Crayon Review: AI-powered Competitive Intelligence But Can You Afford It?

The thing about markets is that they are constantly evolving. And your competitors are always looking for ways to gain an edge. By keeping tabs on them, you can stay agile and adapt to stay ahead of the curve. 

The tool we are reviewing today is an AI-based competitor intelligence platform that lets you monitor and analyze your competition with almost no effort at all. It’s called Crayon. 

Well, just because it is AI-based does not necessarily mean it is good. So, in this review, let’s find out if it can hold a candle to other options in the market. Are you ready?

A Little About Crayon

Used by the likes of MailChimp, Dropbox, and Zendesk, Crayon is a competitor analysis tool. It employs machine-learning algorithms to allow users to track their competitors and alert them to relevant intel.  

Crayon’s software has won multiple awards and caters to businesses of all sizes. To better understand the platform, let’s take a quick look at some of its main features. 

Automated Competitor Tracking

When it comes to keeping tabs on your competition, Crayon eliminates the need for tedious manual research. By monitoring competitors in real-time, it captures every significant move they make, from website changes to pricing updates, and job postings to SEC filings. Crayon's comprehensive approach ensures no detail goes unnoticed, providing you with a competitive edge. Its daily email summaries deliver the most crucial insights straight to your inbox, streamlining your workflow and keeping you informed.

Moreover, Crayon's AI analyzes data to highlight the most pertinent information, sparing you from mundane tasks and delivering actionable insights. By saving time and preventing blindsides, this tool enables businesses to stay ahead in the ever-evolving market landscape.

Insights Sharing and Collaboration

Crayon makes distributing competitive insights within your team effortless. No matter where your colleagues are; be it Slack, Teams, email, or any other collaboration platform, you can share valuable intel with them instantly - with just a click. 

The platform allows you to create these info cards called battlecards in minutes with expertly crafted templates, saving your sales reps valuable time while ensuring they have the latest intel at their fingertips. Not only that, within the Crayon ecosystem, you can also receive real-time feedback from your team to fine-tune your strategies and stay ahead of the competition. And if your colleagues don’t find your intel helpful, they can also share their own with you.

Sales Support

With Crayon, you can change the way your sales team competes, providing them with real-time competitive intelligence seamlessly integrated into their workflow. By providing insights into top competitors and highlighting key differentiators, Crayon enables you to confidently articulate why your product is better. Through embedded battlecards across various platforms like Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, Sharepoint, and Teams, crucial information is readily available wherever your sales reps navigate.

Moreover, Crayon doesn't stop at just delivering data—it offers personalized support by tracking individual performance through its leaderboard feature. This targeted approach allows managers to identify and assist reps who need it most, ultimately driving better outcomes in competitive opportunities.

Performance Metrics

Using a Competitive Intelligence (CI) platform like Crayon can yield tangible returns that manifest in your performance metrics. That’s right! Crayon lets you measure performance by tracking key metrics such as battlecard usage, win rates against competitors, and influenced revenue. 

Through comprehensive analytics, you can monitor battlecard usage patterns, identifying which resources are most utilized by your sales representatives and how this usage evolves over time. Concurrently, tracking competitive win rates offers a clear understanding of sales performance against your rivals. But most compellingly, influenced revenue metrics quantify the direct impact of CI initiatives on the bottom line.

Crayon AI

Crayon AI is your personal competitive intelligence (CI) genie. By filtering out 99% of the noise, it ensures that you focus solely on the 1% of the critical insights essential for your competitive edge. Besides, it can identify significant anomalies across your competitors' digital footprints and send you timely alerts. 

With Crayon Picks, tailored insights are delivered directly to you, saving valuable time and effort. Utilizing AI-powered summarization, Crayon generates concise summaries of vast amounts of data, enabling swift decision-making.  

Well, that is not the end of it. Crayon AI has an automatic tagging feature that can effortlessly categorize intelligence into over 80 subcategories. It can track competitor websites for you. And using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and machine learning, Crayon AI can grade the sentiment of the insights it pulls on a scale while providing nuanced perspectives on market trends.

Templates

For most users, especially beginners, templates make it easier for them to navigate a platform. And luckily, Crayon has a well-designed library of customizable templates to get you started.

And hey, all of them have been curated by experts. So, you can create the battlecards or newsletters you want in a matter of minutes.

Integrations

Most tools today rely on third-party integrations to extend their functionality and create a streamlined workflow for the end user. And Crayon is no different in this respect.

It integrates seamlessly with industry-standard platforms like Salesforce, Slack, Teams, Sharepoint, and more.

Pricing

Like other tools, Crayon does not offer any fixed pricing plans, at least not on the official website. However, you can always get in touch with their sales team, share your requirements with them, and request a quote. 

Also, there is no free trial or a free version. Requesting a demo is the only option if you would like to see Crayon in action before buying it.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Crayon does seem to get the job done. It is an intuitive platform and offers some quite powerful features like battlecards. Also, it does not disappoint when it comes to straightening out the learning curve - thanks to Crayon Academy.

For platforms as easy and powerful as Crayon, it ultimately comes down to whether you can afford to pay for them because you can rarely expect them to be cheap. But if the cost is not a factor for you, do feel free to request a demo and see if it works for your business.