Ellie Mirman
Ellie Mirman, a Crayon alum, is currently CMO at Mulberry, the consumer-first product protection platform. Previously, she was VP of Marketing at Toast, where she built and led the marketing function across demand gen, content marketing, product marketing, branding, and customer advocacy. Ellie also held multiple marketing leadership positions at HubSpot during its growth from 100 customers to IPO. She loves working at the intersection between marketing, sales, and product, and building marketing from startup to scale-up.
8 Stats to Reference When Starting a Competitive Intelligence Program
Just took a new role in competitive intelligence? Congrats! Forming a new competitive intelligence (CI) initiative for your organization? Fantastic! It’s great to see the business investing in this ...
How to Avoid the Dreaded Feature Comparison Checklist
Every product marketer has been asked by a sales rep, somewhere between one and a million times, for a feature comparison checklist. “I need to see how we stack up. Does our competitor have X ...
How to Do Competitor Monitoring in 10 Minutes a Day
Competitive intelligence (CI) done right is a big commitment. But one of the biggest misconceptions is that competitive intelligence only consists of big research projects done monthly, quarterly, or ...
6 Strategies for Partnering with Sales for Better Battlecards
You’ve crafted amazing battlecards. They have the latest intelligence, crisp messaging, and deep information on each competitor. And yet the sales team doesn’t adopt them. They have their own ...
How to Prioritize the Unending List of Product Marketing Initiatives
Product marketing job descriptions can vary significantly from one company to the next… and sometimes even seem like they vary from one day to the next. That’s because product marketers wear many ...
How to Deliver Competitive Intelligence to Executive Leadership
Executive leadership makes critical business-directing decisions every day. In order for those decisions to be sound, executives need a clear view of the competitive landscape and how the company ...
10 Online Events and Resources for Product Marketing and Competitive Intelligence Pros
The entire tech world, and many other industries, are suddenly grounded at home, working remotely. Events have been postponed or canceled, but we’re all still hungry to learn and develop. On top of ...
How to Brief Executive Leadership on Major Market Events
When a global market event takes hold and catches everyone by surprise, executives are left scrambling to get a handle on how their industry is responding. With the latest crisis, our customer ...
Benchmark Your CI Investment: Differences Between Small Businesses and Enterprises
Sophisticated competitive intelligence (CI) programs are not built overnight. They require investment - in the form of people, budget, and time - that likely isn’t available on day one. Effective CI ...
CI Experts Weigh In: How to Drive Engagement on CI Deliverables
Competitive landscapes are fast-moving and complex. Professionals specialized in this field learn the best practices in capturing and analyzing competitor moves and translating that into effective ...
2020 State of CI Report: New Data Shows 94% of Businesses Are Now Investing in Competitive Intelligence
Today, we’re excited to share the results of the third annual market and competitive intelligence research study, the 2020 State of Competitive Intelligence report. This is the largest study on the ...
Benchmark Your Competitive Win Rate [New Data]
Every business has competitors, whether that be status quo or a laundry list of similar companies. How effective we are at winning deals against our competitors is one of the key measures of a ...
Independent Research Firm Names Crayon Competitive Intelligence Leader
I am thrilled to announce that Forrester Research has named Crayon a “Leader” in The Forrester New Wave™: Market and Competitive Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2019 report. We believe this is a ...
How to do a Comprehensive Competitor Analysis [+Free Template]
84% of companies say that their market has become more competitive in the last three years, according to the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report. With markets becoming more competitive, ...
How to Do a Market Analysis In 5 Steps
Becoming a market expert is a big undertaking. Markets are large, complex, and constantly changing. But if you’re tasked with tackling a market analysis, here are the steps you can take to get an ...
Three Strategies for Product Marketers to Gain Influence
Product marketers sit at the intersection of every team in the organization - between Marketing, Product, Sales, Services, and Executive Leadership. They affect, and are affected by, every area of ...
10 Dynamic Tiles to Integrate Into Your Sales Battlecards
Battlecards have historically lived in static PDFs delivered via email to sales reps’ computers. And by historically, I mean most battlecards today are static documents that are always out-of-date, ...
How to Avoid Being Reactive with Your Competitive Intelligence
When your competitive landscape is constantly changing - with new competitors, new products, mergers, marketing campaigns, and more - it can be easy to fall into a reactive mode. An event happens, ...
