Hands-On Competitive Intelligence with Battlecards Part 2: Three Keys to Leaving the Empty Bag at Home

As important as good battlecards are, shortcuts and other poor practices can leave sales teams unprepared as they go on the road to meet with customers. If your competitors are better prepared than you are, they are likely to win and leave your sales team wondering what happened. To keep that from happening, keep an eye on the following potential missteps when creating battlecards:

Don’t try to make one battlecard fit all eventualities. Most companies have multiple sales organizations, and inside sales, for example, has different needs than outside sales. A sales engineer may want deep-dive technical comparisons, where an account manager needs information about how the sales motion gets started, what the entry point is, and what customer roles to target with what messages.

Use templates with caution. If you must try to fit all battlecards into a common template, focus on building a template that is a superset of everything any battlecard might need to include. Then pare it down to meet the needs of each individual project.

Be cautious of just re-packaging positioning documents. Be brutally critical of the end product, making sure to identify weaknesses before the first time a battlecard is used on a sales call. Critique of a battlecard should be though of as a trial by fire, assuming the role of an audience that is very skeptical, or even hostile.

By Sean Campbell
By Scott Swigart