Guide to Creating Competitor Battlecards

Published on: 2024-11-07

What is a battlecard?

A battlecard is an enablement tool that helps sales teams to address competitive challenges during any stage of the sales process. Competitor battlecards are usually developed by the competitive intelligence (CI) team or created collaboratively by sales enablement, CI, and product marketing teams.

Battlecards are visually straightforward to ensure quick and easy reference. They serve as both a quick reference during sales calls and a study guide for preparation, especially when onboarding new employees.

Sales battlecards are typically high level and are geared to arm sales with key talking points or positioning context. For this reason, they usually will not include detailed information such as competitor profiles or feature by feature comparisons.

Why do battlecards matter

One of the factors that contributes most to a sales person's success is being able to overcome objections raised by competitive obstacles. Battlecards help level the playing field, equipping every salesperson, from the less to the most experienced, with the tools to address competition.

A well-maintained battlecard can increase competitive win rates by 50% or more. This is because most companies don't properly utilize the value of battlecards. Often they are outdated, hard to digest, don't have accurate information, or aren't useful for other reasons. Creating and maintaining high-quality battlecards isn't easy, but the impact on performance can yield material results.

Preparing to create battlecards

Before you create new battlecards, you should go through a few preparatory steps. First, figure out which competitors you want to focus on. The sales team should be able to provide a list of the top three competitors they are seeing most frequently in deals, or those they are losing the most frequently to.

See if you have any existing competitive information such as past slides or feature comparisons. If not then your sales team is often a good source of data, as customers frequently share what they like about other competitors. They may even be able to share information such as pricing and competitor slide decks.

You should also make sure you can accurately track which competitors are in your deals and your competitive win rate. At a minimum you should add fields in your CRM to track the competitor(s) in each deal. You should also add a "loss reason" field to help you identify which deals were specifically lost to a competitor.

Researching battlecard material

The first place to research competitors is on their websites, especially their pages on their products and blog posts or press releases explaining the significance of new product releases. Content such as case studies can educate you on a competitor's own differentiators that they will emphasize in sales engagements. It can also be useful to use sites like archive.org to track website changes over time, to get a sense of how their product strategy is evolving.

Review platforms like G2, Trustpilot, and Capterra are valuable resources for gathering competitive intelligence. Both positive and negative reviews can tell you a lot about competitors' strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses, in particular, can be leveraged effectively and make excellent content for battlecards. These reviews may also occasionally provide useful details about pricing and packaging strategies.

Online forums like Reddit and Quora are great sources of competitive intelligence. These platforms often host industry-specific communities where customers discuss their experiences more openly than on review sites or in case studies. Search for mentions of your competitors on these forums, as the straightforward feedback can provide valuable insights.

Creating battlecards

You now have a lot of information and need to distill it so it is effective and not overwhelming for sales to consume. High level information like number of employees, market categories, etc. is interesting but your sales team knows this already so don't go into too much detail.

"Kill shots" are lists of key talking points that help to overcome customer objections about competitors, especially early in sales conversations. They can help to position competitors so their credibility is in question with customers.

"Landmines" are questions or topics that the sales team needs to stay away from, because they could put your company in a disadvantage in sales conversations. Battlecards should identify landmines and provide guidance on how to steer the discussion back to your company's strengths.

Success stories about beating out a competitor are valuable but keep them focused on what specific strategies the sales team employed to be successful. These stories are especially helpful when the customer previously bought from the competitor but moved over to your company.

Battlecards should be no more than one page and easy to read. Create a highly visual format where information is divided into clearly labeled sections. Text should be expressed in bullet form for quick consumption. Key kill shots and landmines should be clearly labeled at positioned at the top of the battlecard.

Sales enablement with battlecards

The job isn't done when the battlecard is created. In order to be effective, battlecards must be actively used by sales to overcome competitive objections. One of the biggest challenges is that battlecards must be kept up-to-date. If a sales person uses information from your battlecard during a call and a prospect identifies it as inaccurate or out of date, this breaks trust not only with the prospect but also between the sales team and you. If a deal is jeopardized because of unreliable information, sales will likely lose confidence in all future content you provide, whether it's a battlecard or anything else.

The best way to keep battlecards up-to-date is to continually check back with your original data sources. Using Google alerts on your competitors also helps to keep current. Also make it easy for your sales team to highlight any data that is inaccurate or outdated and be proactive in making any corrections or updates.

You should track two key metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your battlecards: usage and outcome. If possible, measure how often each battlecard is viewed to approximate usage and identify which competitors require the most support.

Hopefully you now have mechanisms in place to measure competitive win rates over time. Collect a few months of pre-battlecard competitive win rate data to establish a benchmark. After launching your battlecards, measure the competitive win rate month-over-month using CRM data.

Use some basic algebra to calculate the impact of any win rate increase on overall revenue. For example, if your company generates $20 million in pipeline each quarter and 30% of deals involve competitors, raising your competitive win rate from 20% to 30% could drive a $600,000 boost in quarterly revenue.

Conclusion

Whatever effort you put into battlecards, you will get out. While most companies with a large sales team and multiple competitors have experimented with battlecards, few create ones that are truly effective. As a result, well-crafted battlecards remain an untapped opportunity for gaining a competitive edge.

Creating effective battlecards takes significant effort, both in the initial setup and ongoing updates. Despite the work involved, battlecards offer one of the most direct ways for competitive intelligence, product marketing, and sales enablement professionals to drive revenue growth.