Crayon Blog

9 Sales Enablement Tools Your Team Needs to Win a Competitive Battle

emily@crayon.co (Emily Dumas) — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:15:00 GMT

A sales rep has entered a competitive situation: are they ready to go to battle and win? A lot can go into preparing that sales rep to handle questions, objections, and deliver just the right positioning to tee up a competitive win. From trainings, to on-demand resources, to timely competitive updates, there are a variety of ways to successfully arm your sales team to win over that soon-to-be customer in a competitive situation. Here are nine key sales enablement tools to choose from.

Battlecards

Sales battlecards are one of the classic resources for arming your sales team to win one of those competitive battles. These are resources that summarize key differences and background information on a competitor and outline how to effectively position your solution against theirs. These should be helpful for getting new sales reps up-to-speed on the competition and serve as a quick reference in a competitive situation. Consider phrasing information on the battlecard to be easily read verbatim or copied and pasted into an email for a sales rep to answer, “how are you different?” Bonus tip: This Battlecards 101 article will teach you everything you need to know to build successful battlecards.

Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Blake Grubbs

emily@crayon.co (Emily Dumas) — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 12:15:00 GMT

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is an interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In this edition of the Product Marketing Spotlight Series, we shine the light on Blake Grubbs, Head of Growth and Product Marketing at Simplr.

ED: What is your role, and what does your company do?

BG: I’m currently the Head of Growth and Product Marketing at Simplr where I focus on shaping our company’s strategic narrative, crafting product positioning and messaging, enabling sales, and establishing our strategy for bringing products to market.

Simplr is a company that was originally incubated by Asurion and is disrupting the outsourced contact center space by offering a more flexible and efficient customer experience solution, without the traditional subpar practices of the old school BPOs/offshore call centers. We support pre-sale, post-sale and sales support for email, chat, SMS, and other inbound channels and are compatible with most help desk and billing platforms.

How to Leverage Product Reviews In Your Competitor Analysis

ben.cope@crayon.co (Ben Cope) — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 12:15:00 GMT

Review sites are jam-packed with competitive intelligence (CI). On review sites, you’ll find both happy and unhappy customers giving insight into your competitors’ products and outlining strengths and weaknesses. You’ll also gain visibility into when and how competitors respond to customer issues. You’ll get direct and public customer feedback, without the outreach.

How do you then turn that intelligence into a tool to help your sales team win more deals? Certainly, it’s more than sending the review itself around the office. Collecting third-party reviews is an important piece to your complete competitor analysis. Here are five ways to incorporate competitor product reviews into your competitor analysis so that you can build tools to help your sales team win more deals.

How Well Does Your Sales Team Pivot?

jj@crayon.co (John Judge) — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 12:15:00 GMT

Remember not long ago when we’d never heard of Dr. Anthony Fauci, had no idea what Zoombombing was, only occasionally worried about getting the flu? We came into 2020 like we do most years, with expectations grounded in habits and routines that we had no idea were about to dramatically change.

So here we sit, in month-six of a global health crisis and dealing with the extended requirement of working from home and keeping ourselves and our families healthy and safe. Oh, and we still need to get our jobs done! Keep customers happy, find new ones, and get back to growth. In other words, despite all that is swirling around us, we all still need to find a way to do our jobs just as efficiently as if nothing was going on in the world.

Despite being in an environment where so much of your day appears beyond your control, there are some significant pivots you and your marketing & sales teams can make to improve engagement, revenue, and retention.

Let’s dive into how you can level-up your team’s skills, motivation, and messaging while navigating a market shift.

Battlecards 101: Measuring and Optimizing Your Battlecards

emily@crayon.co (Emily Dumas) — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 12:15:00 GMT

Now that we’ve covered the basics of creating battlecards and walked through driving battlecard adoption in our Battlecards 101 series, it’s time to take the next step. By now, you’ve created and distributed your battlecards across your sales team. But, you can’t stop there, it’s the impact that really matters when it comes to competitive battlecards. You need to know how your battlecards are performing and how you can improve your battlecards to help your sales team increase competitive win rates and win more competitive deals. In this installment of Battlecards 101, we’re going to dig into measuring and optimizing your battlecards.

