ZoomInfo + Crayon

Competitive intelligence has always been a part of Andy McCotter-Bicknell’s role at ZoomInfo. As a Senior Product Marketing Manager, he created and scaled the company’s Market Intelligence program, keeping leadership informed about market trends, enabling the sales team to win more competitive deals, and creating content to articulate the “ZoomInfo difference.” These efforts led to ZoomInfo expanding rapidly in a crowded data and insights market.

With the company growing quickly and the industry becoming ever-more congested, Andy knew that ZoomInfo required a centralized competitive intelligence solution. In addition to staying current on what was happening in the crowded business intelligence-software space, the company needed a way for its expanding team to get up to speed quickly. New employees needed easy access to cohesive, shareable competitive intel that would get them up-to-speed and taking the correct actions right away.

Within a few weeks of engaging Crayon, Andy and his team knew they had found a product that fit those needs. ZoomInfo suddenly had a full understanding of the competitive landscape; the company could access competitive feature functionality, pricing, messaging, website changes, product updates and more—about all of the key players in their industry. 

Improvement to ZoomInfo’s sales process followed. The sales team became much more comfortable with using battlecards to share information, which in turn meant that they used and updated them more consistently. Battlecard intel is now accessed and updated in real time by a sales team that has learned their value and have come back to them again and again. And it’s not just a small pocket of engaged account executives—Andy estimates that 90% of the 1,000-plus person sales team interacts with competitive intelligence and CI deliverables throughout the year. 

“The process of building and maintaining battlecards in Crayon is so intuitive, especially when you integrate them into a content management platform. This was definitely the biggest organization-wide win for us—just the overall confidence our sales team now has in handling competitive conversations.”

While the increase in sales self-assurance was impressive, competitive Intelligence at ZoomInfo has gone far beyond battlecards. Data points curated by Zoominfo’s competitive insights analysts have been especially helpful for prioritizing feature roadmaps, launching new product lines, and guiding executive-level strategic decisions. ZoomInfo has integrated Crayon with Slack, which allows the company to instantly give the entire organization access to intel that can help them make better decisions, whether they are in product, marketing, sales, or on the executive team. 

Andy recognizes that this sort of collaborative approach—where intelligence is activated across an organization—has been invaluable to ZoomInfo’s ability to be consistently successful in a highly-competitive industry. In his opinion, any company that isn’t taking this approach to competitive intelligence is putting itself at a steep disadvantage:

“Collective engagement is one of the biggest keys to ZoomInfo staying competitive. Everyone stays informed, even when there are constant shifts in our landscape. The days of competitive intel working in a silo, or only being talked about at the board level are over. The companies that embrace organization-wide competitive programs will come out on top.” 

Andy has since moved on from ZoomInfo, but not from Crayon: read about why he chose Crayon again.