Outdated Battlecards are a Thing of the Past: Automate Your Compete Program With Sparks Content
Every PMM knows the drill: A sales rep pings you before a call—“How do we compete against [Competitor]?” or “Do we have a battlecard on them?”
You drop what you're doing, dig through your compete content, and send them content—only to realize it’s outdated. Now, you’re stuck scrambling to update it, trying to review the latest insights while the rep is already heading into their call.
This isn't just frustrating—it’s an industry-wide problem. According to the State of Competitive Intelligence report, the numbers prove it:
- 58% of CI professionals struggle to keep battlecards and CI content updated, spending hours manually collecting and analyzing intel.
Hey, Product Marketer: Your Battlecards Shouldn’t Be Perfect
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 ...
3 Strategies Customer Success Managers Need to Keep Customers From Switching to Competitors
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 ...
How to Write a Better Battlecard: Follow the ABCs
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 ...
Connecting Employees to the “Why Care” and “Where to Go” with Competitive Intelligence Integrations
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 ...
Exceed Your Inbound Revenue Target With Crayon
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 ...
Gong + Crayon: Helping Your Sellers Win With Personalized Competitive Insights
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 ...
5 Battlecard Best Practices From the Experts at Gong, Salsify, and Hootsuite
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 ...
Because Winners Don’t Wing It: Introducing Crayon Academy
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 ...
Who Uses Competitive Intelligence? A Quick Tour of the 4 Major Stakeholder Audiences
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 ...
Competitive Differentiation: How to Stand Out and Win
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 ...
4 Insights That CI Pros Can Deliver to Their Content Teams
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 ...
Competitive Comparisons Are Not Battlecards—But They’re Close
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 ...
How to Create an Effective Competitive Comparison Landing Page
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 ...
10 Essential Examples of Competitive Intelligence (With Tips for Inspiring Action!)
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 ...
What Are the Goals of Competitive Intelligence? Let’s Break Down 5 of Them
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 ...
3 Ways to Find and Leverage Your Competitors' Weaknesses
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. ...
5 Tips for Communicating Competitive Intelligence to Your Organization
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? ...
5 Steps for Effectively Leveraging Competitive Intelligence
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 ...
12 Actionable Outcomes of Competitive Intelligence
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 ...
How to Give Your Marketing Team a Competitive Advantage
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 ...
How to Deliver Competitive Intelligence to Executive Leadership
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 ...
How to Brief Executive Leadership on Major Market Events
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 ...
3 Unique, Tactical Applications of Competitive Intelligence
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 ...
CI Experts Weigh In: How to Drive Engagement on CI Deliverables
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 ...