Competitive Intelligence Self-Assessment: Evaluate Your CI Effectiveness Across These 5 Dimensions [+ Template]
Competitive intelligence (CI) surfaces insights that can - and should - be leveraged across the business. Competitive intelligence can be translated into tactical activities as well as strategic ...
Strategies to Excel In a Constantly Changing Market
Scenario simulations, war-gaming, and contingency planning can be effective tools for planning your competitive moves ahead of major market shifts. Scenario simulations allow your organization to ...
Identifying Your Competitive Intelligence Stakeholders and What They Need
Every team and employee within a business can benefit from relevant competitive insights. This may seem as obvious as saying that every team and employee can benefit from performance data – how else ...
7 Strategies for Keeping Your Competitors from Copying You
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, is plagiarism the laziest form of flattery? When you work in a highly competitive industry, competitors copying each other is a common occurrence. How ...
Sales Enablement for Everyone: How Areas of Marketing Enables Sales
As companies grow, sales teams get bigger, and sales cycles become more complex, many businesses invest in a sales enablement function within the marketing team. Marketers, who are tasked with ...
Top 5 Competitive Intelligence Challenges from Industry Professionals
Keeping track of a dynamic competitive landscape and enabling your entire company to succeed with market insights is no small feat. For our most recent State of Competitive Intelligence Report, more ...
Announcing Crayon’s Series A Funding to Bring Real-Time Competitive Insight to Every Business
I’m excited to announce that Crayon has raised $6M in Series A funding led by Bedrock Capital with participation from existing investors, including Baseline Ventures, Converge, Box Group, Oyster ...
Competitor Tiers: How to Break Down Your Competitive Landscape
“Who are your competitors?” is a seemingly simple question that can be surprisingly difficult to answer. Do you answer with your most common competitors from a sales perspective? Or, the leaders in ...
Planning a Successful Sales Kickoff - 16 Tips from Marketing Leaders
It’s that time of year again -- when we gather the entire sales team together, energize them, educate them, and align them for success in the new year. This effort often falls to the team that we ...
3 Challenges of Competitive Intelligence Teams & How to Overcome Them
The following topic is discussed more in depth in "Democratizing Competitive Intelligence to Drive Impact Across the Organization", published in the Summer Edition of Competitive Intelligence ...
Should Product Marketing Report Into Marketing or Product?
Product Marketing is a function so interconnected with multiple departments that, from company to company, it can even report into different teams altogether. Product Marketing - as its name ...
Amazon's Job Description Gave Away Strategic Plans -- What Can You Learn About Your Market's Competitive Strategy from Job Posts?
Companies can be plenty secretive about their sales numbers, product roadmaps, and go-to-market strategies, but frequently lay out these details in plain sight: in job descriptions. Last week, Amazon ...
2018 Competitive Intelligence Report: Who's Responsible for Your Organization's Market Intelligence Function?
Who is responsible for competitive intelligence in an organization? Is it the VP Marketing? Product marketer? Business strategy lead? CEO? Is there a single owner or should it be owned by everyone? ...
[New Data] 77% of Businesses Say Holistic Market Intelligence is Critical to Win Against Competition
Today we’re excited to share the results the largest survey on market and competitive intelligence practices. Crayon’s 2018 State of Market Intelligence Report dives into the best practices, ...
How to Decode Your Competitor's Strategy with Predictive Intelligence
A new year is upon us, and with it annual plans with new key initiatives. While you are crafting and executing your plan, so are your competitors… how will your plan succeed in light of their ...
How and Why to Learn from Aspirational Competitors
"We are disruptors in our space, we don't have direct competitors." Many times I have heard that statement, especially from startups, and it has been followed by the refrain that looking at ...
8 Key Product Marketing Metrics: Marketing Leaders Weigh In On Which KPIs To Track
The challenge of measuring product marketing success is not a new one. Nearly every marketing leader I’ve asked about measuring the impact of this function has stated how difficult it is, in part ...
How to Make Product Marketing Strategic: Start with Understanding the Market
On a scale of 1 to 4, is your product marketing function the quarterback or the waterboy? That was the question that came out of last week’s Product Marketing Conference, where many presenters spoke ...