Viant + Crayon

For Viant, receiving news in a timely manner has always been critical. Since their industry is frequently shifting, it’s essential that their Competitive Intelligence team is consistently monitoring the latest competitor and market updates. If this process isn’t streamlined and current, the company is at risk of making key decisions based on outdated intel.  

Andrea discusses the challenge of staying on top of everything in an industry where news is constantly flooding in: 

“We’re in an industry with a lot of news. New regulations will affect advertisers and consumers. New advertising channels and formats are continuously emerging. On the competitor side, companies’ structure and landscape are constantly changing making it difficult to stay up to date — it feels like there are industry shifts and changes happening all the time.” 

With Crayon, important competitive insights are curated in real-time and shared with the organization immediately. Andrea and Blake Ward, a Product Marketing Manager at Viant, set up a customized channel that has the Crayon Slack integration so that useful updates have the ability to get posted from Crayon directly into Slack. With 300 plus Slack users, these updates get into the hands of the people who need them right away. 

In addition to the Slack integration allowing information to flow more freely both to and from the Viant’s Product Marketing team, for Viant’s Sales team, Crayon is not just a location they can rely on for key, regular insights and sales enablement, but also as a place where they can share their own field intelligence to better help the organization. 

Knowledge that once would have only existed in the mind of a single sales rep can now exist in a shareable form (like battlecards), which helps Viant’s team of more than 75 sales reps close deals. 

Creating a culture of competitive intelligence hasn’t just made Product Marketing at Viant more valuable — it’s also made other aspects a lot easier on Andrea, Blake, and their colleagues. 

Crayon has become a central hub through which large scale competitive intelligence flows, which means instead of spending hours every day making sure different competitive intelligence documents are updated and the current versions being used, they can free up that time for crafting better product positioning and strategy.

The Viant team estimates they save several hours a week using Crayon to help automate competitive intelligence. Blake sums up how freeing it is to have a software platform that automates some of the most tedious parts of his role: 

“It makes the job so much easier when we have new competitive intel, I can rely on Crayon to simplify the process and help our team have the most up to date information they need to help keep us as a leader in our space.”