Crayon headquartered in Boston offers the Crayon Intel Pro marketing intelligence suite, including competitive intel and analysis, market and product trends, and search tools (e.g. filters and views) for making data intelligible.
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HG Insights Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
The HG Insights platform provides a view into global industries, markets, and companies allowing users to identify the most valuable opportunities and build strategies to maximize revenue and accelerate growth.
Elsewhere in my review, I've talked about Crayon's incredible capabilities to track competitors, make ingesting intelligence about those competitors automatic, and how easily it incorporates that intelligence into dynamically and automatically-updated battlecards. I've also talked about their expanding use of AI to improve user experience and to improve the final work of CI professionals. All of which is to say that Crayon is the best tool I've ever used for intelligence analysis- it's incredible. Another area of consideration is analytics, particularly around win/loss data - Crayon's integration with Salesforce creates insightful analytics for understanding which competitors you're winning against, which you're losing against, which sellers are having a hard time, which are succeeding, and which sellers are utilizing the battlecards during the sales cycle. Proving ROI is simple with Crayon's analytics, as well, with a tool to show how much revenue you (as an individual) or your team have influenced with your battlecards.
For someone working in B2B IT Marketing, the HG Insights Platform has a wide range of data available that is suited for both a data level employee as well as an ISR. The one draw back is the integration with SFDC isn't as great as we'd like, meaning it is more manual for us to run propensity models using more than one source of data.
Crayon has been innovative in incorporating AI into the tool, both to enhance productivity and to enhance the outcomes of analysis. The fantastic thing is these features started rudimentary, have gotten better, and are set to get better still - I could recommend this to Crayon as an area for improvement (I suppose), but they're already working to take advantage of the latest AI features to make the user experience and our outputs even better.
Crayon is super easy to use - regardless of level in the organization. As a power user, it's easy to curate the most important information about competitors and then distribute it out to leadership and other teams so that they can stay informed on the most important competitor trends. It allows me to share out information via email or through Slack and our competitive intel channel
It’s very easy to use, and the team is very responsive and friendly to work with. The information is unique and usable and can complement some of the data we get from call recordings. The integration with Salesforce is easy to implement and offers good insights into our database.
The core features of all of these are essentially the same. Crayon Impact (the win/loss side) is what won us over compared to the other tools that we demoed.
- Sales Intel seems to be more of a direct competition. Their human research seems to be something interesting. Also the claim to focus on firmographics - We went with Bombora for intent technology in the past - We did not move forward with 6sense
Crayon has centralized what was previously a dispersed collection of competitive intelligence analysis, streamlined sharing of competitive insights, and allowed the CI Team unprecedented visibility into our impact on the business. This helps our business by: making sharing of analysis more efficient and creating a self-serve mechanism among our stakeholders, reducing the number of bespoke requests we receive; fostering competitive discussions among the wider workforce, which pulls in multiple perspective to ultimately shape and improve the quality of finished analysis; clarifying the impact of the CI Team's role on the business, which makes discussions around ROI with leadership much easier now that they're backed by hard numbers rather than a reliance on anecdotal evidence.
I don't massively get involved in financial matters, but the propensity models we use internally to help run our campaigns are certainly a big factor when our sales people approach our clients.
Every campaign sold now comes with a flat data fee for us to run and use a propensity model for the activity we complete on behalf of our clients.
Whilst the client will never see the raw data behind the model (of which HG does play a part along with our other data sources) they are briefed on the methodology and reasoning behind them.
