Crayon has surveyed competitive intelligence practitioners annually for the better part of a decade, and one finding from the 2024 edition deserves a permanent slot in every B2B software revenue meeting: for the average software company, 65% of sales opportunities are competitive. Two out of three deals, contested.
Hold that against the resourcing data in the same report. In late 2022, 34% of surveyed companies had three or more employees dedicated to CI. By the 2024 survey, that figure had fallen to 25%. While the contested share of pipeline sits near two thirds, three quarters of companies run the compete function with two or fewer people. In a large slice of the market, nobody owns it at all.
I have met this setup so many times it has become the default in my head: one product marketer with CI as a fraction of their week, a wiki last tended during an onboarding push, and a folder of battlecards with a modified date nobody wants to read aloud. The rest of this piece is the case that this mismatch, not rep skill and not product gaps, is the quiet tax on software win rates. Every number here comes from Crayon's published survey data, which is about as close to an industry census as this discipline gets.
How competitive is B2B software selling, really?
A competitive opportunity is one where the buyer is actively weighing at least one alternative vendor, so the deal is won or lost partly on comparison. By that definition the average software company fights for 65% of its pipeline, and the trend points up. In Crayon's 2026 survey, 57.5% of respondents said more of their deals are competitive than a year earlier; only 16% saw competition ease. 70% of teams now say at least half their opportunities are contested.
The same 2026 report carries the number that justifies the whole discipline: 49.6% of respondents saw their win rate against competitors increase over the prior year, against just 6.3% who saw it fall. Compete work, done properly, moves the one metric a CRO actually has to defend at the board.
Readiness has not kept pace with the stakes. Respondents in 2026 rated their reps' competitive readiness at 6.3 out of 10. Two years earlier, CI leaders scored their sales teams' effectiveness in competitive opportunities at 59 out of 100, even though 86% reported arming reps with competitive intel. Enablement is happening. It is not landing at the speed the market changes.
The typical CI team is small
And it got smaller. The 2024 report's dedicated-headcount question breaks down like this:
| Dedicated CI headcount | Share of companies (2024 survey) |
|---|---|
| Three or more people | 25% |
| One or two people | 39% |
| No one, or a portion of one person's time | 36% |
Budget tells the same story. 24% of teams reported zero CI budget excluding headcount, up from 18% the year before.
Now scale the workload against that headcount. The most common competitive set in the 2026 survey spans 11 to 30 tracked competitors. Take a hypothetical mid-size program watching 20 rivals, each shipping product updates, revising pricing pages, rotating executives, publishing case studies and analyst placements. Even at a conservative one meaningful change per competitor per month, that is 240 events a year landing on a fraction of one analyst's calendar. Nobody reads that fast alongside a day job, and the survey respondents know it: 58% say gathering competitive intel in a timely manner is a frequent challenge.
Why does the battlecard-and-wiki model break down?
The tooling most teams reach for is genuinely useful and structurally doomed at this staffing level. In the 2024 survey, 79% of CI pros enable sales teams with battlecards, and 59% maintain at least ten of them. Yet 58% say keeping battlecards and content updated is a struggle. The cadence data from 2026 shows the consequence: only 56% of teams share CI weekly or faster, and the teams that do report revenue impact at 79%, against 41% for those on a monthly-or-slower cycle.
The failure mode is decay. A battlecard is a snapshot. A wiki records what was true at the last refresh sprint, and refresh sprints happen when the one owner can carve out a week.
Picture an illustrative case. Your card on CrowdHaven, a fictional rival, says its mid tier lacks SAML SSO. True in March. In June, CrowdHaven ships SSO and its SDRs start opening calls with it. Your reps keep leading with a gap that closed a quarter ago, and each time it happens the buyer quietly discounts everything else on the card. Stale intelligence is worse than none, because it spends your credibility on the wrong fight.
What does a rep do with a card nobody has touched in eleven months? Stops opening it. Then the CI function exists on the org chart and nowhere else.
There is a second, subtler failure. Even a fresh card usually records the competitor's claim, not the evidence behind it. "Sentrix claims 99.99% uptime" and "Sentrix publishes an audited SLA attestation" are different facts, and most wikis flatten them into one bullet. A rep who cannot tell a verified capability from a landing-page promise will either overcorrect into timidity or repeat the competitor's marketing back to the buyer as settled truth.
What actually hyper-charges a one-person CI function
Not another template. Two shifts matter more than any battlecard format.
First, coverage has to run on a schedule rather than in sprints. The market does not batch its changes for your refresh week. If detection and collection still depend on a human remembering to check, the program's freshness is capped by the calendar of its busiest person.
Second, every claim needs a grade attached. A lean team's scarcest asset is credibility with sales, and credibility comes from being able to say, line by line, how well supported each statement is and when it was last confirmed.
Both shifts are wired into how OmniAxis works. OmniAxis re-checks the competitive set on a managed refresh schedule, weekly on the top plan, so coverage stops waiting on the one owner to find a spare week, and every profile carries its last-refresh date. Every capability claim comes with a grade for the evidence behind it, and a vendor's marketing-claim score sits beside its evidence score, so a rep can see at a glance where a competitor's story outruns its proof. The fractional CI analyst stops being the bottleneck on gathering and becomes what the role should always have been: the editor who decides what the intelligence means for this quarter's contested deals.
The market has largely voted on whether compete programs pay. 66% of teams now run a dedicated CI platform, roughly double the 2022 share. The open question inside each company is narrower and harder. Two thirds of your pipeline is contested. Either staff the fight like you believe that number, or automate the parts of it that no fractional analyst was ever going to keep fresh by hand.