If you're a product marketer, you know the pain: drowning in competitive updates, sales requests, and “insight” decks nobody reads. You want to give your team something useful—stuff they’ll actually use, not just file away. This is your no-nonsense guide to finding, creating, and sharing real, actionable insights in Crayon so you can stop spinning your wheels and start making an impact.
Who’s this for? Product marketing teams who want less noise, more signal, and practical tips for using Crayon in the real world.
Step 1: Get Your Bearings in Crayon
Before you can share insights, you have to find them. Crayon pulls in a ton of intel—think competitor website changes, news articles, pricing updates, reviews, and more. That’s both a blessing and a curse. Here’s how to avoid getting lost:
- Set up your dashboards: Start by customizing your dashboards to focus on competitors, topics, and sources that actually matter to your team. Don’t bother tracking every last competitor if you only care about the top three.
- Tweak your feed: Use filters to cut out noise. Crayon’s default feed can be overwhelming; filter by competitors, content type (like web pages vs. reviews), or keywords. If you see too much junk, keep tweaking.
- Ignore the “shiny object” trap: Just because you can track something doesn’t mean you should. If nobody on your team cares about a competitor’s random blog post, don’t bother surfacing it.
Pro tip: Spend 15 minutes with your sales and product teams before you set up your dashboards. Ask them what they actually want to know—don’t guess.
Step 2: Spot What’s Actually Insightful
Not everything Crayon pulls in is worth sharing. An “insight” isn’t just news; it’s something that tells your team what’s changing, why it matters, and what to do about it.
What counts as an actionable insight?
- Changes that affect your sales pitch: New competitor features, big pricing shifts, new positioning, or a competitor suddenly targeting your core customer.
- Real customer reactions: Patterns in reviews or social media that signal a real shift in sentiment.
- Market moves: Mergers, partnerships, or regulatory news that could shake up your space.
What to ignore:
- Every tiny UI tweak your competitor makes.
- Press releases with no real substance (“Company X is thrilled to announce...").
- Generic blog content unless it signals a shift in messaging or strategy.
Gut check: If you can’t answer “So what?” in one sentence, it’s probably not an insight.
Step 3: Turn Raw Data Into Useful Insights
Crayon can surface the raw intel, but it’s up to you to make it meaningful. Here’s how to turn a bunch of data points into something your team will actually care about.
1. Add context
Don’t just share a screenshot of a competitor’s new product page. Add a quick summary: “Competitor X is now emphasizing integrations with Y—this could be a play to go after our enterprise accounts.”
2. Spell out the impact
Connect the dots. Will this change how your sales team positions against them? Does it mean you need to rethink a feature roadmap? Make it explicit.
3. Suggest action
Whenever possible, include a recommendation. This doesn’t have to be world-changing. Sometimes it’s as simple as: “Flag this for the next sales enablement deck.”
Template for an actionable insight:
- What happened: One or two sentences, max.
- Why it matters: Connect to your company or product.
- What to do: Suggest a next step.
Example:
What happened: Competitor Z just launched a free trial for their enterprise plan.
Why it matters: This removes a key objection we’ve been using in sales calls.
What to do: Update our battlecard and alert the sales team.
Step 4: Create Insights in Crayon
Now, let’s get a bit more tactical. Here’s how to actually create insights in Crayon:
- Capture the intel: Find the signal you want to turn into an insight (website change, review, press mention, etc.).
- Use the Insights tool: In Crayon, click “Create Insight” or use the highlight/annotation feature if you’re inside a specific intel item.
- Fill in the fields:
- Title: Keep it short and specific.
- Summary: Use your template—what happened, why it matters, what to do.
- Tags and categories: Makes it easier for others to find later. Don’t overthink these, but be consistent.
- Attach evidence: Add screenshots, links, or original intel so people can see for themselves.
- Choose visibility: Decide if it should be private (just for PMM) or shared more widely.
- Save and review: Double-check it’s clear and actionable. If it sounds like “FYI,” you haven’t gone far enough.
What to skip: Don’t get hung up on formatting or making it pretty. Clarity beats fancy layouts every time.
Step 5: Share Insights So People Actually Use Them
This is the part where most teams fall short. Dumping a bunch of “insights” into Crayon isn’t enough—you need to get them in front of the right people, at the right time, in the right format.
Tactics that work:
- Push to Slack or email: Crayon lets you auto-share insights to Slack channels or via email digests. Don’t overdo it—too many notifications, and people stop paying attention. Prioritize.
- Build battlecards: Use Crayon’s battlecard builder to turn key insights into something sales will actually reference. Update them regularly.
- Schedule regular roundups: Once a week or once a month, send a short, curated summary of the most important insights to your stakeholders. Make it skimmable.
- Present live: Once in a while, run a short “intel” meeting. Walk through the top three insights and answer questions. It’s old-school, but people listen.
What to avoid:
- Sharing everything in real-time. Most people don’t want a play-by-play of every competitor tweet.
- Hiding insights in folders nobody checks.
- Overcomplicating the process with too many categories, tags, or approval workflows.
Pro tip: Ask your sales team what format they actually use. If they live in Slack, meet them there. If they want a Google Doc, export and share it that way. Don’t assume.
Step 6: Keep Insights Fresh (and Kill the Stale Stuff)
Old intel is almost as bad as no intel. If your battlecards or insight feeds are full of out-of-date info, people will stop trusting them.
- Set review reminders: Block time monthly or quarterly to review and prune old insights.
- Archive or update: Don’t be afraid to delete what’s no longer relevant. If an insight is still useful but needs a tweak, update it.
- Ask for feedback: Every so often, check in with your users. Are they using what you share? What’s missing? Adjust based on real feedback, not what you assume they want.
Step 7: Don’t Overcomplicate—Iterate and Improve
Crayon has a lot of features, but you don’t need to use all of them to make an impact. Start simple:
- Track what matters most to your team.
- Share only what’s actionable.
- Keep your formats consistent and easy to scan.
If something isn’t working—nobody reads your emails, battlecards go stale, or sales keeps asking for info you already shared—change it up. The goal isn’t to have the fanciest insight process; it’s to give your team what they need, when they need it.
Bottom line: Actionable insights aren’t about volume or fancy dashboards. They’re about clarity, context, and actually driving better decisions. Start small, keep it simple, and improve as you go. Your team (and your sanity) will thank you.