Mural + Crayon

MURAL creates cultures of effective collaboration — and does it well. For more than a decade, the collaborative intelligence company has empowered remote, hybrid, and distributed teams to connect and innovate together — in real time or asynchronously. That expertise led MURAL to become THE go-to resource for 95% of the Fortune 100.

When the pandemic started and remote work became a core reality, the digital-first collaboration space exploded with activity. Companies that didn’t have whiteboarding or visual collaboration products on their roadmaps were suddenly introducing them. The industry was growing as a whole, and was at the same time becoming more fractured: in short, it was getting more competitive.

As MURAL built out its Product Marketing Management (PMM) team to strategize new feature launches, drive adoption, and enable internal stakeholders, it also needed to formalize a competitive intelligence program, and fast. Casey Ward became MURAL’s first product marketer dedicated to competitive intelligence.

Casey explained why it was so important for the company to have someone like him on board to lead competitive intelligence:

“The pandemic accelerated everything about the future of work — things MURAL had been predicting and championing for years became a must-have for global teams to continue innovating, in many cases even better than before.”

Before Casey joined the MURAL team, the responsibility for gathering competitive intelligence was diffused among the marketing and sales team. Information collection was a manual process of individuals searching for information online and then storing their findings in murals or static documents and spreadsheets. Since there was no central repository for key information, it became difficult to monitor everything, and even more difficult to keep it up-to-date. 

When Casey started, he knew a process change was in order: “I looked at some of the intel we’d collected, and realized the information was six months out of date.”

For MURAL, a company rapidly scaling in a constantly evolving industry, that status quo was untenable. The PMM team and MURAL’s leaders recognized that in addition to hiring Casey to manage its competitive intelligence efforts, they had to provide him with the necessary software to maximize impact and augment his reach. 

After getting up and running within Crayon, Casey noticed a massive improvement in his data collection process. Instead of collecting industry news one search at a time, he could simply open Crayon, go to his Insights feed, and feel confident that nothing was slipping through the cracks. It was so easy, in fact, that it transformed his daily routine:

“It’s coffee and Crayon. I love sitting down every morning and going through my Insights feed -  tagging relevant news so that my reports are already organized. It’s like a daily ritual.”

That organization allows MURAL to respond intuitively to their competitors, and lets Casey create reports that inform the executive and sales teams without overwhelming them. When competitive information is shared too frequently, it becomes noise, and eventually is ignored. When it’s not shared frequently enough, competitive intelligence information gets lost in the shuffle – and also ignored. With Crayon, MURAL gets the granularity of daily insights without losing the bigger picture. 

For the sales team at MURAL, the real value is in the battlecards. Crayon has become the go-to resource whenever there is a competitive deal. Having the information organized and updated gives the team the confidence (and intelligence) they need to prepare for meetings with prospects and win deals..   

Crayon has also become an invaluable training tool. When new sales hires are onboarded and are learning the nuances of the market, they’re introduced to the Crayon repository -  a collection of wisdom from people who understand the industry. Crayon accelerates their ability to get up-to-speed and close deals. Casey typically gets immediate feedback:

“As soon as a salesperson gets in Crayon, the first thing they say to me is ‘wow, there’s so much good stuff in here!’”

Every department at MURAL feels Crayon’s impact. Because Product Marketing is such a cross-functional discipline, the insights the team generates are one of the valuable inputs for everything from product development, to enhancing the customer experience, to advising the executive team on strategic decisions. 

Sean Lauer, Senior Director of Product Marketing at MURAL, explains how Crayon allows competitive intelligence to go beyond just marketing, product development, and sales enablement and to activate across the entire organization:

"Adopting Crayon as our centralized competitive intelligence hub has enabled MURAL to up-level our competitive intelligence efforts across teams from sales and marketing to executives and board members. Crayon helps us scan our highly competitive, ever-changing category and stay on top of news and insights that matter."