Conor Bond
Conor Bond is a member of the content team at Crayon, where he fervently talks all things competition. If, for whatever reason, you were to rip his headphones off his head and put them on yourself, you’d probably hear The Strokes, Charli XCX, Denzel Curry, or Ariana Grande.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
How to Build and Implement Your Sales Enablement Strategy in 7 Steps
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 ...
SaaS Pricing Pages: 8 Tactics to Drive Better Results (with Examples!)
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 ...
5 Things to Get More Value Out of Competitive Intelligence [NEW DATA]
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 ...
NEW DATA: 61% of Businesses Say Competitive Intelligence Directly Impacts Revenue
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 ...
B2B Buyer Personas: Everything Marketers Need to Know
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 ...
Sales Battlecards: 8 Tips to Help You Win More Deals
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 ...
3 Ways to Find and Leverage Your Competitors' Weaknesses
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. ...
How to Definitively Prove the Value of Sales Enablement
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, ...
What Is Sales Enablement? A B2B Marketer's Guide
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, ...
24 Questions to Consider for Your Next SWOT Analysis
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 ...