Crayon Competitive
Intelligence Blog
Ben Cope
Ben Cope, a Crayon alum, is currently Senior Manager of Growth Marketing at Recorded Future, the world's largest provider of intelligence for enterprise security. Previously, Ben spent three years working in both marketing and sales roles at Salsify. When he isn't cobbling together marketing campaigns, you'll find him attempting to cook something overly elaborate or bopping around music venues in Boston.
5 Steps for Effectively Leveraging Competitive Intelligence
You did it. Your persistent competitive research efforts have yielded a key piece of intel about one of your competitors. Maybe a competitor is quietly discontinuing a product line, or maybe they’re ...
Why Technology Companies Need to Invest More in Product Marketing
Most startups and growth-stage tech companies are understandably judicious in their outlay of capital. When you’re under the venture capital magnifying glass and trying to prove your product is ...
How to Give Your Marketing Team a Competitive Advantage
Building and scaling a well-oiled marketing team that facilitates growth is a tall order. Building and engaging an audience with insightful content that pushes the known boundaries of your market is ...
How to Leverage Product Reviews In Your Competitor Analysis
Review sites are jam-packed with competitive intelligence (CI). On review sites, you’ll find both happy and unhappy customers giving insight into your competitors’ products and outlining strengths ...
Using Competitive Data Points to Predict the Future
For anyone with an internet connection and a glut of time available for research, competitive data points are nearly inexhaustible. New job postings, minor website copy changes, new marketing content ...
Three Tactical Ways to Leverage Messaging to Drive Growth
Roles in sales and marketing have become more specialized in recent years. Salespeople are rarely responsible for a full customer lifecycle, instead focusing singularly on initial outreach, pre-sale ...
How Product Marketers Can Adapt to a Rapidly-Changing Market
Product marketers have a lot on their plates during a period of normalcy. During an atypical time when markets are in constant flux, and competitive pivots are just as swift, those plates are filled ...
Product Marketers: The Subject Matter Experts
Product marketing is a uniquely diverse function, and as such, product marketers tend to come from varying backgrounds and possess differing strengths. Some product marketers are master storytellers. ...
How to Balance Customer & Competitor Centric Messaging
Formulating messaging that resonates with your target market is a challenging endeavor. Strong messaging needs to concisely demonstrate differentiated value that addresses the unique goals and ...
3 Unique, Tactical Applications of Competitive Intelligence
Most marketers and competitive intelligence (CI) pros would agree that gathering competitive insights is only a valuable activity if those insights are used to further key business goals. Almost ...
Competitive Intelligence is Maturing: Here’s What to Do About It
Competitive intelligence (CI) is not a new business function. The way businesses and CI practitioners are approaching competitive intelligence, however, is changing quickly. We surveyed 1,000+ CI ...
2021: The Year of the Product Marketer
The nature of product marketing is constantly evolving. Campaign marketers chase new channels each year, content marketers adopt new content mediums; the phenomenon of change isn’t unique to product ...
Why Your Battlecards Aren’t Working
Your competitors impact nearly every aspect of your business. They impact how your product team shapes its development roadmap. They shape how your marketing team runs campaigns. They even influence ...
How to Tie Product Marketing to Revenue
One of the most significant frustrations product marketers face is the disconnect between their work and quantifiable business outputs. Nearly every organization with a dedicated product marketing ...
Why Competitor Battlecards Should Focus on the Entire Sales Funnel
Competitor battlecards have become a popular tool for enabling sales teams, and with good reason. Competitive analyses are more in-depth than what a salesperson needs when they encounter a ...
How Emerging Brands Can Displace Giants with Competitive Intelligence
It’s good to be the king. Companies that ascend to the top of their industries and become category leaders have one goal: continue to grab market share while fending off the ankle-biters that seek ...
How to Prepare Your Sales Team to Win More Competitive Deals
Receiving an inbound demo request is often the best part of a salesperson’s day. Learning that the evaluation is going to be competitive in nature can be less exciting. Sales teams in competitive ...
How Demand Generation Can Gain a Strategic Competitive Advantage
Writing landing page copy, cooking up AdWords campaigns, agonizing over email subject lines - demand generation marketers have a lot on their plate. It’s no surprise that demand gen teams are not ...