COGNISM + CRAYON

When your competitors are always on the move updating product features, releasing industry news, announcing pricing changes, etc., your sales team needs to stay in the know. The sales team at Cognism, a global leader in premium sales intelligence, is always in the know thanks to Kathy Thomson, Manager, Market Intelligence and Olivia Austin, Marketing Project Manager, who lead the company’s compete program. Kathy and Olivia rely on Crayon to help them aggregate, organize, and publish the competitive intel their sales team needs to win deals.

“We have a fast growing sales team of hundreds of reps,” said Kathy “With that much growth, competitive intelligence needs to be as easy as possible for reps to consume — we’re talking a few minutes tops. Crayon has been the ideal solution to meet that need.”

Reps now eagerly consume competitive intel and rely on that intel to close deals. On average, 33 deals a month are being directly influenced by Cognism’s compete program. In less than a year since launching Crayon, Kathy and Olivia have tracked more than $6 million in influenced revenue from the competitive content they create in the platform.

Cognism’s sales team relies on Crayon to give them real-time competitive insights in the places where they spend their time — Salesforce, Seismic, and Slack being a few of those places.

With Crayon’s Salesforce integration, Cognism’s sales team can easily access their competitive battlecards right on the opportunity record. Additionally, sales leadership at Cognism has access to Seller Insights reports and Seller Engagement — the latter report shares details on which sales reps are using battlecards and correlates that activity to their win rates. Alternatively, sales reps with low consumption views and low win rates are flagged so that sales managers can then dig in and better understand if and when training is necessary.

Enabling sales reps in competitive deals is a critical focus for Kathy and Olivia and Cognism needed a competitive intelligence platform that would complement Seismic, the team’s enablement solution.

If you’re paying close attention to a hyper competitive landscape, your team needs reliable competitive insights. Capturing and aggregating deep competitive intel directly into their CI platform was a critical priority for Cognism.

Beyond the unparalleled depth of Crayon’s insights, the team at Cognism found Crayon’s unlimited pricing model to be advantageous for their growing compete program — and for their growing company. Cognism has more than 250 colleagues signed up for Crayon and these users are enthusiastically taking advantage of new and exciting AI functionality within the product, such as Crayon Answers.

“A big reason we made the switch to Crayon was based on the pricing model and Crayon’s ability to scale with Cognism as we grow competitive intelligence across the organization,” said Kathy. “Beyond the sales team, our product team has saved searches for certain competitors to better track competing functionality and they’re getting a lot of value from Crayon.”

According to Olivia: “With Crayon we have unlimited battlecards that we can create and we can have unlimited users across Cognism viewing those battlecards. With our previous vendor we ran up against too many limits on what we could create and share.”

It feels like we have a third member of our team because we’re constantly brainstorming ideas on how to make our compete program better as well as getting tips on how to best use Crayon for our unique needs. Having this level of support has made a difference in our compete program and gives us all the confidence moving forward that we made the right decision.”

Olivia concluded, “Crayon has been incredibly easy to work with. It’s easy for me to create visually appealing battlecards and dashboards, and to share those competitive assets across the company. And as we enable the sales team in their competitive deals, it’s easy for us to see results.”