The 5 Flaws of Old-School Compete Programs (and How to Fix Them)

As summer winds down and the out of office replies become less frequent, companies are in full on planning mode for 2025. 

While there are many inputs that go into annual planning and setting revenue targets, reviewing the competitive landscape — and more specifically, competitive win rates — is critical. 

Everyone knows competitive sales opportunities are your best potential deals but did you know that competitive opportunities close at 5x the rate of non-competitive opportunities? This is all to say, competitive selling and improving competitive selling should be high on the priority list for 2025. Imagine if your company won 20% more competitive deals next year. This could be the difference in hitting (or missing) your revenue target. 

A challenge lies in the fact that competitive selling at your company is only as good as your competitive enablement. So, is your compete program up to the job or are you still executing “old-school” competitive enablement?

What’s an old-school compete program? 

Simply put, old-school compete programs don’t drive sales results. Old-school compete programs come from an era of manual research across the web, setting up Google alerts for all your competitors, quarterly analyst meetings….you get the idea. Old-school compete programs are too focused on tracking the latest blog post from a competitor for example instead of reviewing competitive pipeline. So despite companies facing competitors in a majority of their deals, they’re not actually prepared to compete and win. 

As you think about your compete program and if it falls into the “old-school” category, here are the five flaws associated with “old-school” compete.

1. Old-school compete is out of touch with sales and is typically designated to a team outside of sales that doesn’t align with sales leader priorities. 
2. Old-school compete is over-indexed on the wrong channels spending too much time on lagging intel from social media sites and online reviews, for example. While sources like these are critically important, they don’t give a full picture and often aren’t very actionable. 
3. Old-school compete relies too much on battlecards that are very quickly out of date and hard for reps to find and consume. The result being lack of trust and low sales adoption. In addition, due to the sales-compete disconnect, the strategies in these documents often aren’t really practical for sales to use in deals.
4. Old-school compete is either measured incorrectly or not at all which means there's very little (if any) visibility into competitive win rates and revenue won.
5. Old-school compete is reactive and slow. Most of the intel being looked at lags the market and the research phase takes too long so sales materials are out-of-date. In addition, old-school compete lacks visibility into current open competitive opportunities, so it's always looking in the rear-view mirror. 

There’s a better way to compete. Winning companies, those who consistently drive win rates up quarter over quarter, have figured out how to implement modern competitive enablement programs:

• They establish meaningful partnerships between CI and sales.
• They know that the best intelligence is from buyers, sellers and deals, and they’re tapped into these sources in real-time.
• They take this real-time intelligence and collaborates with and enables sales leaders to proactively impact active pipeline vs dissecting wins and losses post-mortem.
• They aren’t nagging sales reps on battlecard adoption and have implemented a multi-channel strategy that fits into their sales teams workflow and tools.
• They recognize that competitive win rate is a massive revenue opportunity, and they judge compete program success based on revenue won.

Ready to transform your compete program from old-school and outdated into a modern powerhouse? Crayon is the competitive enablement platform that drives higher win rates — faster, and more efficiently. With Crayon, you can:

• Tap buyers, sellers and deals for real-time intel into compete opportunities and threats, and combine those signals with traditional compete data from competitor websites and the digital footprint.
• Organize critical intel for sales in minutes, not months using Crayon’s saved searches, alerts, advanced search and Gen AI curation and publishing tools.
• Go beyond battlecards with a multi-channel enablement strategy that lets the rep choose how they engage with competitive content.
• Integrate into existing workflows with strong integrations across the sales tech stack so you don’t need to retrain end-users or fight an uphill adoption battle.
• Proactively drive sales outcomes in open competitive opportunities by collaborating with sales managers as an extension of the compete team.
• Measure compete program ROI with competitive revenue analytics and automated win-loss analysis.

Get a personalized demo of Crayon and learn more about how our competitive enablement platform increases competitive win rates 20% on average.