2024 in Review: From AI Breakthroughs to the Launch of the AI Toolkit
We will look back on 2024 as the year that artificial intelligence revolutionized competitive enablement.
We have finally hit the critical paradigm shift. The changes weren’t just about advancing technology—they were about empowering teams to work smarter, and achieve measurable results. From streamlining workflows to delivering critical competitive insights in real-time, AI has elevated the role of competitive intelligence, enabling teams to make better decisions and achieve meaningful results.
This year, groundbreaking tools like GPT-4 Omni and Claude 3.5 Sonnet became integral to how teams synthesize and leverage data. Organizations using AI in CI are now 67% more confident in their strategic decisions—a clear ...
Why Competitive Enablement Is the Ultimate Key to Closing More Deals
In today’s hyper-competitive sales landscape, every deal counts. Two-thirds of sales opportunities are competitive, and here’s the kicker: these deals close 5x faster and at significantly higher ...
Webinar Recap: Elevate Your Competitive Enablement Strategy
In a world where business competition is fiercer than ever, having a strategic edge is no longer optional—it's essential. Our recent webinar, "Elevate Your Competitive Enablement Strategy with Crayon ...
3 Tips From Our Battlecard Webinar with Sam Niro
Earlier today, I had the pleasure of talking to Sam Niro, Competitive Intelligence Manager @ Talkdesk, about how she creates and rolls out new battlecards. Here's the recording of our conversation: ...
The Worst Thing a Seller Can Do In a Competitive Situation (+ More Takeaways From Our Latest Webinar)
A few days ago, I had the pleasure of hosting a webinar that featured Crayon’s VP of Strategy, Chris Pope, and Aircall’s Director of Sales, Tommy Jester. We talked about the mistakes that sellers ...
Customer Corner: The Dos and Don’ts of Running a CI Session at Sales Kickoff from Talkdesk’s Holly Jackson
In this edition of Customer Corner, we caught up with Holly Jackson, Director of Competitive Intelligence at Talkdesk. Below she gives her best advice for any CI practitioner trying to make a splash ...
Build and Implement Your Sales Enablement Strategy (in 7 Simple Steps)
It doesn’t matter if you’re building a strategy from scratch or overhauling tired practices established by marketers of yore: Sales enablement shouldn’t be an afterthought. In fact, if you aim to ...
What Is Sales Enablement? Your Burning Questions Answered
Alec Baldwin wouldn’t be the patron saint of closing deals if, in perhaps the most cliche sales reference in cinematic history, he’d said “always be… enabling.” Sellers are hired to sell. It’s the ...
Sales Battlecards 101: How to Help Your Sellers Leave the Competition In the Dust
Sales battlecards (also known as competitive battlecards, or simply as battlecards) give your sellers the facts, tactics, and materials they need to win competitive deals. Before we go any further, a ...
The Key to Handling Competitive Objections and Landmines: “Why?”
An account executive on your sales team, Jen, is chatting with a prospect. The conversation is going well. The prospect doesn’t seem to be evaluating any other vendors. And then they say this: “Talk ...
New Data: Battlecard Benchmarks and Best Practices Based On 1,200+ Survey Responses
Sadly, the impact of good product marketing is often obscured. A flawless product launch, an inspiring positioning statement, a face-melting slide deck—you and I both know that each of these things ...
Sales Enablement Materials: 12 Types of Content That Empower Sellers
Making cold calls. Running demos. Persuading decision-makers. The life of a seller isn’t an easy one. But that doesn’t mean you—whether you’re a product marketer, sales manager, revenue leader, or ...
7 Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Sales Enablement Efforts
Whether you’re a marketer or a sales manager, there are innumerable ways you can empower sellers to do their jobs more effectively. You can provide content that helps them personalize emails. You can ...
5 Reasons Competitive Intelligence Is a Critical Component of Pre-Call Planning
Unless you’re subscribed to the Crayon blog, you’re most likely reading this because you Googled “pre-call planning.” If that’s the case, you probably noticed that there are a lot of blog posts on ...
11 Sales Enablement Statistics Everyone Should Know In 2022
Sales enablement statistics are useful for a number of reasons. Maybe you’re new to the discipline and trying to quickly learn as much as possible. Maybe you’re building a business case for the ...
6 Best Practices to Align Sales and Marketing Teams
The more closely you align your sales and marketing teams, the better. When everyone is on the same page — from content marketers and demand gen specialists to BDRs and account executives — lead ...
Sales Battlecards: 8 Tips to Help You Win More Deals
The sales battlecard is an extraordinarily impactful tool for any business in a competitive B2B market. As we'll discuss in the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence Report (coming soon!), 71% of ...
How to Definitively Prove the Value of Sales Enablement
High-performing sales reps are not born; they’re built. To be more precise, high-performing sales reps are not built in a discrete period of time; they’re built on an ongoing basis. Call analyses, ...
How to Eliminate Competitive Battlecard Bias So Sales Wins More Deals
One sales enablement tool we all know and love is the competitive battlecard. Battlecards are an extremely impactful tool for your sales team to have in their toolbox, especially when a prospect is ...
9 Sales Enablement Tools Your Team Needs to Win a Competitive Battle
A sales rep has entered a competitive situation: are they ready to go to battle and win? A lot can go into preparing that sales rep to handle questions, objections, and deliver just the right ...
