Crayon’s CEO talks competitive enablement, win-loss, and their partnership with Clozd

Andrew: Hey, everyone, I'm Andrew Peterson, one of the co-founders of Clozd, and I am super excited to be joined today by Jonah, the CEO of Crayon. Jonah, thanks for joining us.

Jonah: So good to be here. And I just want to, upfront, thank you, Andrew, and the whole Clozd team for having me as part of Win-Loss Week. And thanks to all the Clozd fans and customers, and everybody who's out there tuning in. I'm just psyched to be here, psyched to do this, psyched to get into it with you here.

Awesome. Well, we're going to jump right in because we don't have a ton of time. We've been making these sessions in Win-Loss Week pretty bite-sized, keeping them to about 20 to 25 minutes. So, we've got a ton that we could cover. I'm super excited to talk to you today about your company, Crayon.

So, to kick things off, I would love to go back. We've known each other for a while, Jonah—years now—and I've never really sat down with you to hear the backstory of why you founded Crayon. So, take me back in time. Let's talk about when and why you started the company.

‍Yeah, psyched to do that. The thesis behind Crayon and why Crayon exists—and why we started the company—is that it is hyper-competitive out there. We live in this era of hyper-competition.

‍So, 94% of businesses say that their market is more competitive than it was last year. And that's been compounding for over a decade, to the point where the typical enterprise—it's like two-thirds of their sales pipeline is competitive. And for a lot of companies, it's 100%. For a lot of companies, every deal in your pipeline is competitive.

‍And those are your best deals. Competitive deals close at five times the rate of non-competitive deals. So, every CRO, every company, cares about this issue of competitive selling and how to compete. But most companies just aren't any darn good at it when it comes to competitive selling.

Gartner is actually doing this really interesting ongoing research where they ask enterprises to self-assess on different dimensions of their go-to-market. And competitive selling companies self-assess as a 1.7 out of 5.

Really?

Really low. And really, an outlier compared to the rest of go-to-market capabilities. And so, that's what we do. That's why we founded the company. What we do is solve the competitive selling problem through competitive enablement. We help our customers drive competitive win rates quarter-over-quarter. I don't know if that's the story you were hoping for, but that's why we exist—that's what we do.

Absolutely. So, probably some people listening to this session will be very familiar with the platform you guys provide in this competitive enablement space. Some people call it competitive battle card software, competitive intelligence software, but some people who are listening might be unfamiliar with what a platform like yours does. So, why don't you give us a quick overview of what your platform does to enable sales teams to compete more effectively in these competitive deals?

Yeah, awesome. Happy to do that. So, our mission is to drive competitive win rates up. There are three big use cases inside of our product that help deliver on that.

The first one is we essentially aggregate all of the signals that a company needs to get a picture of their competition. This includes things like news, press releases, online reviews, competitor websites, and more traditional sources.

But one of the things we’ve learned is that to really get a full picture of your competitors—where they're attacking you and how you can best respond—you’ve got to tap signals from buyers, sellers, and deals to complete the picture.

That’s why we integrate and partner with Clozd. It’s also why we do things like integrate with Gong and use LLMs to analyze all the competitive interactions between buyers and sellers from actual sales calls. A lot of times, those are the most actionable pieces.

So there's public signals—stuff in the public domain, people's websites, press releases, things like that—that you'll capture and pull in. But there are also signals that you can capture from what buyers are willing to tell you and what sales reps are learning in the deals. You've got to have tools and ways to capture those signals too.

Well said. Actually, you said it much more clearly than I did, so thank you, thank you for that. The first piece is: how do you collect and aggregate all of these signals?

The second bit is, now that you've got all these signals, we help customers connect the dots and synthesize all of that information. What you've got to produce out of that is winning plays for your sales team, and you need to do that quickly. You’ve got to do it in minutes, not months. It’s actually very similar to lead follow-up in your demand generation process—it’s all about speed. You get more out of your leads if you follow up quickly, and you get way more out of your competitive information if you very quickly transform that into sales plays and get it out to your sales team.

For example, at Crayon, we let you select from hundreds of different competitive signals. These could be win-loss interviews, seller interactions, or news articles. Then, you can use LLMs to very quickly produce sales plays from those signals.

Yeah, because there's probably so many signals coming in all the time, and you've got to have a way to package that up for sales reps so they can be effective and deploy that without having to go through all the signals themselves?

Exactly, right. Sellers are never going to do that. And you’ve got to do it fast.

The third piece we do is: once you have those competitive plays—you’ve pulled in all these signals, made sense of them, and created the competitive plays—we enable customers to deploy and track those plays at the point of the rep. This means proactively pushing plays to particular reps who are in competitive deal cycles and integrating those plays into the workflows and tools—the sales tech stack—that sellers are already using. It’s not just about creating battle cards and throwing battle cards at every problem. There are other formats, like a compete GPT assistant that sellers might want to use inside of Slack or Teams, which we make available.

So, that’s the third bit: Now that you’ve got these winning plays, how do you deploy and track those at the point of the rep?

