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.
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HG Insights Platform
Score 4.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
The HG Insights platform provides a view into global industries, markets, and companies allowing users to identify the most valuable opportunities and build strategies to maximize revenue and accelerate growth.
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.
The HG Insights Platform has helped us with GTM planning as we segment accounts amongst our verticals. There are verticals with specific tech stacks that we would like to prioritize, and HG Insights allows us to do that. The account scoring allows us to prioritize outreach efforts. We are able to use the technographics to weigh scoring and assign those accounts out accordingly.
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.
Crayon is super easy to use - regardless of level in the organization. As a power user, it's easy to curate the most important information about competitors and then distribute it out to leadership and other teams so that they can stay informed on the most important competitor trends. It allows me to share out information via email or through Slack and our competitive intel channel
It’s very easy to use, and the team is very responsive and friendly to work with. The information is unique and usable and can complement some of the data we get from call recordings. The integration with Salesforce is easy to implement and offers good insights into our database.
The core features of all of these are essentially the same. Crayon Impact (the win/loss side) is what won us over compared to the other tools that we demoed.
We have evaluated all of these vendors and some are used in tangent with the HG Insights Platform. We found that for technographic data in particular HG gave the best coverage, but a few of these do help "fill the gaps" when occasion calls. We also use multiple intent engines to help verify trends rather than being reliant on one platform. Other vendors also offer contact data as well which is integral for our outbound marketing campaigns which HG does not cover. Overall HG does perhaps stack up better than some of these however, it is only one source of data and using multiple is necessary to give a reliable result.
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.
I don't massively get involved in financial matters, but the propensity models we use internally to help run our campaigns are certainly a big factor when our sales people approach our clients.
Every campaign sold now comes with a flat data fee for us to run and use a propensity model for the activity we complete on behalf of our clients.
Whilst the client will never see the raw data behind the model (of which HG does play a part along with our other data sources) they are briefed on the methodology and reasoning behind them.
