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CRAYON COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE BLOG

Why Competitive Enablement Is the Ultimate Key to Closing More Deals

David Cardiel

David Cardiel on Thu, Nov 21, 2024

In today’s hyper-competitive sales landscape, every deal counts. Two-thirds of sales opportunities are competitive, and here’s the kicker: these deals close 5x faster and at significantly higher value. Yet, many sales teams are still fumbling with outdated battlecards or scrambling for insights mid-call.

If your sales team is stepping into competitive deals without the right tools, you’re not just losing opportunities—you’re handing them to your competitors.

The Cost of Outdated Competitive Enablement

Using old-school competitive enablement is like trying to stream Netflix on ...

Hey, Product Marketer: Your Battlecards Shouldn’t Be Perfect
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Mon, Apr 17, 2023

In high school, my economics teacher loved to remind us that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It’s an old-timey way of saying “everything comes at a cost.” Oftentimes, the cost of something ...

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3 Strategies Customer Success Managers Need to Keep Customers From Switching to Competitors
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Thu, Jan 19, 2023

Your sales team just won a competitive deal. It was a taxing evaluation: multiple demos, a trial period, extensive pricing conversations—the works. Until the account executive on your sales team got ...

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How to Write a Better Battlecard: Follow the ABCs
Sheila Lahar

Sheila Lahar on Tue, Jul 26, 2022

If you’re working with a sales team actively involved in competitive deals, you’re probably familiar with battlecards. Battlecards are a fundamental resource to help your sales team win more deals ...

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Connecting Employees to the “Why Care” and “Where to Go” with Competitive Intelligence Integrations
Erica Jenkins

Erica Jenkins on Tue, May 24, 2022

We all know your stakeholders can benefit from competitive intelligence, but let’s talk about the real problem: They have so many places to look for information that, rather than looking, they’ll ...

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Exceed Your Inbound Revenue Target With Crayon
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Wed, May 11, 2022

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 ...

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Gong + Crayon: Helping Your Sellers Win With Personalized Competitive Insights
Erica Jenkins

Erica Jenkins on Mon, May 9, 2022

It’s 8:32am. An account executive on your sales team opens up their laptop to get their day started. Yesterday was crazy. Back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls. Lots of follow-up for them to tackle ...

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5 Battlecard Best Practices From the Experts at Gong, Salsify, and Hootsuite
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Wed, Mar 9, 2022

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 ...

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Because Winners Don’t Wing It: Introducing Crayon Academy
Sheila Lahar

Sheila Lahar on Wed, Feb 16, 2022

We recently published the 2022 State of Competitive Intelligence Report—the 5th installment in the CI industry’s largest and longest-running survey series. Here’s my favorite finding: Compared to ...

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Who Uses Competitive Intelligence? A Quick Tour of the 4 Major Stakeholder Audiences
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Wed, Jan 26, 2022

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 ...

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Competitive Differentiation: How to Stand Out and Win
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Fri, Jan 21, 2022

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 ...

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4 Insights That CI Pros Can Deliver to Their Content Teams
Mackenzie Colcord

Mackenzie Colcord on Wed, Dec 22, 2021

Blogs. E-books. White papers. Reports. The list goes on and on. Behind every great piece of content is a team that strategized, planned, and executed an idea with one goal in mind – to share their ...

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Competitive Comparisons Are Not Battlecards—But They’re Close
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Tue, Oct 26, 2021

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 ...

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How to Create an Effective Competitive Comparison Landing Page
Mackenzie Colcord

Mackenzie Colcord on Wed, Jul 14, 2021

No matter your industry or your product, your company likely has dozens of rivals (if not hundreds)—some of them direct competitors, some of them indirect competitors, and some of them aspirational ...

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10 Essential Examples of Competitive Intelligence (With Tips for Inspiring Action!)
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Wed, Apr 21, 2021

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 ...

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What Are the Goals of Competitive Intelligence? Let’s Break Down 5 of Them
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Fri, Apr 16, 2021

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 ...

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3 Ways to Find and Leverage Your Competitors' Weaknesses
Conor Bond

Conor Bond on Wed, Feb 24, 2021

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. ...

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5 Tips for Communicating Competitive Intelligence to Your Organization
Emily Dumas

Emily Dumas on Wed, Dec 9, 2020

You work hard to stay on top of your competitors’ moves. You sift through big and small changes alike and analyze the data to identify trends and strategies. But then what do you do with the data? ...

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5 Steps for Effectively Leveraging Competitive Intelligence
Ben Cope

Ben Cope on Wed, Nov 4, 2020

You did it. Your persistent competitive research efforts have yielded a key piece of intel about one of your competitors. Maybe a competitor is quietly discontinuing a product line, or maybe they’re ...

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12 Actionable Outcomes of Competitive Intelligence
Emily Dumas

Emily Dumas on Thu, Oct 22, 2020

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a function that fits into every business strategy. No matter what your product or service is, you’ve got competitors fighting to win the same business as you and ...

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How to Give Your Marketing Team a Competitive Advantage
Ben Cope

Ben Cope on Wed, Sep 23, 2020

Building and scaling a well-oiled marketing team that facilitates growth is a tall order. Building and engaging an audience with insightful content that pushes the known boundaries of your market is ...

