Have you ever found yourself competing against industry giants with more brand recognition and resources, wondering how your sales team can stack up? That was the challenge we faced at The Standard. 

As an insurance company competing against heavyweights like Prudential, MetLife, and Guardian, we knew we had to equip our sales teams with more than just intuition – we needed solid, actionable insights about our competitors to give us an edge.

As the Senior Director of Sales Enablement, I found myself tasked with figuring out how to best support our sellers in this high-stakes game. We needed to know what our competitors were offering, where we were strong, and where we had vulnerabilities. But the reality was, our competitive intelligence efforts were scattered and manual. 

The solution? A comprehensive competitive intelligence program powered by AI, which would change the way we approach competition.

So in this article, I’ll walk you through the key steps of how we built our competitive intelligence program – what we learned, the tools we used, and how it has transformed the way we arm our sales teams. 

Let’s dive in.

The need for competitive intelligence

In the world of insurance, especially when you're competing for large clients, knowing what your competitors are up to is crucial. Our competitors were already established and had more brand recognition.

We had to find a way to position ourselves more effectively. How could we compete with these giants when we didn’t have the same level of visibility or brand presence? How could we prepare our sales teams to go into those high-stakes situations and succeed when they didn’t have the full picture of what our competitors were offering?

That’s when I realized the importance of competitive intelligence. I transitioned from being a seller myself to stepping into the enablement role, which was a huge shift. But my experience as a seller informed my understanding of what was needed to support our sales teams. 

We needed data – reliable, up-to-date, actionable insights on who we were competing against, what they were offering, and where we could win.

1. Building the business case for an AI-powered platform

To build a competitive intelligence program that was going to make a difference, I knew we needed a more efficient, tech-driven solution. I started by researching competitive intelligence platforms. One of the vendors that reached out to me was Crayon, an AI-powered platform, and I was intrigued. But before we made any decisions, I had to build the case for this investment.

We had to demonstrate the value of an AI-powered platform, which meant proving that it would not only save us time but also improve the accuracy and relevance of the insights we were providing to our sales teams.

I came across a report from Crayon that highlighted just how much time companies were spending on manual competitive intelligence activities. In fact, 61% of companies still didn’t have a competitive intelligence platform in place, meaning they were manually gathering and analyzing data. 

This resonated with me because it confirmed what we were experiencing at The Standard. We were spending so much time gathering data manually, and yet we weren’t able to use it as effectively as we could.

This data became the cornerstone of our business case. We could clearly show that investing in an AI platform would reduce the time spent gathering data and allow us to deliver more relevant and timely insights to our sales teams.

Competitive intelligence training exercise
A hands-on, low-stakes environment where team members can practice handling competitive scenarios
Sales Enablement CollectiveJames Shaw