CRAYON COMPETITIVE
INTELLIGENCE BLOG

In high school, my economics teacher loved to remind us that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It’s an old-timey way of saying “everything comes at a cost.” Oftentimes, the cost of something ...

Your sales team just won a competitive deal. It was a taxing evaluation: multiple demos, a trial period, extensive pricing conversations—the works. Until the account executive on your sales team got ...

If you’re working with a sales team actively involved in competitive deals, you’re probably familiar with battlecards. Battlecards are a fundamental resource to help your sales team win more deals ...

We all know your stakeholders can benefit from competitive intelligence, but let’s talk about the real problem: They have so many places to look for information that, rather than looking, they’ll ...

You just lost a customer. Let’s call her Sarah. No, she didn’t churn. In fact, she’s never seen your product, let alone used it. Sarah just signed a contract with your competitor—without so much as a ...

It’s 8:32am. An account executive on your sales team opens up their laptop to get their day started. Yesterday was crazy. Back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls. Lots of follow-up for them to tackle ...

Battlecards. They can be your organization’s secret weapon or just another outdated file buried in the shared drive. But while every PMM worth their salt knows they should be creating, updating, and ...

We recently published the 2022 State of Competitive Intelligence Report—the 5th installment in the CI industry’s largest and longest-running survey series. Here’s my favorite finding: Compared to ...

Competitive intelligence is only as good as what it yields: better preparedness, happier customers, stronger revenue growth, and so on. In order to yield these results, you need to activate the intel ...

The space race. SATs. Where the best barbecue hails from. Nothing is more American than competition. Forgive me—that’s not true. Nothing is more American than the desire to win. And what holds true ...

Blogs. E-books. White papers. Reports. The list goes on and on. Behind every great piece of content is a team that strategized, planned, and executed an idea with one goal in mind – to share their ...

I’m sitting at my desk as I write this intro—a desk that I assembled over the course of a snowy Saturday afternoon last winter. Had the box in which the parts were shipped not included an instruction ...

No matter your industry or your product, your company likely has dozens of rivals (if not hundreds)—some of them direct competitors, some of them indirect competitors, and some of them aspirational ...

For those who conduct competitive intelligence, gathering insights in a timely manner can be an enormous struggle. On any given day, there may be hundreds — if not thousands — of signals generated ...

Businesses have never been more agile than they are right now. Bringing a product to market, releasing a new feature, launching an ad campaign — these initiatives, though they will never be easy by ...

In the B2B world, you can’t go to market with a product that’s identical to that of your competitor. Without some form of differentiation, your chances of succeeding over the long term are slim. ...

You work hard to stay on top of your competitors’ moves. You sift through big and small changes alike and analyze the data to identify trends and strategies. But then what do you do with the data? ...

You did it. Your persistent competitive research efforts have yielded a key piece of intel about one of your competitors. Maybe a competitor is quietly discontinuing a product line, or maybe they’re ...

Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a function that fits into every business strategy. No matter what your product or service is, you’ve got competitors fighting to win the same business as you and ...

Building and scaling a well-oiled marketing team that facilitates growth is a tall order. Building and engaging an audience with insightful content that pushes the known boundaries of your market is ...

Executive leadership makes critical business-directing decisions every day. In order for those decisions to be sound, executives need a clear view of the competitive landscape and how the company ...

When a global market event takes hold and catches everyone by surprise, executives are left scrambling to get a handle on how their industry is responding. With the latest crisis, our customer ...

Most marketers and competitive intelligence (CI) pros would agree that gathering competitive insights is only a valuable activity if those insights are used to further key business goals. Almost ...

Competitive landscapes are fast-moving and complex. Professionals specialized in this field learn the best practices in capturing and analyzing competitor moves and translating that into effective ...

You can spend all day telling prospects how great your product is, but you can be sure they are checking out the competition as well. Competitors will expound on the virtues of their own products, so ...

It’s good to be the king. Companies that ascend to the top of their industries and become category leaders have one goal: continue to grab market share while fending off the ankle-biters that seek to ...

Writing landing page copy, cooking up AdWords campaigns, agonizing over email subject lines - demand generation marketers have a lot on their plate. It’s no surprise that demand gen teams are not ...

Are you feeling in a rut with your competitive intelligence (CI) deliverables? Want some ideas to help you take the content to the next level? Below are some different ways to spice up your ...

Innovative companies have learned that the secret to maintaining a competitive advantage is not to compete head-to-head. Instead, it is to resolve to set themselves apart from the competition. This ...

Scenario simulations, war-gaming, and contingency planning can be effective tools for planning your competitive moves ahead of major market shifts. Scenario simulations allow your organization to ...

Competitive intelligence (CI) is a function that serves many different parts of an organization. Marketing leverages CI for campaigns and messaging, sales enablement uses it to inform sales reps of ...

Every team and employee within a business can benefit from relevant competitive insights. This may seem as obvious as saying that every team and employee can benefit from performance data – how else ...

In the traditional sense, competitive intelligence is used in marketing, product, and sales departments to understand their competitive landscape as well as how a company’s product stands up to the ...

“It is nothing for one to know something unless another knows you know it.” ― Persian Proverb Whichever wise man (or woman) said the above proverb knew that knowledge is absolutely useless when it ...

The New Year is officially here! While I’m sure you got ahead on your 2019 planning in Q4 of 2018, there is one strategy your team should be sure to incorporate into its plans - Competitive ...

Executing a product launch includes many moving parts. Pre-launch, your team needs to have an understanding of your market and be prepared to launch your new product into your space. During launch, ...

Your sales team pushes each month to help deliver your product to new customers, but despite every company’s best efforts, even the oldest subscription companies see over 2% of those hard-earned ...

When it comes to competitive intelligence, collecting data is a critical, or more importantly, collecting valuable data. There is a mass of constantly changing and increasing data on the internet ...

If you’re like thousands of marketers across the globe, you want to shake up your headache-inducing competitive intelligence program and create a new approach. Maybe this year you got the coveted ...

A common misconception surrounding competitive intelligence (CI) is that its main benefit is for sales teams. While it’s extremely important for sales reps to be prepared, knowledgeable, and armed ...