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Keeping track of a dynamic competitive landscape and enabling your entire company to succeed with market insights is no small feat. In the newly published 2019 State of Competitive Intelligence Report, more than 1,000 CI professionals shared their best practices, challenges, and results they’ve experienced when leading CI at the organizations. Challenges shared by CI professionals range from gathering accurate competitive intelligence data to getting internal buy-in for CI programs to quickly analyzing and acting on insights that are discovered. Here are the top five challenges CI professionals are tackling this year. For more challenges and best practices, download the full report.

It’s no secret that your time is valuable. When you do your job, you don’t have time to waste, and you try to avoid investing in activities that won’t give you results. So, why should competitive intelligence (CI) be any different? Every business should spend time investing in competitive intelligence so that they can keep an eye on their competitive landscape and maintain a competitive advantage. But, what many businesses miss, is setting actionable competitive intelligence goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). It’s essential to set goals and KPIs for your CI program so that you can measure its success and iterate on your strategy. This year, we surveyed 1,000+ competitive intelligence professionals on their competitive intelligence practices. Here’s what we discovered when it came to CI programs and goal setting.

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 Funds and both new and existing angel investors. We’re honored to be partnering with Bedrock Capital and Eric Stromberg, co-founder and partner who led the round, to scale Crayon and bring real-time competitive insight to every business.

Last year, Crayon grew 300% and brought on hundreds of the most sophisticated customers, including Fortune 50 enterprises and high-growth startups alike. They, too, saw a growing need to capture the exponential wealth of market data available on the web, extract competitive insight, and drive impact in every corner of their businesses. Crayon customers have seen sales win rate increases of more than 50% and time savings of at least 20%, among other benefits, and we’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with this intelligence.

“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 the industry even if you don’t compete directly? Or, the companies you’re not yet competitive with, but you hope to be after certain product development efforts? Do you repeat those answers for each of the verticals and geographies you serve as well?