Crayon Competitive Intelligence Blog

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...

Competitive intelligence (CI) is the process of tracking, analyzing, and activating information related to your competitors. It is conducted with the intent of empowering internal stakeholders to...

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...

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 battlecards (also known as competitor battlecards, or more simply as battlecards) can add a tremendous amount of value to your suite of sales enablement collateral.

In fact, the value of...

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...

Gathering competitive intelligence is a challenge. In fact, according to our survey of more than 1,000 CI professionals, it’s the toughest part of the job. On average, it takes up one-third of all...

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 ...

Conducting market research is never an easy task — it presents challenges to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

With that being said, those with large budgets do enjoy certain advantages. When you...

If you can help it, sales enablement — the act of empowering your sales reps with the tools, resources, and competitive intel they need to win deals — should not be conducted on an ad-hoc basis.

To...

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...