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 reflection of our commitment to helping customers drive meaningful impact in their organizations through competitive intelligence.

Download The Forrester New Wave: Market and Competitive Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2019

Forrester Evaluated 12 Companies

In Forrester’s evaluation of the market and competitive intelligence space, they evaluated the 12 most significant providers in the category. Each was analyzed across 10 criteria via a survey and two-hour briefing, and augmented with customer references. Crayon received a “differentiated” score (the highest possible score) in the following categories:

• User experience
• Data collection/taxonomy
• AI/ML-enabled search
• AI/ML automation
• Distribution of intelligence and usage analytics
• Product vision
• Market approach

We believe a differentiated score reflects that this is a strength for the organization and one that is differentiated among the vendors evaluated.

Leads the Pack in Measuring Impact on Sales

Forrester cites that Crayon “leads the pack with a focus on measuring the platform’s impact on sales.” We believe that arming sales with competitive intelligence that helps them win deals is the critical use case for CI. This is because:

1. Every company cares about winning competitive sales. More than half of businesses say the majority of their deals are head-to-head competitive.
2. You can close the loop via CRM. Integrating a CI platform with a CRM allows you to measure whether or not your CI efforts are translating into more deals won.
3. You can show the impact on revenue. The impact of competitive sales enablement is real and significant: the impact comes through in terms of revenue.

This is why we at Crayon have invested so much into our intelligence-integrated battlecards that are also integrated with CRMs, sales enablement platforms, and team collaboration tools. Successfully enabling sales with competitive intelligence requires (1) up-to-date, actionable intelligence, (2) delivery where the sales team works on a daily basis, and (3) the ability to measure what’s working and what’s not.

Crayon Battlecards address each of these areas: they’re wired up to our market intelligence engine that automatically pulls from hundreds of millions of sources, they’re integrated with a variety of platforms already leveraged by sales teams, and they have metrics baked in to show which battlecards get used, which reps are using them, and how that usage is translating into competitive deals won.

But enabling sales is not the only use case - in fact, our State of CI Report found that marketing and product stakeholders were just as frequently cited as primary audiences for CI outputs. So we’ve built flexible outputs for sharing intelligence with any and all stakeholders, to deliver real-time, actionable intelligence to every employee in the organization.

Differentiated in Tracking Changes on Competitor Webpages

In the report, Forrester states that “Crayon is differentiated in catching and annotating changes to the complete domain of a company website, including a company’s deep website pages… Customer references praise how Crayon shows changes that occur on competitors’ webpages.”

The CI professionals we speak with repeatedly say that their competitor’s website is a top source of competitive intelligence. But it’s hard to capture changes to a company’s website well - when done manually, it’s time-consuming and error-prone. When done with technology, it’s noisy and hard to find meaningful changes. That’s why Crayon:

1. Automatically tracks a company’s complete domain - no need to define which pages to track. This allows us to capture changes to deep pages that are otherwise forgotten, and also capture new pages added.
2. Filters website change data to just the meaningful insights. For every 1,000 webpage comparisons, there may be 550 actual changes, and of those we only deliver the one competitive insight such as a pricing change or new messaging.
3. Adds highlights and annotations to call out what matters. Highlighting the specific change - additions, removals, or changes - and annotating as needed calls attention to the significant change on a website that triggers a competitive insight.

Crayon has compared hundreds of millions of pages, applying this competitor website tracking approach at scale to find millions of significant insights for our customers.

Thank You to Our Customers

We’re humbled to work with hundreds of the most forward-thinking companies in the world. Our customers have made the commitment to delivering meaningful value to their organizations through competitive intelligence, and we’re proud to be able to fuel their intelligence programs. Thank you for believing in Crayon’s vision and product, thank you for your feedback and insight as we continuously improve our platform, and thank you for championing the work of competitive intelligence in your organizations.