Clozd: 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, for 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, 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 2/3 of their sales pipeline is competitive. And for a lot of companies, it's a 100%. For a lot of companies, it's 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 do we compete? But most companies just aren't any darn good at it when it comes to competitive selling. So, 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 five.

Really?

Really low. 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. That's what we do is solve the competitive selling problem through competitive enablement. 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 drive competitive win rates up. There's three big use cases inside of our product that we do to deliver on that. So the first one is we essentially aggregate all of the signals that a company needs to get a picture of their competition. So it's all the things like news and press releases and online reviews and competitor websites in more traditional sources.

But one of the things that we've learned is that to really get a full picture of your competitors and where they're attacking you and how you can best respond and attack is you've got to tap signals from buyers, sellers and deals to complete the picture. And so, obviously, that's why we integrate and partner with Clozd. It's also why we do things like we integrate with Gong and we use LLMs to analyze all the competitive interactions between buyers and sellers from actual sales calls. And a lot of times, that's the most actionable pieces there.

So there's public signals, stuff on 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, what sales reps are learning in the deals, and you've got to have tools and ways to capture those signals too.

Well said. Actually, said much more clearly than what I said, so thank you, thank you for that. That's the first piece is how do you collect and aggregate all of these signals?

So then, the second bit is, now that you've got all these signals, we help customers connect the dots basically and synthesize all of that information. Because what you've got to produce out of that is winning plays for your sales team, and you've got to do that quickly. You've got to do that in minutes and not have that take months. And it's actually very much like lead follow-up in your demand gen process where it's all about speed. Where you get more out of your leads if you follow up quickly, you get way more out of your compete information if you very quickly transform that into sales plays and get that out to your sales team.

So that's the second piece, for example, at Crayon, we let you select hundreds of different competitive signals, could be win-loss interviews or seller interactions or news articles, and then use LLMs to very, very quickly produce sales plays out of those things.

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 where 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 got to do it fast.

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

So, that's that third bit is now 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 and 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 you might compare to other vendors in your space that 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, I know them as, they do a Pulse every year where they ask the product marketers, they've got a very big association, they survey them and ask about all the different vendors and tools that they use and what their preferences are and they develop rankings on the best products. And 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 is it that makes your platform distinct, different, better than some of the other platforms that are out there in the eyes of these product marketers that are users that are voting on it?

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

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

Yeah, I appreciate it. But the thing that I love about the PMA Pulse is that it's not just market analysts forming opinions and that kind of thing. It's just 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 who vote and the Pulse is won by whoever gets the most votes. And 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 the things that typically when we ask our customers what they most appreciate about Crayon, it's 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 the competitor websites, which is one of the most important intelligence sources out there. That's something that's a hard problem. We've solved it quite well. Our competitors really still struggle to solve that problem.

Another example is how we use LLMs to pull competitive call snippets out of Gong is again, just a hard problem. It's a problem that only Crayon has solved there. Second thing we hear is around multi-channel enablement. You just can't use battle cards as your only solution to enabling sellers if you want them to adopt.

Probably every seller is different. Maybe some seller loves battle cards and goes in them all the time, but then there's sellers that they probably don't, they probably just aren't proactive enough to go and look at a battle card.

They'd much rather be able to quickly see what's changed today that I need to be aware of before I jump on a call. Or they'd much rather, inside of Slack, be able to do a backslash command and ask the AI for some specific compete assistance inside of a deal cycle in the moment. So, those kinds of things are places where we've excelled.

The other one is Crayon enables customers to shift compete to a much more proactive motion, which is something that a lot of our customers tell us that they appreciate. Compete has historically been pretty reactive inside of a lot of companies. It's been a discipline that often is looking at last quarter's win rates, looking at last quarter's trends and those sorts of things. But a lot of the tooling that we provide enables these compete teams to shift to a much more proactive, much more about how do we influence this quarter's results and the current deals that are open in our pipeline. And I'll tell you, it's way more fun to run a compete motion when you're driving revenue and having an impact on those sales metrics and getting more resources and having a bigger team, which usually goes hand in hand with the shift toward a proactive motion there.