Yeah, gotcha. Super interesting. So, I noticed recently, in looking at your space, your space is competitive. Because of the interplay between win-loss analysis as one of these signals and what your platform does, we get questions at Clozd about your product and how it might compare to other vendors in your space—what we'll refer to as the competitive enablement space.

I noticed that the Product Marketing Alliance or Association—I can't remember—the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA), as I know them, does a Pulse every year where they survey product marketers. They’ve got a very big association, and they ask about all the different vendors and tools that product marketers use and their preferences. From this, they develop rankings on the best products. You guys have won the Best Competitive Enablement Platform and a PMA Pulse Award for, I think, three years in a row now.

So, what makes your platform distinct, different, or better than some of the other platforms out there, in the eyes of these product marketers who are voting on it?

First of all, I love the question, so thank you. Anytime you want to ask me a question about us winning awards—

Yeah, there you go. Silver platter. Tell us about it.

Yeah, I appreciate it. But the thing I love about the PMA Pulse is that it’s not just market analysts forming opinions or anything like that. It’s exactly what you described, Andrew. It’s the actual product marketers and compete leaders—the actual practitioners of this stuff—who are part of that community and who vote. The Pulse is won by whoever gets the most votes, so we’re quite honored to win that.

Now, I obviously don’t know what’s in the heads of all the thousands of folks who voted for us in that process, but typically, when we ask our customers what they most appreciate about Crayon, it comes down to a couple of things.

The first one is our data and intelligence. We make big investments in the quality of our data and intelligence. For example, the way we track competitor websites, which is one of the most important intelligence sources out there, is something we’ve solved quite well. It’s a hard problem, and our competitors still really struggle to solve that problem.

Another example is how we use LLMs to pull competitive call snippets out of Gong. Again, this is a hard problem and one that only Crayon has solved.

‍The second thing we hear is around multi-channel enablement. You just can’t use battle cards as your only solution to enable sellers if you want them to adopt.

Probably every seller is different. Maybe some sellers love battle cards and use them all the time, but then there are sellers who probably don’t. They might just not be proactive enough to go and look at a battle card.

They’d much rather be able to quickly see what’s changed today that they need to be aware of before jumping on a call. Or they’d much rather, inside of Slack, be able to use a backslash command to ask the AI for specific compete assistance during a deal cycle in the moment. Those kinds of tools are where we’ve really excelled.

The other key point is that Crayon enables customers to shift compete to a much more proactive motion, which is something many of our customers tell us they appreciate. Compete has historically been pretty reactive in a lot of companies. It’s often been a discipline focused on looking at last quarter’s win rates, trends, and similar metrics. But the tools we provide allow compete teams to shift to a proactive approach, focusing on how to influence this quarter’s results and the current deals open in the pipeline. I’ll tell you—it’s way more fun to run a compete motion when you’re driving revenue, impacting sales metrics, gaining more resources, and building a bigger team. That shift toward a proactive motion really makes a difference.

Yeah, it’s interesting. As I listen to you talk about it, there’s a big emphasis in the way you describe compete, competitive enablement, and competitive intelligence as a way to enable sales reps to perform better in competitive deals. Historically, compete has been seen more like a research function, informing high-level strategic business decisions. But it sounds like, in this modern era of compete, it’s shifting more toward equipping sellers, in the moment, to succeed in competitive deals. Is that right?

100%. That’s a great observation, and it’s absolutely true. If you think about it, the pace of sales execution is hour-to-hour, day-to-day, in terms of what sellers need to understand and how they need to respond and execute. Historically, before companies like Clozd were doing what you do, before we were doing what we do, and before many compete and market intelligence teams had software to automate these processes, everything was very human-driven and research-driven.

When compete is human-driven and research-driven, it just takes way too long to generate insights that are relevant to sales execution. Not that it’s never relevant, but it’s hard to be consistently timely without the tools we have today. Now that sales tech stacks have matured, and we’re building software to support compete, there’s an incredible opportunity to solve this massive challenge around competitive selling. Competitive selling is a huge revenue opportunity for almost every business. So, it’s pretty exciting.

And how far are companies falling behind if they don't have real-time mechanisms that are automated to capture the voice of the buyer, to capture these signals from the public domain, websites, and their internal teams, and push and feed that to their sellers live in their deals? Companies are at such a disadvantage if they're slow to adopt these kinds of technologies.

So, let's talk a little bit about the interplay between win-loss analysis and competitive enablement. You see it every day—the way these buyer signals can influence and enrich a compete program because that perspective of the buyer is so important. What are you seeing on that front in terms of how competitive enablers are leveraging win-loss analysis as a key signal and using it to enhance their compete programs?

Yeah, totally. We do a big survey every year. We survey over a thousand companies about competitive intelligence. In the 2023 survey, win-loss was the second most important intelligence source. The number one source was seller intelligence—things that sellers learn in competitive situations and then provide as feedback. Number two was win-loss. Number three, I think, was competitor websites.

So, 84% of over a thousand companies that we surveyed said win-loss is a critical input to how they run their compete program. And that wasn't new. It's not like that just cropped up last year. It wasn't like, "Oh, that was a surprise." That wasn’t a surprise at all.

