10-06-2025
Why sales teams are turning to this Canadian firm for a competitive edge
When a competitor falsely claimed that the Huntress cybersecurity solution lacked a specific feature – a statement that could have turned off prospective clients – the U.S.-based company turned to Vancouver-based Klue Labs Inc. for help.
Klue's AI-powered competitive intelligence platform helped Huntress's sales team quickly discover and counter the misinformation. Uncovering the false claim also helped Huntress highlight its work and secure an upcoming deal.
Knowing what the competition is up to is essential in the rapidly evolving cybersecurity sector.
'I couldn't do my job without it,' Dustin Ray, head of competitive and market intelligence at Huntress, says of the Klue platform that helps businesses collect, analyze and share competitive and market intelligence. Mr. Ray says 90 per cent of his sales team engages with the Klue platform weekly.
In business-to-business sales, understanding your competitor's positioning is crucial, says Klue co-founder and chief executive officer Jason Smith, using a car analogy to make his point.
'If you're thinking, 'Do I buy a Toyota or an Audi?', you've got a certain perception of each,' Mr. Smith says.
He argues that a savvy salesperson doesn't need to name the competitor. Instead, they highlight unique features that set their product apart.
For instance, emphasizing advanced battery technology without directly referencing Toyota can subtly counter the competitor's strengths, allowing the prospect to perceive the distinction. The approach requires a deep understanding of the competitor's offerings and the ability to pivot the conversation effectively.
'It's about understanding why you're better than somebody else... and then figuring out how to talk around that in an elegant way that is authentic to your business,' says Mr. Smith, who founded Klue in 2015 with Sarathy Naicker.
He says Klue's solutions make it easier for sales teams to have more meaningful conversations with potential customers by turning heaps of data into clear, actionable insights. Instead of getting bogged down in endless spreadsheets or outdated documents, reps get real-time, digestible information that helps them highlight what makes their product stand out.
The approach boosts confidence and allows teams to address concerns and reinforce their product's value without resorting to negative comparisons.
'There's this big corpus of information about your competitors,' Mr. Smith says. 'How do we harness it? How do we collect it? How do we pull it down into something that is actually going to be digestible at a human scale?'
To help with the heavy lifting, Klue's platform processes millions of data points daily, including news articles, blog posts, and website updates. It then takes the raw data, chooses the most pertinent points, has a human – their product marketer – help contextualize the material and then delivers a succinct, deep dive into the competition.
'Companies like ours are designed to find the right quality content and the right trade-offs and the weighting and the wrappers around it, the workflows, so that the human can add the right context and fix it to produce a really great output, not just fluff,' Mr. Smith says. 'And that's the difference.'
It's all part of how AI is modernizing workflows by enhancing areas like marketing automation, distilling vast quantities of information and streamlining administrative tasks, explains Jenny Yang, senior advisor at MaRS Enterprise.
'It may not be that you need to use AI in your core business, but there are many ancillary areas of your business where AI could help,' says Ms. Yang, adding that by automating repetitive tasks, AI frees employees to focus on strategic initiatives, thereby boosting efficiency and innovation.
She also warns that failing to adopt AI tools means risking inefficiency and falling behind the competition.
'If you're not using it, then you're wasting your time on those mundane tasks when your competitors are focusing that time on their core business,' Ms. Yang says. 'If you're a farmer who used to till your field by hand, but now someone else is using a tractor or a machine, you need to adjust or you're going to get left behind.'
Even within Klue's own business, adopting its tech has drastically reduced tedious tasks for its employees, saving saving 150 hours of tedious work per month last quarter, Mr. Smith says.
He believes humans excel when engaging in creative and strategic thinking and interacting with other people, not in repetitive tasks that 'sap our energy' and are 'not what we're designed for,' he says.
'Every series of new innovations that we've come up with in tech has just led to more creativity,' Mr. Smith says. 'And I'm confident that that's what's going to happen next.'
