Competitive Intelligence Platform Crayon announced an integration with win/loss insights platform Primary Intelligence, marrying competitive and win/loss intelligence in a common platform.  The joint solution “helps teams better understand their competitors.”

“In today’s competitive climate, competitive intelligence and win-loss analysis are essential for B2B companies looking to increase win rates,” stated the firms.  “While win-loss interviews and surveys with buyers are filled with critical competitive insights, getting these insights updated into competitive intelligence deliverables, such as battlecards, has traditionally been a slow, manual process — until now.”

Win/loss analysis is conducted after deals close.  Primary Intelligence acts as a third-party collecting data concerning why they selected the vendor, who else was considered, their selection criteria, and how the vendor stacked up against other vendors across the selection criteria.  Historically, this was a human-driven service, making integrating the intelligence into the CRM challenging and restricting availability to the top B2B firms.

“Our approach in the last five years or so has been [asking] ‘How can we take the operational lift and automate as much as possible?” explained Primary Intelligence President Nick Siddoway to GZ Consulting.  “Now it’s a process that begins in Salesforce or whatever CRM you’re using.”

Primary Intelligence reaches out to decision-makers associated with an opportunity as soon as the deal closes.  Primary Intelligence sends an email from the sales rep requesting an online interview.  Automated surveys increase the number of buying committee members that can be interviewed before hitting budgetary caps and make the service available to a broader set of clients.

Survey response rates are between 25% and 35% due to the request coming from the sales rep.  Online surveys run ten to fifteen minutes and are dynamically adjusted based on the responses.

“We’ve taken the live interview model that we have honed over our entire existence and turned it into an online experience, where we call it an online interview.  But it really is something that a respondent can do in ten minutes on a mobile device.  There are some quantitative questions for them to record voice responses, which we then transcribe and…publish that data.  And then we still do the live interview.”

Primary Intelligence President Nick Siddoway

Furthermore, the firm has “democratized” win/loss research for “smaller organizations that can’t budget $1,000 an interview,” said Siddoway.

Primary Intelligence also analyzes Gong recordings during the sales window, providing both in-flight and post-mortem deal analysis.

Primary Intelligence’s TruVoice platform conducts surveys, online interviews, and live phone interviews.  In addition, buyer feedback is displayed in Crayon and available in battlecards, newsletters, and dashboards, providing “more depth, context, and insight from the buyer’s perspective.”

TruVoice can also be used for customer experience, competitive analysis, and churn analysis. It also offers an aggregated Performance Gaps view that displays strengths and weaknesses according to buyer prioritization.

Primary Intelligence battle cards, available with Crayon, rollup feedback on competitive deals.  Reps can see all related deals, outcomes, and competitive insights with quotes.  Siddoway described the battlecards as a frequently used feature by sales reps as they can find direct competitor-related quotes from previous deals and forward them to current prospects.

“Today, every deal is a competitive deal,” argued Siddoway.  “Through our 20+ years of win-loss analysis, we’ve seen the impact competitive intelligence has on win rate.  If you can provide your reps with that insight and help them have confidence when selling against competitors, it makes all the difference.  This integration is going to be game-changing for our mutual customers.”

“Competitive intelligence professionals and product marketers have historically struggled to include critical win-loss insights within the competitive assets their revenue teams use every day to win more business,” stated Crayon VP of Strategy Chris Pope.  “Due to this unique integration, our mutual customers will now be able to solve this problem in an automated way for the very first time.”

Siddoway noted that sales reps are often in the dark about why they lost a deal.  “They’re wrong more than half the time about why they really lost an opportunity.  So, we just stopped asking [them].”

Primary Intelligence offers a separate module for price.  Back when I did competitive intelligence, deal price was the reps’ favorite explanation for lost opportunities, so having third-party win/loss data with comparative prices and decision criteria helps with pricing analysis.

“Here’s your wins and losses, and here’s the percentage of time you are higher, lower, or similarly priced.  Every sales rep’s favorite reason for losing is price.  I love coming in with their data and saying, ‘Yeah, but you actually win half the time as the higher price option,’” said Siddoway.

Furthermore, by helping differentiate offerings, vendor offerings become less price sensitive.  Crayon and Primary Intelligence highlight competitor offerings’ relative strengths and weaknesses, providing improved positioning for sales and marketing teams.

Primary Intelligence also provides views at the rep level, providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of reps and where they would benefit from coaching.

Last June, Crayon announced a partnership with Gong to deliver a daily log of competitive mentions to sales reps, providing them with battlecard and call transcript links that help them write follow-on messaging that parries competitive statements. “Product marketers and competitive intelligence professionals dedicate a tremendous amount of time ensuring sales reps are equipped with the most up-to-date competitive and market intelligence,” stated Crayon CPO Erica Jenkins.  “However, despite these efforts, there’s still friction around the adoption and use of these enablement materials.  The integration between Crayon and Gong gets competitive intel into an account executive’s hands quickly and easily, drastically improving competitive positioning for reps to level up their game.”