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How to Deliver Competitive Intelligence to Executive Leadership
Ellie Mirman

Ellie Mirman on Thu, Apr 30, 2020

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 ...

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How to Brief Executive Leadership on Major Market Events
Ellie Mirman

Ellie Mirman on Tue, Mar 24, 2020

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 ...

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3 Unique, Tactical Applications of Competitive Intelligence
Ben Cope

Ben Cope on Wed, Feb 19, 2020

Most marketers and competitive intelligence (CI) pros would agree that gathering competitive insights is only a valuable activity if those insights are used to further key business goals. Almost ...

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CI Experts Weigh In: How to Drive Engagement on CI Deliverables
Ellie Mirman

Ellie Mirman on Wed, Jan 29, 2020

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 ...

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How to Prove Your Point with Competitive Comparison Pages
Jeanne Hopkins

Jeanne Hopkins on Thu, Jan 9, 2020

You can spend all day telling prospects how great your product is, but you can be sure they are checking out the competition as well. Competitors will expound on the virtues of their own products, so ...

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How Emerging Brands Can Displace Giants with Competitive Intelligence
Ben Cope

Ben Cope on Fri, Sep 6, 2019

It’s good to be the king. Companies that ascend to the top of their industries and become category leaders have one goal: continue to grab market share while fending off the ankle-biters that seek to ...

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How Demand Generation Can Gain a Strategic Competitive Advantage
Ben Cope

Ben Cope on Tue, Jul 30, 2019

Writing landing page copy, cooking up AdWords campaigns, agonizing over email subject lines - demand generation marketers have a lot on their plate. It’s no surprise that demand gen teams are not ...

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37 Great Topics for your Sales Battlecards and Competitor Profiles
Tom Heys

Tom Heys on Wed, Jul 17, 2019

Are you feeling in a rut with your competitive intelligence (CI) deliverables? Want some ideas to help you take the content to the next level? Below are some different ways to spice up your ...

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How These 3 Market Leaders Have Maintained a Competitive Advantage
Emily Dumas

Emily Dumas on Tue, May 28, 2019

Innovative companies have learned that the secret to maintaining a competitive advantage is not to compete head-to-head. Instead, it is to resolve to set themselves apart from the competition. This ...

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Strategies to Excel In a Constantly Changing Market
Ellie Mirman

Ellie Mirman on Tue, May 7, 2019

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 ...

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How to Enable Channel Partners with Competitive Intelligence
Lauren Kersanske

Lauren Kersanske on Wed, Apr 24, 2019

Competitive intelligence (CI) is a function that serves many different parts of an organization. Marketing leverages CI for campaigns and messaging, sales enablement uses it to inform sales reps of ...

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Identifying Your Competitive Intelligence Stakeholders and What They Need
Ellie Mirman

Ellie Mirman on Tue, Mar 26, 2019

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 ...

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Use Competitive Intelligence to Transform the Employee Experience
Jules Kelley

Jules Kelley on Tue, Mar 19, 2019

In the traditional sense, competitive intelligence is used in marketing, product, and sales departments to understand their competitive landscape as well as how a company’s product stands up to the ...

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5 Strategies to Share Competitive Intelligence Information with Teams
Lauren Kersanske

Lauren Kersanske on Fri, Feb 8, 2019

“It is nothing for one to know something unless another knows you know it.” ― Persian Proverb Whichever wise man (or woman) said the above proverb knew that knowledge is absolutely useless when it ...

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12 Ways Competitive Intelligence Will Benefit Your Team in 2019
Emily Dumas

Emily Dumas on Thu, Jan 3, 2019

The New Year is officially here! While I’m sure you got ahead on your 2019 planning in Q4 of 2018, there is one strategy your team should be sure to incorporate into its plans - Competitive ...

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Competitive Intelligence at Each Stage of a Product Launch
Emily Dumas

Emily Dumas on Wed, Dec 19, 2018

Executing a product launch includes many moving parts. Pre-launch, your team needs to have an understanding of your market and be prepared to launch your new product into your space. During launch, ...

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Using Competitive Intelligence to Retain Customers

Joshua Terry on Tue, Oct 9, 2018

Your sales team pushes each month to help deliver your product to new customers, but despite every company’s best efforts, even the oldest subscription companies see over 2% of those hard-earned ...

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Competitive Intelligence Applications for Marketers, Product Managers, and More

Ronit Gupta on Thu, Jun 21, 2018

When it comes to competitive intelligence, collecting data is a critical, or more importantly, collecting valuable data. There is a mass of constantly changing and increasing data on the internet ...

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Communicating Competitive Intel: Intranet and Slack Won’t Cut It
Julie Martland

Julie Martland on Wed, May 30, 2018

If you’re like thousands of marketers across the globe, you want to shake up your headache-inducing competitive intelligence program and create a new approach. Maybe this year you got the coveted ...

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What are the Benefits of Competitive Intelligence for Your Organization Beyond Sales Enablement?
Emily Dumas

Emily Dumas on Thu, May 3, 2018

A common misconception surrounding competitive intelligence (CI) is that its main benefit is for sales teams. While it’s extremely important for sales reps to be prepared, knowledgeable, and armed ...

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