Fuze + CRAYON

Fuze, the modern unified communications as a service (UCaaS) company, strives to power every business conversation in the global enterprise. With such an ambitious mission, it’s no surprise that they’ve encountered fierce and diverse competitors along the way. But the Fuze product marketing team did not shy away from such a challenge, taking on the task of extracting market intelligence to drive sales enablement, product strategy, and marketing programs.

Prior to Crayon, Rob and his team did not believe there was a software tool that could solve these problems. It wasn’t until they saw Crayon that they realized how this technology could help them overcome their CI challenges and become truly strategic with their competitive intelligence.

Crayon takes care of the monitoring, categorizing, and prioritizing of competitive updates so that the Fuze team can focus on the analysis and action related to those updates. They no longer need to sift through irrelevant alerts, and they are able to get ahead of requests and proactively create recommendations for sales, as well as product, marketing, and executive stakeholders. On top of that, Crayon’s programmatic monitoring approach picks up additional, more subtle, insights that they would have otherwise missed. “The combination of expansive data and human curation keeps the noise down while not missing anything important,” Rob explained.

The result is a more proactive and strategic competitive intelligence program, one that has expanded and become more efficient at the same time. Crayon and competitive intelligence is part of every day for the Fuze team. Rob shared, “Staying on top of competitive and industry moves is something you need to do every day to take advantage of intelligence effectively."

Leveraging Crayon intel every day has allowed the Fuze team to pick up on subtle competitive moves and engage stakeholders in a timely way. For example, Crayon captured a subtle change on a competitor’s website that indicated a move on one of Fuze’s differentiators. Rob immediately engaged the relevant product managers so that they could determine their strategy and develop a response proactively, instead of waiting to be surprised by an announcement.

This type of strategic conversation happens frequently now. As part of product roadmap discussions, Rob can pull a history of competitors’ moves to show where each company is investing. This level of insight allows Fuze to inform investment decisions with market intelligence to gain a competitive advantage. “The ROI comes down to each of the strategic moves we are able to make based on intel rather than gut,” Rob explained.

The tactical output of Crayon intelligence also plays a central role in the Fuze competitive intelligence program. No longer being blindsided by the competition - or even their own sales team - allows the Fuze team to stay ahead of competitive threats and take advantage of new opportunities. Crayon is now listed as a deliverable to sales and other stakeholders, filling the need to provide complete and timely updates regarding top competitors. “Wrong or outdated intelligence can be more damaging than not having intel at all, because everyone from sales to product to marketing to executive leadership leverages this intel every day,” Rob described. Ultimately, Crayon saves the Fuze team from the high cost of not having the best intelligence on their market.