HCM Software + CRAYON

The human capital management industry is a fast-moving and competitive one. In a crowded market, some of the key challenges are to create differentiated messaging and stay ahead of competitors in terms of their product and marketing efforts. Being tasked with addressing these challenges means that the Market Research & Industry Relations team had many stakeholders, from sales to product management to product marketing to executive leadership and demand generation teams.

Competitive technologies were part of their day-to-day, particularly in sales conversations, whether coming up against a top tier competitor, an emerging player, or simply the inertia of sticking with an incumbent solution. The market intelligence function emerged to address the competitive landscape head-on.

Tackling the challenge of market research led this team to use a combination of tools and strategies, including Google Alert news monitoring, an enterprise social monitoring tool, and manually monitoring review sites and competitor websites. Ultimately, this combination of strategies lacked a key quality of useful intelligence: timeliness. Gathering intel in this way was incredibly time-consuming - from manually checking websites to sifting through hundreds of Google Alert emails - and this data was not discovered in real-time. As a result, the team’s time was consumed by researching outdated intelligence rather than analyzing and acting upon it.

“Our manual market intelligence process was very time-consuming, including sifting through hundreds of alerts every day, and the data often wasn’t delivered in a timely manner. We needed a better way to collect and analyze real-time market data,” reported their Vice President of Market Research & Industry Relations.

The team needed a tool to help them work smarter in how they approached market intelligence. They sought out a solution that would augment their current process, make them more efficient, and grow with the team long term. “When we saw what Crayon could do, it was as if it was built on our team’s goals,” their VP said.

Crayon cuts out the manual market research process so that they can focus on analyzing the data and driving recommendations. They no longer have to manually search competitor websites or sift through hundreds of Google Alerts. Instead, they can focus on using the intelligence to improve differentiated messaging, create a stronger customer review program, and launch more effective content campaigns.

On top of that, they are able to empower stakeholders to access market intelligence relevant to their roles. Previously, the market research team would spend hours collecting and sharing data with each of their stakeholders through quarterly or ad-hoc reports. With Crayon, each of those stakeholders can log into the platform and access relevant data on-demand to drive decisions in real-time.

“Crayon allows us to spend our time being strategic rather than consuming our time with tactical research,” they reported.

Crayon has driven efficiency improvements, and led to improved performance across areas of marketing, sales, and product. The end result is a significant impact in both quantitative and qualitative measures.

Even the hard cost associated with the efficiency gains shows clear and significant return on investment for their team. “We save 32 hours per month by using the Crayon platform,” the VP said. “That translates to a massive savings based on the efficiency gains alone.” In addition to the time saved collecting the intelligence, their team saves time by empowering stakeholders to review the data collected and analyzed within the Crayon platform. They no longer need to spend hours creating hefty reports summarizing data, and instead allow their coworkers to access data in real-time.

Ultimately, the impact of market intelligence may be best represented by more qualitative measures. “Crayon gives us the ability to be agile through real-time data access,” the VP said, “and you can’t put a single number on that.”

Crayon has become the one-stop shop for this global company’s market intelligence program. Delivering complete market intelligence on a single, accessible platform in real-time allows them to be more efficient and strategic to better compete in a fast-moving and crowded industry.