How Well Does Your Sales Team Pivot?
Remember not long ago when we’d never heard of Dr. Anthony Fauci, had no idea what Zoombombing was, only occasionally worried about getting the flu? We came into 2020 like we do most years, with ...
Battlecards 101: Measuring and Optimizing Your Battlecards
Now that we’ve covered the basics of creating battlecards and walked through driving battlecard adoption in our Battlecards 101 series, it’s time to take the next step. By now, you’ve created and ...
Battlecards 101: 5 Ways to Drive Sales Adoption of Battlecards
This post is part two in our Battlecards 101 Series. Click here to read part one. Imagine that you spent hours upon hours building an informative and detailed battlecard for your sales team. Now ...
13 Sales Enablement Tools to Increase Your Competitive Win Rate
Arming your sales team with the tools, skills, and resources they need to win competitive deals is a critical step in growing revenue. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team ...
6 Strategies for Partnering with Sales for Better Battlecards
You’ve crafted amazing battlecards. They have the latest intelligence, crisp messaging, and deep information on each competitor. And yet the sales team doesn’t adopt them. They have their own ...
How to Set Up a Comprehensive Competitive Sales Enablement Program
It’s important to ensure that your sales team is ready to close any deal that comes into their pipeline, whether or not it’s competitive in nature. Sales teams need to be well equipped, trained, and ...
3 Win/Loss Insights to Use in Your Battlecards
Win/loss analysis is a critical component of competitive intelligence (CI). Understanding who you are winning (or losing) against and why helps inform how you position and differentiate yourself ...
How to Enable Sales Teams to Win in Hyper-Competitive Markets
Market landscapes have become exponentially more competitive. Organizations now operate in a state of hyper-competition–a landscape in which no competitive advantage can be sustained in the long run. ...
Why Your Battlecards Aren’t Working
Your competitors impact nearly every aspect of your business. They impact how your product team shapes its development roadmap. They shape how your marketing team runs campaigns. They even influence ...
Why Competitor Battlecards Should Focus on the Entire Sales Funnel
Competitor battlecards have become a popular tool for enabling sales teams, and with good reason. Competitive analyses are more in-depth than what a salesperson needs when they encounter a ...
Competitive Objection Handling: How to Fight Against Competitor Claims
The competition is talking about you, and no surprise—it’s not good. Whether it’s half-truths or outright lies, you need to arm your sales team with tactics and talking points to counter claims made ...
How to Prepare Your Sales Team to Win More Competitive Deals
Receiving an inbound demo request is often the best part of a salesperson’s day. Learning that the evaluation is going to be competitive in nature can be less exciting. Sales teams in competitive ...
10 Dynamic Tiles to Integrate Into Your Sales Battlecards
Battlecards have historically lived in static PDFs delivered via email to sales reps’ computers. And by historically, I mean most battlecards today are static documents that are always out-of-date, ...
Four Ways to Analyze Sales Enablement Program to Improve Sales Success
How do you know if your sales enablement efforts are effective? It's important to not only deliver a variety of sales enablement resources, but to also circle back and analyze their impact on your ...
Five Tips To Help Your Sales Reps Win Competitive Deals
84% of businesses say their industry has gotten more competitive in the last three years, according to the 2021 State of Competitive Intelligence. In the same report, 53% of respondents said the ...
What is the Difference Between Sales Operations and Sales Enablement?
Back in the 1970s, Xerox recognized the need for a support team that handled many of the basic operations and logistics essential for a successful sales team. The support team took over core sales ...
How to Combine Tactical and Educational Competitive Intelligence for Sales Success
Sales are often primary clients of competitive intelligence (CI) in companies and also one of the best channels to drive measurable value through battlecards. By making intel more accessible and ...
3 Sales Enablement Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Product marketers have a complex job working cross-functionally to support many crucial areas of the business. Creating and distributing buyer-facing content, updating sellers on the industry and ...
Sales Enablement for Everyone: How Areas of Marketing Enables Sales
As companies grow, sales teams get bigger, and sales cycles become more complex, many businesses invest in a sales enablement function within the marketing team. Marketers, who are tasked with ...
Top 3 Sales Consequences for Ignoring Competitive Intelligence
The sales process we know today is remarkably different from the sales process of a decade ago. Years ago, prospects had an average of four to five choices for any product or service they were ...
Planning a Successful Sales Kickoff - 16 Tips from Marketing Leaders
It’s that time of year again -- when we gather the entire sales team together, energize them, educate them, and align them for success in the new year. This effort often falls to the team that we ...
10 Sales Enablement Terms You Need to Know
Sales enablement is an important role in any organization - ensuring that sales has the skills and tools to win in their market. Most industries change rapidly, with competitors regularly launching ...
The Best Sales Enablement Tool Just Got Better: Introducing Crayon Battlecards
The speed of competition has never been faster. Over the last decade, innovations like Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing have allowed companies to improve their products, change their ...
The Art and Science of Using Competitive Intelligence to Win Sales
There are endless tips and tricks to help sales executives close more deals. One of those tips not talked about enough is using competitive intelligence to win sales. Leveraging competitive ...