Item: Crayon Intel Pro
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Crayon Intel Pro

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 and Cons

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

Crayon is super intuitive, has received constant updates to ensure it's even easier to use, and the spate of AI enhancements to improve usability has made it even better than before.

Key Insights

Do you think Crayon Intel Pro delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Crayon Intel Pro's feature set?

Yes

Did Crayon Intel Pro live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Crayon Intel Pro go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Crayon Intel Pro again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, Tableau Cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Crayon Intel Pro Feature Ratings

Comments

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Crayon is hands down the best tool for CI professionals.