Crayon Competitive
Intelligence Blog

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 They can be your organization’s secret weapon or just another outdated file buried in the shared drive.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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Sales, in general, is a tough job. Whether you’re a server trying to maximize tips or an account executive trying to hit quota, communicating value to a prospective customer is difficult. Naturally, ...

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 ...