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 contributes to the success of your company. But the people calling the shots? They may not realize just how vital you are.
That’s about to change—because when you’re finished reading the brand new 2022 State of Battlecards Report, you’re going to drive up your win rates to heights previously unimaginable.
Based on our industry-leading State of Competitive Intelligence survey—which recently fielded more than ...
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 ...
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. Produced by nearly ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 Competitive Advantage 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 ...
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 ...
5 Ways to Incorporate Competitive Intelligence Into Your 2022 Sales Kickoff
Competition is heating up in nearly every industry. In 2021, 53% of businesses said the majority of their deals were competitive. That means that your sales team must be prepared for competitive ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Elizabeth Brophy
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 ...
Positioning vs. Messaging: Distinguishing These Go-to-Market Staples
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 ...
5 Next-Level Tactics for Gathering Competitive Intelligence
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Sophia Chang
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 ...
3 Keys to a Captivating Product Story (with Examples)
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 ...
Rival Companies: Exploring 8 Businesses with Fierce Competition
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 ...
6 Competitive Advantage Examples From the Real World
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 ...
8 Product Marketing Interview Questions That Hiring Managers Should Ask (and Candidates Should Prepare For)
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 ...
How to Find Competitor Pricing Information
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 ...
Competitive Comparisons Are Not Battlecards—But They’re Close
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Jaime Singson
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 ...
Sales Enablement Materials: 12 Types of Content That Empower Sellers
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 ...
Compete Like You Mean It: Taking Crayon’s Brand—and Competitive Intelligence—to New Heights
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. ...
6 Exceptional Brand Messaging Examples We Can All Learn From
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, ...
Restaurant POS Software Leader Has Removed “Restaurant” From Its Vocabulary In 2021
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, ...
7 Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Sales Enablement Efforts
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Mitchell Comstock
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 ...
Cybersecurity Content Marketing: 2 Data-Backed Tactics For a More Differentiated Strategy
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 ...
8 Sources of Competitive Intelligence to Keep Tabs On Industry Rivals
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 ...
5 Reasons Competitive Intelligence Is a Critical Component of Pre-Call Planning
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 ...
Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Elvis Lieban
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: Your Definitive Step-by-Step Guide (+ Free Template)
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 ...
16 of Our Favorite B2B + B2C Product Advertising Examples
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 ...
8 Pain Point Examples From the Real World (+ Tips for Better Understanding Your Prospects)
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 ...
This Summer, Education Brands Blogged About COVID—But They Didn’t Tweet About It
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 ...
Brand Pillars: How to Use Your Company’s Core Values as Strategic Differentiators
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 ...
Features vs. Benefits: How to Leverage Them Both and Create Messaging That Your Competitors Envy
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 ...
Women in Sales at Crayon
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 ...
3 Ways to Use Market Research for Product Development
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, ...
A Marketer’s Guide to Conducting Social Media Competitive Analysis (Free Template Included)
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 ...
Competitive Pricing: Breaking Down 5 Time-Tested Strategies
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 ...
How to Create Win/Loss Analysis Templates In Microsoft Excel (Free Downloads)
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 ...
Your Guide to Creating Customer Case Studies (+ Some Show-Stopping Examples)
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 ...
Here Are 4 Must-Ask Questions For Your Win/Loss Interviews
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 ...
5 Product Launch Examples That Are Worth Studying (+ Tips for Success)
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 ...
How to Create an Effective Competitive Comparison Landing Page
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 ...
6 Steps to a Strong(er) B2B Value Proposition
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, ...
3 Keys to Crafting an Excellent Brand Promise
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, ...
Your Guide to Conducting a Successful Competitive Product Analysis
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 ...
How to Gain Valuable Insight From Your Competitor’s Website
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 ...
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 ...
PRIDE Month: I’m Not Afraid Anymore
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, ...
The 5 Best Brand Positioning Examples We’ve Ever Seen
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 ...
Competitive Landscape Analysis: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get a Head Start
Neglecting competitive landscape analysis is a costly mistake—one that’s steadily growing costlier over time. We say that for several reasons. First of all—and as regular readers of this blog are ...
7 Ways to Make a More Effective Message Map
Let’s face it—your product doesn’t sell itself. Most products just don’t. That’s why product marketing focuses on defining the positioning for your solution and the messaging your team should use to ...
Competitive Analysis Frameworks: 3 Ways to Get More From Competitive Data
Competitive analysis frameworks are indispensable for anyone who wants to extract meaning from intel and inspire action across their organization. When we talk about competitive intelligence, we’re ...
Why You Need to Align Your Product and Marketing Teams + How to Make It Happen [A B2B Guide]
A Google search for “sales and marketing alignment” yields dozens of case studies and blog posts (including one that we wrote). This is unsurprising; it’s generally taken for granted that getting ...
5 Competitive Advertising Examples to Spark Competitive Creativity
Competitive advertising is a well-established practice in our modern media landscape. As the intensity of competition rises, so, too, does the difficulty of earning and maintaining the attention of ...
The Definitive Guide to Win/Loss Analysis: How to Gather, Analyze, and Act On Win/Loss Data
Win/loss analysis is an essential practice for anyone who wants to better understand their competitive landscape and continuously optimize processes across sales, marketing, product management, and ...
Why You Need a Messaging Hierarchy (+ How to Create One)
In the battle against competitors for sales, a positioning statement gives brand stakeholders much-needed ammunition. Across marketing and sales channels, you need to know how to promote your product ...
Celebrating Our 500th Customer and $22M Series B!
It’s a great day for the Crayon community! Today, we celebrate our 500th customer and $22M Series B. Let’s go!!! This round is being led by Benedict Rocchio at Baird Capital, a remarkable investor ...
11 Sales Enablement Statistics Everyone Should Know In 2022
Sales enablement statistics are useful for a number of reasons. Maybe you’re new to the discipline and trying to quickly learn as much as possible. Maybe you’re building a business case for the ...
How to Create a Winning Brand Positioning Strategy
If your brand existed in a vacuum, it’d be easy enough to convey your unique selling proposition to a prospect. You’d be unique because you’d be the only game in town. Your product’s defining ...
10 Essential Examples of Competitive Intelligence (With Tips for Inspiring Action!)
For those who conduct competitive intelligence, gathering insights in a timely manner can be an enormous struggle. On any given day, there may be hundreds — if not thousands — of signals generated ...
What Are the Goals of Competitive Intelligence? Let’s Break Down 5 of Them
Businesses have never been more agile than they are right now. Bringing a product to market, releasing a new feature, launching an ad campaign — these initiatives, though they will never be easy by ...
6 Best Practices to Align Sales and Marketing Teams
The more closely you align your sales and marketing teams, the better. When everyone is on the same page — from content marketers and demand gen specialists to BDRs and account executives — lead ...
What’s the Difference Between Product Marketing & Product Management?
The difference between product marketing and product management is not an especially clear one. Within a given organization, both product marketers and product managers are intimately familiar with ...
The 8 Free Market Research Tools and Resources You Need to Know
With over 400,000 new businesses opening in the United States each month, the need for individual companies to conduct their own market research has never been more urgent. However, conducting ...