TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Crayon Intel Pro

Score8.6 out of 10

16 Reviews and Ratings

What is Crayon Intel Pro?

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.

Top Performing Features

  • Competitor alerts

    Alerts notify users when their competitors have entered a new customer segment, modified their strategy, incorporated new products or services, changed their prices for specific products, etc.

    Category average: 8.9

  • Market Insights and Reports

    Reports, newsfeeds, and information related to events, industry trends, or competitive insights.

    Category average: 8.3

  • Competitor Research

    Quantitative and qualitative tools that are used to identify competitors and assess their strengths and weaknesses, with a view toward identifying competitive advantages and opportunities for improvement.

    Category average: 8.7

Areas for Improvement

Best CI tool on the market

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Crayon Intel is a crucial part of our Competitive Intelligence program. It helps us monitor news about our top competitors, build and update battle cards, and see what deals are competitive and who we're winning or losing to. We have several different teams that consume the content we compile in Crayon, but only have 2-3 power users who create and then push the content to the other teams.

Pros

  • Win/Loss Analysis
  • Competitive Listening
  • Battlecard Creation

Cons

  • Filtering for Crayon Impact
  • Dislike option for when mentions of non-competitors get tagged
  • Better editor for the share option on boards

Most Important Features

  • Battlecards
  • Win/Loss Analysis and Dashboard
  • Competitive Listening
  • Analyst helping monitor and identifying competitor changes

Return on Investment

  • Has helped us close more deals when going up against competitors
  • Identify where we're weak on messaging and rebuttals for certain competitors

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Klue and Kompyte

Other Software Used

Bitly, Mailchimp, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs, Semrush, Typeform, Formstack Forms, Wistia, Hotjar

Crayon is hands down the best tool for CI professionals.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Crayon as the central platform for gathering, collating, and analyzing competitive intelligence, as well as sharing finished analysis with our stakeholders, including product management, marketing, and sales.

Pros

  • Crayon makes gathering intelligence incredibly easy - information is automatically gathered, persistent searches in Crayon push gathered information to you, and it is a snap to use that intelligence to dynamically update battlecards and keep internal stakeholders informed.
  • I love Crayon's Sparks AI feature, which improves upon persistent searches to create automatically updating results to natural language queries; one constant question I get from internal stakeholders is about status updates for one of our competitors, and Sparks allows me to offload manual research and spreadsheet updates. Moreover, I've used this example query to create an automatically-updated battlecard tile, so my information is always fresh without having to lift a finger.
  • Stale battlecards are a thing of the past. Beyond Crayon's automatically updating live tiles, or its AI integrations with Sparks, I really appreciate the ease of updating battlecards at the margins in Crayon on a regular basis. Sometimes a full refresh of battlecard is needed; more often, a small competitive update requires a small change, which is a breeze to do in Crayon. Also, by syncing tiles across multiple competitors, one small update can keep multiple battlecards up-to-date with no extra effort.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Usability

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, Tableau Cloud