KLAVIYO + CRAYON

Klaviyo, a modern marketing platform, helps e-commerce brands grow by enabling them to build high value relationships with consumers at scale. Like most industries, the email and marketing automation space is crowded and competitive. Nearly every company, no matter the industry, needs help with email or marketing automation and seeks out software to assist their efforts. Since the industry is so competitive, the Klaviyo team needed a way to automate their market research and get a deep understanding of what their competitors were doing. Brian Whalley, Director of Product Management at Klaviyo, found the missing piece to their competitive intelligence strategy - Crayon.

There were two key reasons why an automated competitive intelligence solution was essential to the Klaviyo team, Brian told us. “Before Crayon, we were finding that our competitor information was constantly out of date, and we needed a way to stay up to date with industry changes, in real time. We also needed a process for successfully sharing intel across the whole organization.” In the past, competitive intelligence at Klaviyo was done using a Google Sheet, which was a manual process for collecting data and distributing it to the team. Once they were able to put Crayon in place, they could immediately see the impact of delivering real-time, actionable intelligence to their team.

Delivering actionable intel to the whole team in real time

Competitive intelligence isn’t just tracking one competitor or one action, it’s tracking many competitors and every action they take. The Klaviyo team wanted to have dynamic competitive intelligence that would benefit their product management and product marketing strategies. The Product Management team and Product Marketing team care about a wide range of competitive intelligence data points, including competitor news, team changes, software updates, pricing, packaging, press, and of course, product updates. With a vast competitive landscape and new updates occurring daily, Michael Greene, Product Marketing Manager, says, “I always have Crayon running in the background, providing me with constant competitive updates that I can reference at any moment.” That way, he can get competitive updates, without losing productivity or time throughout his day.

Another important part of competitive intelligence is effectively communicating the data. In an organization of hundreds of employees, communicating competitive intel across the entire organization can be a difficult task. If your organization uses an instant message software, such as Slack, it can be a vital channel for communicating intelligence. The Klaviyo team created a competitive intelligence focused Slack channel and integrated it with Crayon so, now, new competitive updates are communicated to their whole team right away. This has transformed their strategy from manual data collection and communication, to automated data collection and instant team communication.

Building dynamic battlecards with Crayon integrated intelligence

Crayon has become the centralized hub of competitive intelligence information for Klaviyo. When Battlecards was released, Klaviyo was eager to hop on board. In the past, their battlecards had been static, often outdated and time-consuming to update. Dynamic, always-up-to-date battlecards were critical to enable their sales team to win competitive deals. With Crayon, their battlecards are now tied to real-time intelligence and the sales team always has up-to-date information. Michael told us, “Crayon is always there collecting important information. If I don’t have the time to manually check in on competitors, I can still provide my team with intel, without making it a huge project.” Once their battlecards were loaded in the Battlecards tool, they were able to ensure they’re being updated in real-time with Crayon integrated intelligence. Crayon Battlecards are integrated with the real-time data from Crayon Intel, so as soon as an insight is surfaced in Crayon, users are able to make updates to their battlecards.

A major win for the Klaviyo team was their increase in competitive win rates since rolling out Crayon Battlecards. Michael reported, “Our competitive win rates have increased as much as 59% since rolling out Crayon Battlecards.” Since their sales team has their competitive intelligence data on-hand at all times, they have the tool they need to close more competitive deals.

Scaling competitive intelligence in a high-growth company

The Klaviyo team has transformed their competitive intelligence strategy, transitioning from a once manual process to a seamless program fueled by Crayon integrated intelligence. Over the last three years, Klaviyo has grown their business over 6000%, and with the support of Crayon as a partner, they are making new breakthroughs in this highly competitive industry. They’re able to arm their sales team with winning intelligence to help them with their competitive deals.

As their industry continues to see new competitors, Klaviyo is leveraging Crayon competitive intelligence to stay one step ahead of their competition. Michael notes, “Our competitive landscape makes staying on top of CI difficult, but having Crayon from the beginning has given me peace of mind that we are staying one step ahead of our competition.”