So, we've been looking at this and thinking, "Okay, it's very, very clear that our customers are going to need access to win-loss information that's super high quality, and they need access to that at scale." And that's what led us to your door, frankly, Andrew. We were like, "Okay, well, we want to build a partnership and integration with whoever leads this space and can deliver this kind of quality around win-loss at scale." Most of our customers view win-loss as a critical intelligence source that they must have for their compete program.

Love it. And we've seen that every day. Likewise, we view competitive enablement and the Crayon platform as an incredibly powerful, meaningful way to get these buyer insights in front of sellers in competitive situations so they can sell more effectively and win more deals. Because, like you guys, our mission is to help our clients win more business and competitive deals. We're capturing such valuable insights that could make sellers more effective, but we are always constantly looking for new, effective ways to drive those insights to sellers in those moments. It just made perfect sense to say, "Hey, Crayon is one of those tools. We need to find a way to push these insights through Crayon to those sellers." If anyone listening is curious, they can check out the Crayon-Clozd integration to learn more about how Clozd insights can flow seamlessly into the Crayon platform. Where I want to go—yeah, go ahead.

‍So well said. I was just going to jump in and say we're so aligned on what we're trying to solve for customers around win rate and competitive win rate. But I think the number one question in competitive enablement is always just what you articulated, Andrew. It's always: How do we enable sellers to win deals? When you have these competitive win-loss insights—insights from win-loss around a competitive dynamic that you need to respond to or can exploit—the question becomes, how do we make that actionable for sellers inside actual deal cycles? I know we only have 20 minutes, and you and I get pretty excited about this. We could probably talk about this all day. But really, to me, I agree with you. That's the crux of the value of the integration between Crayon and Clozd. You have these amazing insights that are hyper-actionable for your sellers. Now you’ve got them through Clozd, and you have this tactical channel through Crayon to deploy and track with your reps.

Yeah, love it. Where I want to go next real quick, Jonah, is looking into the future a little bit. From your vantage point, how do you see the competitive enablement space evolving over the next couple of years? We've come so far, but a lot of exciting things are on the horizon. So, where do you see things going?

Yeah, I love this question because there's so much innovation in the competitive enablement space. It's exciting, and it's an amazing time to be building this category together.

There are a couple of trends and predictions that I'll point to. The first one is probably somewhat obvious to most of the folks at Win-Loss Week who are already pretty advanced and sophisticated in their thinking on this. AI is just going to continue to get cheaper, better, and more central to the way that we compete. I think this means that we're going to get much faster and much better at connecting the dots across all these signals and turning them into actionable strategies for sales.

And I think what that means is that the compete discipline is just going to be elevated, because the need for compete folks to be kind of stuck in the back room, sifting through a bunch of data is much lower. The LLMs are going to be in the back room sifting through a bunch of data for us, and we're going to be much more driving sales execution and having an impact on the organization that we can measure. So, I think that's super positive. I think AI just is a tailwind for us that elevates this discipline and is very positive for anyone in the compete discipline.

The second one is around the sales tech stack, which I'm sure you're seeing too, Andrew, which is essentially ... so the prediction is that essentially every buyer-seller interaction is going to be recorded, and then inside those buyer-seller interactions is more rich competitive signal in real time than we've ever had before. And I think that also serves to elevate this discipline, and it dovetails with the first trend around AI. Because actually, if we didn't have LLMs emerging to help us synthesize and connect the dots across all this information, then the fact that every buyer-seller interaction is going to be recorded actually would've created a pretty substantial problem, just in terms of signal overwhelm and signal-to-noise.

But the fact that we have LLMs to help us do the analysis at the same time that the sales tech stack's maturing to provide this amazing buyer-seller interaction data is... Those are powerful. And I think when you put those together, what it leads to is just this shift from a reactive compete discipline to a proactive discipline. You've got this amazingly actionable real-time information to help you analyze that quickly. And so then what that means is, looking ahead, compete is much less 'here's what's happened in the past' and much more 'here's what happened last week that is going to help us win this week.' And so the future is bright.

Yeah, love it.

You won't be surprised to hear my perspective that the future is very bright for folks who are in this discipline.

So, if I could restate it this way or add on this way, would you agree with the statement that a compete pro, because of this technological enablement, is going to be able to focus much more of their time on being a proactive catalyst for change in their organization, as opposed to a back-office, manual-task-oriented research person that's just trying to find and compile all of this data?

Well said. Much more high impact, much more of a seat at the table, much more connected to sales execution, and much less just combing through a bunch of data in the back office.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, it's a great time then for people to be in compete, for people to be in sales; so many exciting changes are happening. This has been an awesome conversation, Jonah. I really appreciate it. Is there any last invitation or advice you have for anybody that might be interested in learning more about Crayon?

‍If you want to learn more about Crayon, we'd be overjoyed. There's tons of information on our website. Of course, you can go and engage there. There are courses you can take and lots of stuff you can download and that kind of thing. If you want to get a demo of Crayon, if you want to see how Crayon integrates with Clozd and how the two systems work together, please go to our website and request a demo. And when you talk with the Crayon team, definitely let them know if you're a Clozd customer, because we have a bunch of special incentives for Clozd customers who want to work with Crayon as well.