ALLEGO + CRAYON

Allego, a software company providing a sales learning and readiness platform, battles a variety of competitors in the growing sales enablement software space. Their product focuses on empowering salespeople to learn, share insights, and collaborate through video, so they truly understand the need to arm their sales and other audiences with the competitive intelligence needed to remain nimble in dynamic business environments. They ultimately turned to Crayon to automate the CI process and have a significant impact on sales win rates and strategic decision making.

They knew they needed to capture more and better competitive intelligence and help every team develop strategies for beating the competition. They needed a solution that would allow them to be agile and focus on the competitive strategy and messaging rather than the research. Getting complete and automated competitive intelligence required turning to software due to the speed and accuracy technology would provide, and Crayon perfectly fit that need.

The Allego team heavily used Slack and Allego for sales communication, and plugged Crayon into that existing workflow. Automated competitive intelligence flows directly from Crayon into Slack, where the team can notify key audiences and tag relevant employees across product marketing, sales, or executive leadership, to comment. 

Frequently, the Allego team discovers new intelligence about competitors that they would otherwise not find in a timely manner or find at all without Crayon. News such as acquisitions, executive firings, or competitor product videos, is immediately shared with the team so that they can craft messaging and enable their sales team to address the latest updates as they happen. 

As intelligence is discovered, team members immediately create quick explainer videos in the Allego platform to share out the desired messaging around the news. They frequently share these agile competitive intelligence updates, including two weekly podcast series created by Senior Product Marketing Manager Jake Miller called “Jake’s Take” and a series created by Director of Sales Alex MacKenzie called “AM in the AM” (delivered Thursday AMs). These short, two-minute video updates have been great avenues for delivering market updates, competitive tips, win/loss stories, and more.

“It’s been really nice using the combination of Crayon and Allego. Crayon gives me the ongoing information and insight that I need about competitors, and then I can use Allego to create quick videos contextualizing that information for the sales force,” shared Jake.

For example, after the Allego team was alerted by Crayon about a change to a competitor’s product, they immediately put together a short Allego training video. The video covered the news and how to handle the messaging about this update. That same day, an enterprise sales rep viewed the video, did the messaging certification, and knocked out that competitor in a sales call that afternoon. Without the speed of capturing that intelligence and developing the messaging for sales the same day, that prospect would have still evaluated that competitor and the deal could have been lost.

The results of this new competitive intelligence program are very clear. “In less than 6 months of using Crayon, the sales win rate in our most competitive segment has doubled, and the win rate against a top competitor has tripled to 95%,” said Alex. By capturing deep competitive information and timely intelligence, the Allego team has been able to train their sales teams to win more competitive deals and get new hires up to speed faster. They have been able to share different approaches and winning practices from the top reps to the whole team so that everyone can level-up their win rates and confidence.

In addition to the impact on the sales and marketing teams, the Allego team has leveraged Crayon to deliver monthly market presentations to executive leadership as well as product analyses to the product team when developing new features. For example, they discovered a trend in competitors’ messaging around a buzzword, and used the executive discussion to outline a campaign to contrast that messaging. They also analyzed competitors’ functionality around a new feature they were developing in order to identify requirements to reach parity in that area as well as opportunities to differentiate. This has enabled every team to build awareness of the competitive landscape and take advantage of timely intelligence to improve their performance across the board.