CRAYON COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE BLOG

If you visit Bob Boyle’s LinkedIn profile, you’ll see that he became a product marketing manager (PMM) in January 2023. But if you have a conversation with him, you’ll quickly realize that he started ...

Rachel Pangburn and Garrett Denney—who lead competitive intelligence at RF-SMART and Crayon, respectively—are well-versed in the act of presenting CI program results to senior leaders. They’re so ...

Last month, we began collecting responses for our 2024 State of Competitive Intelligence survey. So far, of the 106 people who have completed the survey, 62% have said they struggle to gather ...

If you’re responsible for competitive enablement, you should survey your sales reps on a quarterly basis and ask them how confident they feel selling against your top competitors. Their responses ...

Last week, I used data from Crayon’s competitor tracking software to show you that your competitors are talking about AI 5x more than they did in 2022. The data in that blog post is industry ...

When a competitor announces a major product release or an acquisition, the natural reaction is to wish you’d known about it sooner—because the sooner you know, the more time you have to prepare ...

In a perfect world, you can see the future. You know what your competitors are going to do months before they actually do it. I wish I could tell you that I have a portal to this alternate universe. ...

A few days ago, we started collecting responses for our 2024 State of Competitive Intelligence survey. As I’m writing this, the sample size is still very small (42 responses), but the early results ...

For the data presented in this blog post to make sense, you need some background on Crayon. Crayon is a competitive intelligence platform. Our customers use our technology to monitor their ...

Champions (a.k.a. advocates or evangelists) are coworkers who encourage their peers to consume the content you produce. They are essential to the success of your competitive intelligence program. So ...

Your company has two kinds of competitors: direct and indirect. You know the former. Those are the competitors that your sales team goes head-to-head with every single day. Meanwhile, an indirect ...

Being a CI team of 1 in a saturated market is a tough job. Ideally, you'd like to keep tabs on every competitor, but you don't have nearly enough bandwidth to do that. You need to prioritize. You ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

For nearly a decade, Crayon has been helping people like you build excellent compete programs—programs that increase win rates and influence executive decision-making. We decided to take everything ...

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of talking to Sam Niro, Competitive Intelligence Manager @ Talkdesk, about how she creates and rolls out new battlecards. Here's the recording of our conversation: ...

For the third installment of our new Win/Loss Wednesdays series, we had the pleasure of chatting with Brad Rosen, President at Sales Assembly, and Nick Siddoway, President & CRO at TruVoice from ...

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 ...

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 — ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 market ...

No one cares about the price of your product unless they’re interested in buying it. (Or they're interested in gathering competitive intel. But we'll set that aside for now.) Prospects who visit your ...

Editor's note: The following blog post is based on data from the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report. To get the latest insights, download the 2022 report. If I had to summarize the brand ...

Editor's note: The following blog post is based on data from the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report. To get the latest insights, download the 2022 report. Every year, for the last four ...

In order to stand out in a crowded market, you need to position your solution in a manner that resonates with your prospective customers. Nothing you say will resonate with your prospects unless you ...

The sales battlecard is an extraordinarily impactful tool for any business in a competitive B2B market. As we'll discuss in the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report (coming soon!), 71% of ...

In the B2B world, you can’t go to market with a product that’s identical to that of your competitor. Without some form of differentiation, your chances of succeeding over the long term are slim. ...

High-performing sales reps are not born; they’re built. To be more precise, high-performing sales reps are not built in a discrete period of time; they’re built on an ongoing basis. Call analyses, ...

So, you’re getting ready to conduct a SWOT analysis — fantastic! Whether you’re a marketer, an executive leader, a competitive intelligence (CI) professional, or someone else entirely, you’re on your ...