayon Launches CI Partner Directory
Competitive Intelligence professionals and product marketing leaders know the struggle of being resource-constrained. Product marketing in particular often owns competitive intelligence (and all that ...
Introducing Draft Control: The Secret to Building Better CI Deliverables
Creating effective competitive intelligence deliverables is like trying to build a sandcastle on the beach: Just when you think you've got it right, a new wave comes crashing in and changes ...
The State of Competitive Intelligence In 2023
When Crayon published the first edition of the State of Competitive Intelligence on January 16, 2018, “Despacito” was still comfortably in the Top 40. You had just heard the term “Bitcoin ...
8 Key Steps to Help You Spot Competitor Analysis Trends in 2023
While they might be a thorn in your side, your competitors aren’t special. They, like every other business on the planet, are coming into 2023 with all kinds of newfangled ideas. The optimists are ...
It Takes a Village: How to Elevate Your CI Program Through Multi-Threading
As a Customer Success Manager here at Crayon, I have seen over 100 CI programs in action. Nearly all of them have the same success criteria: “Enabling the sales team to win competitive deals and ...
It’s a Three-Peat: Crayon Is Once Again Named the PMA Pulse Leader for Competitive Intelligence
In the world of sports, a team that wins three or more championships in the span of only a few years is considered a dynasty. Today, Crayon is celebrating a dynasty of our own in the competitive ...
Crayon and Primary Intelligence Develop a Market First Integration: Sellers Now Automatically Have the Win-Loss Insights they Need to More Close Deals
When your win/loss data is disconnected from your competitive intelligence tool, trying to understand your differentiators is like trying to appreciate the Mona Lisa from a mere 6 inches away — you ...
3 Strategies Customer Success Managers Need to Keep Customers From Switching to Competitors
Your sales team just won a competitive deal. It was a taxing evaluation: multiple demos, a trial period, extensive pricing conversations—the works. Until the account executive on your sales team got ...
The 4 Types of Role-Based Battlecards You Need to Build
Battlecards are one of the most popular sales enablement materials businesses create today, with two-thirds of competitive intelligence teams saying that they regularly maintain competitive ...
Podcast Episode: A Practical Guide to Competitive Intelligence
Tis’ the season for a brand new episode of Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast! In our latest installment, podcast guest host Will Thompson (Crayon’s Director of Growth Marketing), ...
What's a SWOT Analysis?
Tesla, Rivian, and Toyota all make electric vehicles, but the way they perceive their respective roles in the EV market (and the way prospective purchasers perceive each brand) couldn’t be more ...
Podcast Episode: Using Competitive Intelligence for Product-Led Growth
As we glide into a new month, you know what that means — a new episode of Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast has arrived! In our latest installment, guest host Will Thompson sat down ...
Your Sellers’ Needs Are Always Changing. Hit the Bullseye Every Time with Competitive Performance Insights.
The best competitive intelligence programs are proactive, meaning they identify threats as soon as they begin to emerge and enable their sales teams accordingly. That sounds pretty straightforward—so ...
Your Competitor’s Next Big Move Is Coming. Get Ready with the Accelerator Course.
A product launch. An acquisition. A groundbreaking go-to-market partnership. Sooner or later, your competitor will do something big—something that directly threatens your market share. You have two ...
Customer Corner: The Dos and Don’ts of Running a CI Session at Sales Kickoff from Talkdesk’s Holly Jackson
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 ...
10 Best Practices for a Successful Win/Loss Program
This is a Crayon guest post from one of our partners, PSP Enterprises. Visit the Crayon Partner Directory to learn more! The hypercompetitive New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said it best: ...
NEW DATA: The Industries with the Most Mature Competitive Programs
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 ...
Never Get Blindsided by a Competitor Again. Crayon Introduces CI Without Limits.
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 ...
Build and Implement Your Sales Enablement Strategy (in 7 Simple Steps)
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 ...
What Is Sales Enablement? Your Burning Questions Answered
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 ...
How to Create a Competitive Matrix (Step-by-Step Guide With Examples + Free Templates)
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 ...
5 Tips for Building Your Competitive Intelligence Dream Team from CI Leaders at Dropbox and Stripe
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 ...
Your Competitor Is Up to Something—But What? Use Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) to Crack the Case
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 ...
Podcast Episode: How to Train Your Whole Company on Competitive Intelligence Techniques
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 ...
Podcast Episode: Building a Competitive Intelligence Program That's Collaborative and Connected to What Your Users Really Need
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 ...
Building A Top-Tier Market Intelligence Strategy
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 ...
Crayon Customer Corner: How Splash Used Crayon to Implement a Culture of Competitive Intelligence
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 ...
How to Measure Product Launch Success: 12 KPIs You Should Be Tracking
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 101: How to Help Your Sellers Leave the Competition In the Dust
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 ...
The Competitive Program Grader: A Free Tool for Anyone Who Wants to Master Competitive Intelligence
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 ...
Everything You Need to Know About Competitive Analysis (Template Included!)
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 ...
Podcast Episode: Using Competitive Intelligence to Influence Your Content Marketing Strategy
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 ...
How do you Conduct a Competitive Audit?
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 ...
Scaling Your Competitive Intelligence Team? Start Here
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 ...
Competitor Tracking 101: Identifying the Competition and Your Biggest Questions Answered
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 ...
