CRAYON COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE BLOG

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of talking to Sam Niro, Competitive Intelligence Manager @ Talkdesk, about how she creates and rolls out new battlecards. Here's the recording of our conversation: ...

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar that featured Crayon’s VP of Strategy, Chris Pope, and Aircall’s Director of Sales, Tommy Jester. We talked about the mistakes that sellers ...

In this edition of Customer Corner, we caught up with Holly Jackson, Director of Competitive Intelligence at Talkdesk. Below she gives her best advice for any CI practitioner trying to make a splash ...

It doesn’t matter if you’re building a strategy from scratch or overhauling tired practices established by marketers of yore: Sales enablement shouldn’t be an afterthought. In fact, if you aim to ...

Alec Baldwin wouldn’t be the patron saint of closing deals if, in perhaps the most cliche sales reference in cinematic history, he’d said “always be… enabling.” Sellers are hired to sell. It’s the ...

Sales battlecards (also known as competitive battlecards, or simply as battlecards) give your sellers the facts, tactics, and materials they need to win competitive deals. Before we go any further, a ...

An account executive on your sales team, Jen, is chatting with a prospect. The conversation is going well. The prospect doesn’t seem to be evaluating any other vendors. And then they say this: “Talk ...

Sadly, the impact of good product marketing is often obscured. A flawless product launch, an inspiring positioning statement, a face-melting slide deck—you and I both know that each of these things ...

Making cold calls. Running demos. Persuading decision-makers. The life of a seller isn’t an easy one. But that doesn’t mean you—whether you’re a product marketer, sales manager, revenue leader, or ...

Whether you’re a marketer or a sales manager, there are innumerable ways you can empower sellers to do their jobs more effectively. You can provide content that helps them personalize emails. You can ...

Unless you’re subscribed to the Crayon blog, you’re most likely reading this because you Googled “pre-call planning.” If that’s the case, you probably noticed that there are a lot of blog posts on ...

Sales enablement statistics are useful for a number of reasons. Maybe you’re new to the discipline and trying to quickly learn as much as possible. Maybe you’re building a business case for the ...

The more closely you align your sales and marketing teams, the better. When everyone is on the same page — from content marketers and demand gen specialists to BDRs and account executives — lead ...

The sales battlecard is an extraordinarily impactful tool for any business in a competitive B2B market. As we'll discuss in the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report (coming soon!), 71% of ...

High-performing sales reps are not born; they’re built. To be more precise, high-performing sales reps are not built in a discrete period of time; they’re built on an ongoing basis. Call analyses, ...

One sales enablement tool we all know and love is the competitive battlecard. Battlecards are an extremely impactful tool for your sales team to have in their toolbox, especially when a prospect is ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Arming your sales team with the tools, skills, and resources they need to win competitive deals is a critical step in growing revenue. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team ...

You’ve crafted amazing battlecards. They have the latest intelligence, crisp messaging, and deep information on each competitor. And yet the sales team doesn’t adopt them. They have their own ...

It’s important to ensure that your sales team is ready to close any deal that comes into their pipeline, whether or not it’s competitive in nature. Sales teams need to be well equipped, trained, and ...

Win/loss analysis is a critical component of competitive intelligence (CI). Understanding who you are winning (or losing) against and why helps inform how you position and differentiate yourself ...

Market landscapes have become exponentially more competitive. Organizations now operate in a state of hyper-competition–a landscape in which no competitive advantage can be sustained in the long run. ...

Your competitors impact nearly every aspect of your business. They impact how your product team shapes its development roadmap. They shape how your marketing team runs campaigns. They even influence ...

Competitor battlecards have become a popular tool for enabling sales teams, and with good reason. Competitive analyses are more in-depth than what a salesperson needs when they encounter a ...

The competition is talking about you, and no surprise—it’s not good. Whether it’s half-truths or outright lies, you need to arm your sales team with tactics and talking points to counter claims made ...

Receiving an inbound demo request is often the best part of a salesperson’s day. Learning that the evaluation is going to be competitive in nature can be less exciting. Sales teams in competitive ...

Battlecards have historically lived in static PDFs delivered via email to sales reps’ computers. And by historically, I mean most battlecards today are static documents that are always out-of-date, ...

How do you know if your sales enablement efforts are effective? It's important to not only deliver a variety of sales enablement resources, but to also circle back and analyze their impact on your ...

84% of businesses say their industry has gotten more competitive in the last three years, according to the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence. In the same report, 53% of respondents said the ...

Back in the 1970s, Xerox recognized the need for a support team that handled many of the basic operations and logistics essential for a successful sales team. The support team took over core sales ...

Sales are often primary clients of competitive intelligence (CI) in companies and also one of the best channels to drive measurable value through battlecards. By making intel more accessible and ...

Product marketers have a complex job working cross-functionally to support many crucial areas of the business. Creating and distributing buyer-facing content, updating sellers on the industry and ...

As companies grow, sales teams get bigger, and sales cycles become more complex, many businesses invest in a sales enablement function within the marketing team. Marketers, who are tasked with ...

The sales process we know today is remarkably different from the sales process of a decade ago. Years ago, prospects had an average of four to five choices for any product or service they were ...

It’s that time of year again -- when we gather the entire sales team together, energize them, educate them, and align them for success in the new year. This effort often falls to the team that we ...

Sales enablement is an important role in any organization - ensuring that sales has the skills and tools to win in their market. Most industries change rapidly, with competitors regularly launching ...

The speed of competition has never been faster. Over the last decade, innovations like Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing have allowed companies to improve their products, change their ...

There are endless tips and tricks to help sales executives close more deals. One of those tips not talked about enough is using competitive intelligence to win sales. Leveraging competitive ...