Crayon Customer Corner: 5 Questions with the Product Marketing Team of Bonterra

In our second installment of the Crayon Customer Corner, we sat down with the Product Marketing Team at Bonterra (formerly Social Solutions). The team recently purchased Crayon and discussed how the platform and their team bring competitive intelligence to the next level. At Bonterra, sales, marketing, and customer success teams all leverage competitive intel to stay informed on competitors’ movements and improve their go-to-market strategy. Learn how Bonterra is leveraging Crayon company-wide to gain a serious advantage! 

Our primary users at Bonterra are all client-facing teams. Sales, Marketing and Customer Success all leverage competitive intelligence to inform our daily work and long-term strategy. Additionally, competitive intelligence is particularly important for the Product Management team. By understanding which features are most important to our customers and how we compare to our competitors, we can use these insights to build features and products that make the greatest impact for our users.

One of the reasons we chose Crayon is because it integrates with tools we already use today like Slack, Salesforce, and Gong. This makes it possible for us to communicate and collect updates in real-time, through the channels our team is already accustomed to using. We’ve found that it’s really important to standardize how we’re tracking information, such as why we’re winning or losing, so that everyone is speaking the same language.

Additionally, we host competitive training sessions with our Sales teams on a regular basis, so that those who are interested in learning more about a particular competitor or feature set can join in and learn more. 

We’re seeing more and more that customers want to be able to do research on their own and gain access to information, before consulting with a sales representative. Potential buyers are spending more time perusing websites and review sites, attending on-demand product demos, and asking colleagues for recommendations before accepting a Sales call. 

With this shift in purchasing preferences, companies are being forced to be more transparent with information such as pricing and feature sets online. This means that not only your potential customers, but also your competitors, will have more visibility into what they’re up against. This makes competitive intelligence all the more important. If you’re speaking with a prospective customer, you should be prepared to speak to how your product stacks up competitively - because chances are, your buyer already knows!

Since bringing together our four companies, Crayon will be the single place to collect our competitive intelligence and share it across our new team. It will automate some of the research that we’re doing manually, like searching for news and updates from competitors. 

The number one reason we chose Crayon was the unlimited number of users and the ability to share competitive intel and battlecards across departments and teams. Additionally, our team members have enjoyed the integrations with Gong and Salesforce which will allow our teams to track insights from conversations already happening.