Product Marketing Spotlight Series: Melanie Grefsheim

emily@crayon.co (Emily Dumas) — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 12:15:00 GMT

Crayon's Product Marketing Spotlight is an interview series where we chat with product marketers to get a glimpse into their careers and gain unique insight into product marketing strategy. In this edition of the Product Marketing Spotlight Series, we shine the light on Melanie Grefsheim , Product Marketing Manager at RainFocus.

ED: What is your role, and what does your company do?

MG: I am a Product Marketing Manager responsible for understanding customers, markets, and how RainFocus products solve pain points while crafting go-to-market messaging that generates awareness and interest, enables sales, and excites customers.

RainFocus is a next-generation event marketing platform built from the ground up to capture, analyze, and harness an unprecedented amount of data for significantly better events and conferences. As a true SaaS platform, RainFocus simplifies event registration, content management, exhibitor activation, and onsite experiences from a single dashboard. Save time, increase engagement, and maximize event value for every event.

8 Stats to Reference When Starting a Competitive Intelligence Program

ellie@crayon.co (Ellie Mirman) — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 12:15:00 GMT

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 critical area. There’s so much to do, so where do you start? What are the resources you need, how do you go about analyzing the competitive landscape, and how do you focus your efforts for maximum impact? These eight key stats and graphs from the 2020 State of Competitive Intelligence Report will give you the foundation you need to kickstart a new and effective CI program.

Using Competitive Data Points to Predict the Future

ben.cope@crayon.co (Ben Cope) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 12:15:00 GMT

For anyone with an internet connection and a glut of time available for research, competitive data points are nearly inexhaustible. New job postings, minor website copy changes, new marketing content offers - daily movements in the market are endless. On their own, many of these individual data points are closer to worthless noise rather than signals of meaningful competitor movement. However, some can be incredibly valuable hints at shifts in competitor strategy.

How can you tell the difference?

While a single data point often fails to provide value, a series of data points that prove a hypothesis can help you predict the future. Predictive intelligence is one of the most valuable outputs of competitive intelligence (CI) efforts. Uncovering and quickly responding to competitor moves, while important, will never be as valuable as catching wind of those moves before they happen.

To corroborate a single data point, and confirm the existence of a broader trend, look to the past, present, and future to tell a story before it unfolds.

5 Key Areas to Analyze when Conducting a Competitor Marketing Analysis

lauren@crayon.co (Lauren Kersanske) — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 12:15:00 GMT

A competitor analysis encompasses many different facets of your competitor’s business—revenue, product, marketing, sales, engineering, organizational structures, and more. But there’s something to be said for digging deep in one area and surfacing insights that drive action.

Analyzing your competitor’s marketing strategy is more than simply understanding what your competitor is doing on their blog or social media channels. It’s about understanding the story your competitor is telling the market, the methods and channels they are using to reach their core audience, and which types of resources they are using to achieve their goals.

When conducting a competitor marketing analysis, you’ll want to analyze five key areas:

Campaigns
Messaging
Content Marketing
Customers
Team

Let’s dig into how to gather the required data, analyze to surface key insights, and then leverage those insights to drive action in your marketing strategy.

Battlecards 101: 5 Ways to Drive Sales Adoption of Battlecards

lauren@crayon.co (Lauren Kersanske) — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 12:30:00 GMT

This post is part two in our Battlecards 101 Series. Click here to read part one.

Imagine that you spent hours upon hours building an informative and detailed battlecard for your sales team. Now imagine that once you hit publish, the sales team barely uses it. If you’re a product marketer or are responsible for creating content for sales teams, you probably don’t have to imagine it—the unfortunate reality is that many sales teams often don’t use the content that’s produced for them by their marketing teams. In fact, according to a study done by Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn, 80% of content created by marketing goes unused by sales. There are a variety of reasons why sales content goes unused, including misalignment between sales and marketing, sales being unable to find the content they need, or simply—bad content.

Creating battlecards is no simple task, so putting the work into creating and maintaining them isn’t worth it if sales isn’t leveraging them in competitive deals. You need to drive the adoption of your competitive battlecards. Driving adoption means not only getting your sales team to use your battlecards once, but to drive repeat usage of the battlecards, to help your sales team win more competitive deals.

Here are five ways you can get your sales team to adopt your battlecards. If you haven’t created any battlecards yet and would like to know how, check out our post about building competitive battlecards in our Battlecards 101 series, to get started.