A Clear and Complete Guide to Building Sales Battlecards that Win Deals: Part One

Kimberly Mercer

Sales battlecards that win deals are: Targeted.

Powerful, useful, winning battlecards are focused on one thing: delivering timely and tactical competitive intelligence to sales teams to use in late-stage selling.

I’m talking about short-list, decision-time, key leadership, time-to-lay-it-all-on-the-table, late-stage selling. You know who is making the decision and what their choices are. You know what matters to them and why. Sales battlecards that win deals distill the key points about a competing product that remains in serious contention. It’s you or Them. And winning battlecards give your sales reps what they need to take Them out of the running.

Battlecards are used towards the end of the sales funnel, so they needn’t go deep on competing product features; rather, they should provide a framework of how to sell to a specific buyer persona against a specific competitor’s offering.
– Tim Rhodes

Sales battlecards that win are not a catch-all for every bit or byte of information stored on your Sharepoint.

We’re past that.

Now is the time for a deep dive into the buyer’s needs as matched by the competitor. Position every point as it relates to those needs. Be specific. Don’t say that product x has a complicated integration process. Say that it takes longer to implement, has a high degree of difficulty for regular users and doesn’t play well with other apps/platforms. Those are the details that give a buyer pause.

Be prepared to defend against what competitors are saying about you, too. Speak honestly and rationally to any objections they’ve planted. Frame everything from the buyer’s point of view. This degree of preparedness can only be achieved when you’ve integrated intel from win loss analysis, sales debriefs and customer satisfaction feedback, in addition to the comprehensive market and smart competitive intelligence research you have in place. Sales reps and accounts teams rely on sales enablement tools, like battlecards, to provide insight into the buyer, as well as the competition.

Think about how a political candidate might tweak her message on a topic depending on the location, the demographic of a specific audience, the events of the day and countless other variables that impact the way that message is received. It’s a level of specificity and customization that is required in sales at a time when the buyer is more informed than ever before. That’s what your team needs from you. “A sales battlecard is the most tactical, most literal product of competitive analysis. It is the roadmap to a perfect pitch.”

Blog > Battlecards