Rapid7 + CRAYON

Nate Crampton is a Product Marketing leader for Rapid7’s application security product line and formerly led their competitive intelligence program. As a leading provider of security analytics and automation, his company deals with a variety of competitors across their different business units. As a result, they aimed to create a comprehensive and impactful intelligence program that spanned everything from sales support, to product and pricing research, to their win/loss program, and everything in between.

A key part of the success of Rapid7’s program was rooted in the monitoring and tracking of competitors' moves at scale. However, the reliance on legacy tools led to a manual and time-consuming process that limited their progress towards building a proactive program across all product lines. As such, the competitive intelligence collected was siloed and not easily accessible by the rest of the organization until formal readouts were held, which limited the ability to grow the program.

As a result of that complexity and the isolated nature of the information, Nate felt that they needed a more robust solution: “The cybersecurity market is constantly evolving with competitors making frequent moves and new competitors always popping up. We needed a partner with a platform to help us scale and grow our ability to monitor and track key competitors' moves.” Nate and the team had a vision for something more: a platform to collect information, create conversation, and deliver impact knowledge to the right person at the right time. To get there, Rapid7 partnered with Crayon to help make their vision a reality.

After switching to Crayon from a competitor, Rapid7’s CI program experienced dramatic efficiency improvements in collecting, organizing, and sharing competitive intelligence. As the former CI lead, Nate adds context to this change: “Our previous vendor wasn’t real-time and their user interface wasn’t as intuitive as Crayon’s. Crayon keeps investing in their product, and its ability to automate the process of monitoring, tracking, and alerting on competitors’ moves allowed me to spend time on more impactful competitive intelligence projects.” He continued, “The best part is that by leveraging the platform I was able to give self-service access to different internal teams—giving me valuable time back.”

And now in his product marketing role he really sees the value in having access to one of Crayon’s Competitive Insights Analysts in addition to using the platform: “As a product marketer it’s hard having enough time to keep tabs on competitors. Having a Competitive Insights Analyst to help highlight things that matter is huge and saves me valuable time.”

Another key challenge Nate and the team had hoped to overcome was determining the right way to handle competitive intelligence that came from the field. “We are also leveraging Crayon for internally collected intelligence. Gathering intel from our sales team about an update to our competitor’s pricing, for example, would follow the same workflow as externally collected intel. With Crayon, we can appropriately communicate that field intelligence, including having the ability to automatically display this information in our battlecards.”

A centralized platform was the key: By bringing more people from Sales to Product Marketing to Product Management into the competitive intelligence program from both a consumption and contribution standpoint, it allowed the program to be an open, democratized model—increasing the reach and scale.

By deepening the integration with other parts of their tech stack—namely their sales enablement tools (Highspot), communications platform (Slack), and CRM (Salesforce)—Nate and the team were able to further democratize competitive intelligence across the organization. “To create an open competitive intelligence model, we decided to meet our internal stakeholders where they spend their time and have competitive conversations. We have Crayon’s battlecards automatically displayed in Highspot and we use the Slack integration to push and capture intelligence out to the field.” Nate explained. “Now, we have over one-third of our organization using Crayon in one way or another."

The Rapid7 team is seeing tangible results from Crayon across the different departments. For example, their sales team saw an average increase of 10% in win rates against competitors for which the team had a corresponding battlecard in Crayon; customer success representatives learned how to defend against competitors; and product management teams kept tabs on competitors to help influence roadmaps.

Nate and the product marketing teams have had a wide-reaching impact using Crayon as their competitive intelligence platform, while saving time and gaining valuable focus. “The Crayon competitive intelligence platform is a key part of our CI program for collecting, centrally storing, analyzing, and distributing intel throughout Rapid7.”

Rapid7 has been a Crayon customer since 2017, and Nate sees the relationship continuing: “Crayon’s product just gets better every day—and the team is incredibly customer-driven and frequently asks for and acts on our feedback. It’s been invaluable to have such a long-term partner invested in our CI success.”