If you’re a B2B marketer, product marketer, or sales enablement lead, you’ve probably heard of Crayon. It promises to help you track competitors and win more deals. But let’s be real—most software platforms are long on features and short on what actually matters. If you want to avoid shelfware and focus on what’ll actually help you launch, sell, and win, this guide’s for you.
Who Should Care About Crayon?
Crayon isn’t for everyone. If you’re a team of two, or you’re in a market with no real competition, you can probably stop reading. But if you’re in a crowded B2B space—think SaaS, fintech, or enterprise IT—where the difference between winning and losing is razor-thin, then getting competitive intelligence right can make a real difference.
This article breaks down what to look for in Crayon, what’s fluff, and how to avoid common traps that waste time and money.
1. Automated Competitive Intelligence: The Basics (and the Pitfalls)
What matters: The core reason to buy Crayon is to get a real-time feed of what your competitors are up to—pricing changes, product launches, new messaging, customer wins, and so on. The platform promises to surface all this automatically.
- Look for: Reliable, frequent updates from a wide range of sources (websites, social, press releases, review sites).
- Ignore: Features that just regurgitate Google Alerts or flood you with irrelevant info.
Honest take: Crayon’s automation is solid, but it’s not magic. You’ll still need someone to review, curate, and make sense of the data. If you expect “push-button insights,” you’ll be disappointed. Treat it as a force multiplier for a real person, not a replacement.
Pro tip: Test the sources on a few of your key competitors. If you get a lot of junk or miss big events, that’s a red flag.
2. Battlecards That Actually Get Used
What matters: The promise of battlecards is huge—quick, actionable summaries your sales team can use to handle objections and beat competitors. The reality: Most battlecards end up ignored or out of date.
- Look for: Battlecards that are easy to update, share, and access right from your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot). Bonus if you can see if sales reps are actually using them.
- Ignore: Over-designed, one-size-fits-all templates. If it takes a designer to update, it’ll never happen.
Honest take: Crayon’s battlecard builder is straightforward and integrates with major CRMs, which is a win. But you still need a process for keeping the cards fresh. The tool won’t do the thinking for you.
Pro tip: Ask your sales team what info they actually use. Build cards for top 3-5 competitors, not 20.
3. Alerts and Notifications: Signal vs. Noise
What matters: Getting notified when something important happens—not every time a competitor posts a blog.
- Look for: Customizable alerts by competitor, topic, or trigger. You want to be able to filter out the noise and focus on what matters to your products and deals.
- Ignore: Platforms that just blast every update to everyone, or don’t let you fine-tune notifications.
Honest take: Crayon gives a lot of control over what triggers alerts, but you’ll need to spend time upfront tuning it. Out of the box, it can be noisy.
Pro tip: Start with just your primary competitors and biggest deal-breaker topics (pricing page changes, new features). Expand later.
4. Collaboration and Sharing: If No One Sees It, It Didn’t Happen
What matters: You want your intel to get in front of the people who need it—sales, marketing, execs—without extra steps.
- Look for: Integrations with Slack, email, CRM, and the ability to tag and assign insights to specific teams or people.
- Ignore: Platforms that assume everyone will log in daily. They won’t.
Honest take: Crayon does a good job here—Slack and email digests are handy. But don’t expect everyone to suddenly “become competitive experts.” Drive adoption by pushing only the most relevant stuff to the right people.
Pro tip: Set up a regular digest for leadership and a separate feed for front-line sales. Don’t overwhelm folks with trivia.
5. Analytics and Reporting: Prove It’s Working
What matters: You need to know if the investment is paying off—are win rates improving? Are reps actually using the insights?
- Look for: Usage stats, engagement tracking (who’s reading battlecards, what gets shared), and links to CRM outcomes if possible.
- Ignore: Vanity metrics—number of “insights captured” means nothing if no one acts on them.
Honest take: Crayon’s analytics are better than most, but you’ll still be guessing about ROI unless you connect usage to sales outcomes. If you can’t do that, at least track adoption and engagement.
Pro tip: Run a short survey with your sales team after a few months. If they say the intel helped close deals, that’s real value—even if you don’t have perfect attribution.
6. Customization and Scalability: Don’t Box Yourself In
What matters: Your competitive landscape will change. You need to tweak categories, add new competitors, or change alert rules without calling support.
- Look for: Self-serve controls for adding competitors, editing sources, and customizing dashboards.
- Ignore: Rigid setups that require “implementation projects” for simple changes.
Honest take: Crayon is flexible, but like any enterprise tool, the more you customize, the more you own the maintenance. Start simple and iterate. Don’t overbuild on day one.
Pro tip: Assign a part-time “owner” for Crayon—someone who can keep things tidy, update battlecards, and adjust alerts as things change.
7. Data Quality and Coverage: Trust, but Verify
What matters: You can’t make decisions on bad intel. If Crayon misses key updates, or pulls in irrelevant noise, it’s worse than useless.
- Look for: Transparent sourcing (where is the data coming from?), options to add your own sources, and tools to flag irrelevant or low-quality content.
- Ignore: Vague claims about “AI-powered insights” without specifics.
Honest take: No platform is perfect. You’ll need to sanity-check the feed, especially early on. Spot-check your biggest competitors monthly.
Pro tip: Have a “kill list” of sources you don’t care about—block them early to keep things clean.
8. Integrations: Meet People Where They Work
What matters: Competitive intel is only useful if it shows up in the tools your team already lives in.
- Look for: Direct integrations with your CRM, Slack, email, and maybe your wiki (Confluence, Notion, etc.).
- Ignore: Integrations that require tons of IT work or only support obscure platforms.
Honest take: Crayon covers most of the bases, but double-check that your stack is supported. Don’t underestimate how much adoption improves when battlecards show up in Salesforce, not buried in another tool.
Pro tip: Pilot with the sales team’s favorite channel (usually Slack or CRM). If you get traction there, expand.
What to Skip (Unless You’re a Fortune 500)
You’ll see features like “market landscape mapping,” “AI-powered win/loss analysis,” and “executive dashboards.” Honestly, most B2B teams don’t need these to get value from competitive intel. They sound nice in demos, but they rarely drive action.
- If you don’t have a dedicated competitive intelligence analyst, skip the advanced analytics.
- Don’t get dazzled by visualizations—focus on the basics: better intel, faster, to the people who need it.
Keep It Simple, Iterate Fast
Crayon can be a real asset for B2B go-to-market teams—but only if you keep your setup simple, focus on a handful of high-impact features, and actually use what you build. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start with your top competitors, build a few battlecards, and get feedback from sales. Tweak as you go.
The biggest trap is thinking the tool will do the work for you. It won’t. But if you treat Crayon as a multiplier for smart people, rather than a magic bullet, you’ll be ahead of most teams. Start small, ship fast, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of done.