Yeah, it's interesting. As I listen to you talk about it, there's a big emphasis in the way you talk about compete, competitive enablement, competitive intelligence around enabling sales reps to perform at a higher level in the competitive deals against competitors. Whereas maybe historically, compete is thought about as kind of a research function where you're just trying to inform high level strategic business decisions, but it sounds like, in this modern era of compete, it's shifting more to be about how do we equip our sellers, in the moment, to succeed when they're in a competitive deal. Is that right?

100%. That's a great observation and it's 100% true. And if you just think about the pace of sales execution is hour to hour, day to day in terms of what you need to understand and how sellers need to respond and execute. But historically, before Clozd was doing what you do and before we were doing what we do, and before a lot of these compete teams and market intelligence teams had software to help them automate a lot of this, they were really in a human driven, research driven mode of operation. And when you're human driven, when you're research driven and how you do compete just takes way too long for you to generate insight to be relevant inside of sales execution.

Not that it's never relevant, but you could never be relevant without the tooling we have today to really influence sales results. So now that we have this, now that the sales tech stack's matured and we're doing what we do in building this software stack to support compete, now there's this huge opportunity to finally solve this problem around competitive selling, which is such a massive 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 voice of the buyer, to capture these signals from the public domain and websites and from their internal teams and push and feed that to their sellers live in their deals. Companies are at such a disadvantage if they're being slow to adopt these kinds of technologies.

So, let's talk a little bit about the interplay between win-loss analysis and competitive enablement because 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. So, what are you guys seeing on that front in terms of how competitive enablers are leveraging win-loss analysis as a key signal and using that to enrich their compete programs?

Yeah, totally. So, we do a big survey every year. We survey over a thousand companies around competitive. In the 2023 survey, win-loss was the number two most important intelligence source. So number one was seller intelligence was things that my sellers are learning in competitive situations that they feedback. Number two was win-loss. Okay. Then number three I think was the competitor websites.

So, 84% of over a thousand companies that we surveyed said win-loss is 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, very, very clear that our customers are going to need access to win-loss information that's super high quality, 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 who can deliver at scale this kind of quality around win-loss. But I think most of our customers, the way that they look at win-loss is just an intelligence source that's critical that they have to have coming into their compete program.

Love it. And we've seen that every day. And likewise, we view competitive enablement and the Crayon platform as an incredibly powerful, meaningful way to get these buyer insights in front of the sellers in those competitive situations to where they can sell more effectively and win more deals. Because like you guys, our mission is to help our clients win more business and win more competitive deals. And we're capturing such valuable insight that could make sellers more effective, but we are always constantly looking for new effective means to drive those insights to those sellers in those moments. And 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." And so if anybody listening is curious, they can obviously check out the Crayon Clozd integration and 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 just articulated, Andrew. It's always how do we enable sellers to win deals? And so when you have these competitive win-loss insights, you have this insight from Win-loss around a competitive dynamic that you need to respond to or that you can exploit, then the question becomes how do we make that actionable for sellers inside of actual deal cycles that's there? I know we only have 20 minutes, you and I get pretty excited about this point, we could probably talk about this all day, but it's really, to me, I agree with you. That's the crux of the value of the integration between Crayon and Clozd is you have these amazing insights that are hyper actionable for your sellers. And now you've got that through Clozd, and you've got this tactical channel through Crayon that you can use 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. So 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, there's so much in the competitive enablement space that's exciting and such an amazing time to be building this category together. But there's a couple of trends and predictions that I'll point to. First one is probably somewhat obvious to most of the folks at win-loss week who are already pretty advanced, sophisticated in their thinking on this. But that's that AI is just going to continue to get cheaper, it's going to continue to get better, it's going to continue to become more and more central to the way that we do compete. And I think what that means is that we are 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 a super positive. I think AI just is a tailwind for us that elevates this discipline and very positive for anyone in the compete discipline there. So, that's the first one.

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 there.

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 there. 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 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.

Love it. Yeah.

You won't be surprised to hear my perspective is 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 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 happening. This has been an awesome conversation, Jonah. Really appreciate it. Is there any last invitation or advice for 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's 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.

Awesome. Perfect. Thanks so much for the conversation today, Jonah.

All right, thanks Andrew. Thanks for having me.

See you.