ENA + Crayon

ENA has enabled education communities for 25 years. From K-12 to higher education to government organizations, ENA has been helping organizations optimize the digital delivery of learning services. Currently, 1 in every 12 students have their public education facilitated in some way by the company. To support that mission, ENA has greatly expanded its product portfolio over the last five to ten years, adding several new connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, and unified communication services. 

When ENA added new services to its product menu, new competitors came too. All these new competitive companies required research. “With these new services, we needed to understand who we were playing with,” explained Monica Cougan, Manager of Strategic Relationships & Initiatives.

However, there was no process in place for collecting and organizing competitive data and nobody formally tasked with managing it. The team struggled with ownership for it and how competitive intelligence could be integrated into the existing organization. ENA tried to use market research firms in the past, but that required a lot of upfront work and a hefty financial investment - all for a document that wasn’t kept up to date. 

After downloading and using a Crayon battlecard template and seeing a demo of Crayon’s platform, Monica realized that the need for competitive intelligence couldn’t be handled manually - and that Crayon was a natural partner.

While the creation and maintenance of battlecards was what initially drew the ENA team to Crayon, it was the Insights feeds that created the necessary momentum for the tool to be activated organization-wide.

“The big ‘aha moment’ for us was the feeds. We started realizing that there was great information coming in that they didn’t have to search for,” said Monica.  “When we began sharing those insights with the executive team, it spurred support from the top-down.” 

Monica began sending Crayon analyst picks, along with her own curated intel from the platform, to the executive team on a monthly basis. The energy from the top-down became palpable and people across the business began asking how they could get on Crayon.

Just as the Product Marketing team helped the rest of ENA understand Crayon, Crayon helped the rest of ENA better understand Product Marketing. Colleen Hoy, Director of Product Management, noted a transformative effect in how the company understood the function:

“It’s given other departments a new lens into the value Product Marketing can bring, and it will keep doing so as more people engage it. What we’ve been able to do since using Crayon is elevated beyond what we were able to do before. The organization sees how impactful product marketing can be.”

Using multiple parts of Crayon’s platform helps the Product Marketing team create a positive feedback loop. The reports and emails make building battlecards easier because information like price changes, position updates and new website messaging are readily available and automatically collated. That data can then be added to battlecards which give the sales team the high-level insight they need to close competitive deals. As those deals close, field intel is added to Crayon, ensuring the next iteration of battlecards are even more robust.  

For Lauren Basile, Senior Marketing Communications Professional, that product depth was a major benefit:

“I went in for the battlecards and got really excited about the insights. They save so much time, everything I need is clearly highlighted and so easy to incorporate directly back into the battlecards.”

As the head of Product Management, Colleen has a long list of duties. Her team is responsible for pricing, development work, market research, technical write ups and RFPs, internal system management, and more. Every member of the team handles multiple products so time and effort are valuable commodities – Crayon maximizes both for Colleen and her team: 

“Crayon makes the entire department more efficient. Reducing time and effort is a big deal for me and having something like Crayon to handle competitive intelligence lets us maximize our ability to do all of the other things we have to.”