You’re Not a Factory, Gift Cards Suck, and Other Takeaways from Our Latest CI Live Event
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 ...
Podcast Episode: Taking a Tiered Approach to Your Competitive Landscape
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 ...
How to Use Slack + Crayon to Unlock Real-Time Intel, Delight Your Colleagues, and Win More Deals
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 ...
How to Write a Better Battlecard: Follow the ABCs
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 ...
I Used Google Alerts to Collect Intel for a Month. Here Are 5 Things I Missed.
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 ...
How to Win More Competitive Deals (and Lose With Dignity)
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 ...
The Key to Handling Competitive Objections and Landmines: “Why?”
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 ...
Podcast Episode: Creating a Win/Loss Program That’s Repeatable and Actionable
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 ...
Your Seat at the Table Awaits: Introducing the Architect Certification Course
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 ...
New Data: Battlecard Benchmarks and Best Practices Based On 1,200+ Survey Responses
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 ...
Whether You Want to Play Pop Music or Pro Hockey, Crayon Has Your Back
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 ...
How to Write an Outstanding Competitive Positioning Statement In 4 Steps (Example Included!)
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 ...
Happy Pride: The Freedom to be Yourself is an Amazing Thing
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 ...
6 Tips for Driving Competitive Intelligence Adoption from the Experts at Gainsight, Affinity, and Apprize360
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 ...
Competitive Intelligence in the Financial Services Industry
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 ...
Trying to Make the Case for Competitive Intelligence Software? Here Are 3 Tips
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 ...
Crayon Customer Corner: How Mend Uses Crayon Integrations to Empower their Sales and Marketing Teams
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 ...
Connecting Employees to the “Why Care” and “Where to Go” with Competitive Intelligence Integrations
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 ...
The Competitive Intelligence KPIs You Need To Be Tracking
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 ...
It’s True, Your Market is Getting More Competitive
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, You Need Role Models and Software
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 ...
Exceed Your Inbound Revenue Target With Crayon
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 ...
Podcast Episode: The Past, Present, and Future of Competitive Intelligence
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 ...
Gong + Crayon: Helping Your Sellers Win With Personalized Competitive Insights
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 ...
What's in Your Competitive Intelligence Tech Stack?
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 ...
Sponsor, Scope, Solutions: How to Create an Ironclad Business Case for Your CI Program
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 ...
Loss Leader Pricing: What It Is and How It Works (Examples!)
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, ...
Hopes, Hypotheses, Humility: The 3 H’s of a Successful Win Loss Project
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 ...
Reinventing Your Career at Crayon
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 ...
Crayon Analysts: Your Built-In Competitive Intel Sidekick
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Hannah Sackett
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 ...
3 Ways Product Marketers Can Win (More!) with Crayon’s Competitive Win Loss Tools
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 ...
Crayon Customer Corner: 5 Questions with the Product Marketing Team of Bonterra
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 ...
Navigating Motherhood (and a Whole Lot More) With Crayon By My Side
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 ...
Out of the Dark, Into the Noise: The Case for a Tiered Approach to Competitor Tracking
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 ...
Compete: The Next Must-Have Department
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 ...
Podcast Episode: Building CI Credibility at Your Company
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: A Data-Backed Overview (Video)
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 Final Four: Leveraging Battlecards to Predict Winners
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 ...
How to Effectively Analyze Competitive Intelligence: 5 Questions with Affinity’s Carolyn Klinger
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 ...
Supply Chain Solutions: Who Has the Largest Share of Voice?
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 ...
Seven Tried-and-True Pieces of Advice For Product Marketers
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 ...
Penetration Pricing: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How It's Executed In the Real World
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Alison Hayter
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 ...
Are You Measuring Your CI Efforts? New Data Reveals It’s Time to Start [Infographic]
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 ...
Here’s What CI Practitioners Are Struggling With—And What Experts Recommend [New Data]
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Ankita Asthana
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 ...
5 Battlecard Best Practices From the Experts at Gong, Salsify, and Hootsuite
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 ...
Introducing Into the Fray: The Competitive Intelligence Podcast
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 ...
Competitor Messaging Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide for Product Marketers
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 ...
5 Ways to Elevate Your CI Function In 2022 [New Data]
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 ...
The State of Competitive Intelligence In 2022: 3 Remarkable Trends
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 ...
Because Winners Don’t Wing It: Introducing Crayon Academy
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 ...
A Battle for the Ages: Rams vs. Bengals Competitive Advantages
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 ...
Jobs to Be Done: What Product Marketers Can Learn From Product Managers
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 ...
Five Key Takeaways from Leading Analyst Firms on the Competitive Intelligence Industry
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 ...
Prestige Pricing: What It Is, Why It Works, and How It's Executed In the Real World
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Farhan Manjiyani
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 ...
Influenced Revenue: How CI Practitioners Can Prove—and Amplify—Their Impact On Sales
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 ...
Who Uses Competitive Intelligence? A Quick Tour of the 4 Major Stakeholder Audiences
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 ...
Competitive Differentiation: How to Stand Out and Win
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 Manager Salary Overview: How Do You Stack Up?
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 Just Bought Crayon For the Second Time—Here's Why
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 ...
4 Insights That CI Pros Can Deliver to Their Content Teams
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 ...