Hands-On Competitive Intelligence with Battlecards Part 3: Three Steps to Lock and Load Before Going on the Road

Everyone needs to be able to think on their feet, but that’s no substitute for preparing the sales team ahead of time. A well-designed set of battlecards is a prerequisite for many sales teams, and no sales team should go on the road without it. As your competitive intelligence team assembles its next set of battlecards, make sure you consider the following best practices:

Participate in the conversation, first-hand. Pursue being able to go along on a sales call or two, if possible, to get a first-hand idea of how the process goes. Also spend some time getting exposure to customer experience with the competitor’s product, through means such as support forums, case studies, and hands on benchmarking.

Adopt the personas of both sales and the customer. Before you even start writing the material that will go into a battlecard, you must be able to answer with confidence the question, “what are the top five customer concerns and complaints related to this class of product?”

Be careful how you share it. If you provide a battlecard to a strategic partner, you should assume that it will find its way onto the web, becoming public information. It’s a good idea to create a “partnerized” version of the battlecard before sharing it, to avoid providing ammunition your competitors can use against you.

By Sean Campbell
By Scott Swigart