How eSkill brought competitive intelligence to a lean marketing team

“Almost like having another team member who proactively tells us what’s going on in the landscape of the industry.” — Chris Blomquist, Director of Demand Generation, eSkill

When you’re a five-person marketing team competing against the biggest names in pre-employment testing, every hour spent manually checking competitor websites is an hour stolen from work that actually moves pipeline. That was the math facing Chris Blomquist, Director of Demand Generation at eSkill — until competitive intelligence stopped being a side-of-desk chore and became something his marketing team could actually keep up with.

About eSkill

eSkill has been the market leader in pre-employment testing and skills assessment since 2003. The platform offers more than 800 job-based tests, behavioral assessments, and simulations that plug into the ATS, LMS, and HR systems hiring teams already use. Based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, eSkill has tested millions of candidates for 4,000+ organizations including FedEx, ADP, KPMG, Kaiser Permanente, and Coca-Cola. The category is mature and the competitive set is crowded — legacy assessment vendors on one side, a wave of well-funded AI-native entrants on the other.

The competitive intelligence gap

eSkill’s marketing org runs lean: three full-time employees and two contractors. With that headcount, ownership of competitive tracking kept falling through the cracks.

"For us it’s bandwidth. We’re a smaller marketing team — three full-time and then two contract employees. Nobody really owned keeping up with competitors ... It was a struggle for us to stay on top of competitive insights. We have a lot of competitors in a crowded space, so it would manually be us going, checking competitors’ websites, listening to recorded meetings to understand what our competitors were doing regarding strategy or price."

The workaround was slow. Someone would check competitor sites one at a time. Sales-call recordings were combed through for whatever competitive intel happened to come up. By the time a strategic shift surfaced, it had usually been live for weeks — and in a category where well-funded competitors are pushing new positioning and pricing at speed, weeks-late insight isn’t insight.

Why eSkill chose KeepTabz

What eSkill needed wasn’t another dashboard. It was the equivalent of a teammate who watches every competitor, scores what actually matters, and surfaces it before the next standup. KeepTabz fit that brief.

KeepTabz’s always-on monitoring layer — website changes, news, social, ads, reviews, and SEO — was built to do the work nobody on Chris’s team had time for. KeepTabz takes a snapshot of every important page on every tracked competitor and re-checks them continuously, flagging meaningful changes the moment they appear. An AI agent scores each update for competitive importance and rolls the highest-impact moves into a daily digest, so the team sees what matters and skips the noise.

It helps us solve the problem of staying nimble. Some of our competitors have a lot of funding. They’re very big. They’re moving very quickly. So if we can get some insight on what direction they’re going to go in, we can be proactive about beating them there or deciding to fill a different need.

How eSkill uses KeepTabz today

KeepTabz has become a daily habit. “I look at it probably daily to stay informed on what our competitors are doing,” Chris said. The workflow looks something like this:

• Scan the KeepTabz dashboard each morning for the highest-impact moves across the tracked competitor set
• Drill into website-change alerts when a competitor shifts messaging, pricing, or product positioning
• Feed competitor signals into product, messaging, and sales-enablement conversations the same day they surface
• Loop directly with the KeepTabz team on feature feedback as new workflows emerge

The net effect is that a team of five operates with the situational awareness of a team twice its size — without adding a single headcount.

The results

The clearest example came when KeepTabz caught a major messaging shift at eSkill’s biggest competitor.

We noticed that our biggest competitor actually switched their language on their homepage from finding employees who have the skills required to finding AI-native skills, which shows a huge shift from that company to completely center their business around testing for AI skills.

The shift didn’t stick — the competitor reverted within a couple of weeks. But eSkill had a front-row seat before most of the market noticed it had happened. Chris’s read was decisive: “We realized pretty quickly that, hey, that’s a lane they’re going to swim in. Good luck. We’re going to focus elsewhere.”

Concretely:

• Caught a major positioning test at the largest competitor in the category — and used the data to make a deliberate “we’re going elsewhere” call before investing campaign budget against it
• Cut competitor research from a fire drill to a daily habit for the Director of Demand Generation
• Recovered marketing bandwidth equivalent to adding a teammate dedicated to competitive monitoring — without growing headcount
• Built a tight feedback loop with the KeepTabz team, shaping new features in real time

For a five-person team, that’s the difference between learning a competitor’s move from a lost deal and learning it the morning they ship it.

“KeepTabz is almost like having another team member who proactively tells us what’s going on in the landscape of the industry.”

— Chris Blomquist, Director of Demand Generation, eSkill

What’s next

Chris and the eSkill team are continuing to push KeepTabz on what they need most — surfacing more nuanced patterns across the competitive set and tightening the loop between competitor intel and campaign execution. The feedback loop with the founder has been a big part of why the product keeps working for a team of their shape.

KeepTabz has been very receptive to our feedback and made a product that works splendidly for us. It’s huge for us to get what we need and make those improvements and feel like we’re actually being heard as a client.

‍See how KeepTabz can give your marketing team the situational awareness of a much larger one. Start a 14-day free trial or book a demo.