Competitive Battlecards 101: Questions to Ask Battlecard Template

Katie Berg

The foundation is set. With the Company Overview and Approach to Market battlecards now complete, you can start diving into more tactical deal support. Also known as the fun stuff.

The third battlecard in our Competitive Battlecards 101 Series, the “Questions to Ask” sales battlecard has two primary use cases. It can serve your reps in the information gathering and pain discovery process with a prospect.

At the same time, it can help your reps start to deposition your competition with strategic questions. Whichever way you use the Questions to Ask battlecard, we’re know you’ll make good use of it. It’s one of the most popular battlecards across all our clients.

Question to Ask Battlecards for AEs and SDRs

Both ways of using this card are key components to use within your sales playbooks. They aren’t mutually exclusive.

Your account executives (AEs) and sales development reps (SDRs) will naturally deal with different questions.

In fact, many choose to use both for the value they each bring to the sales process.

Remember this when building these cards. You may choose to have variants of each built uniquely for your SDRs and AEs based on their roles in your sales cycle.

Use Case #1: Information Gathering and Pain Discovery

To steer salespeople away from getting into their pitch too soon, the Questions to Ask sales battlecard makes it easy for your sales reps to quickly uncover their prospect’s pain by giving them the exact questions to ask to diagnose their needs.

These questions typically occur used during qualification/discovery calls. By making it easy for your sales reps to consistently collect certain pieces of information on their leads, it will improve their ability to hit the points that matter most to closing a deal.

It’s far more important that your reps understand their prospects’ pain than to know all of the details of your competitors’ products.

Questions to ask battlecards are becoming increasingly popular as organizations shift sales strategies towards using playbooks. Meaning, sales pitches for a product that evolve and adapt dynamically. This is in contrast to rigid sales pitches that can come off as inauthentic and overrehearsed.

The positioning messages a salesperson will use will vary depending on their prospects’ problem and unique scenario. Using the Questions to Ask sales battlecard to uncover these pain points supports this mentality and provides the foundation for battlecards focused on sales strategies.

Want more tips and templates for your battlecards? Check out our Competitive Sales Battlecards 101 guide here.

How to Build This Battlecard:

Build this card by crafting questions to help your salespeople unearth information on prospects during the qualification stage. As a starting point, seek to understand your prospect’s goals and objectives and well as their current situation.

Try providing 1-2 different variations in the phrasing of your questions to give salesreps a couple of options.

To make sure the right information is being gathered, you may want to list the question(s) and link out to a brief description of what information is intended to be discovered.

In the example below, once a rep clicks on the ‘Why We Ask’ link, a new card will popup with background information.

Use Case #2: Depositioning Questions

The second use case for this card is to assist your salesperson to deposition a known competitor in a deal. The questions typically focus on exposing weaknesses where your competitor falls short.

If you know that a competitor has a particular weakness that will not gel well with the person you’re selling to (which you can now identify using the information gathering card from above), you want to make sure the prospect is aware of that.

As you can see below, the fourth question on the card is meant to lead the conversation into discussing weaknesses in your competitor’s pricing model.

How to Build This Battlecard:

Our examples for this use case have been built using public reviews on a chosen “competitor”. General themes of weaknesses were found by aggregating software reviews from multiple websites.

Develop questions to surface these weaknesses, with an explanation of why each question works and what it helps the salesperson to do/expose.

If you are lacking internal competitive intelligence on a competitor, this is one way to approach the build of this card, although there are obvious limitations in how accurate and up to date this information will be. Building this based on internal information should always be your first choice.

80% of your most valuable intel comes internally by virtue of the fact it’s your reps who face-off with competitors directly. And as a result, they are able to pull intel directly from prospects.

Next Up in Competitive Battlecards 101:

The Questions to Ask sales battlecard is the first in the series to start diving deep into the tactical world of competitive selling. The next battle card is the Product Overview card, which provides a product-specific overview. As opposed to the Company Overview card which deals mainly in firmographics.

If you’ve come this far and you’re still looking for more on battlecards, download our Competitive Sales Battlecards 101 Ebook.

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