Think Like a Rep: The Secret to Creating Competitive Content for Sales

Adam is joined by Jessica Davis is the Manager of Competitive Intelligence at HubSpot. In this conversation, she and Adam dive into what it takes to build usable, impactful competitive content Here are three takeaways from their conversation

1️⃣ Don’t make your reps do mental gymnastics 1️⃣

The distance between your competitive content and how it gets used need to be short.

The more your reps are forced to adjust content in format, look or feel, you’re running a higher risk of low adoption.

“Is this competitive content ready, something that a rep can read and immediately say? Or are they going to have to do mental gymnastics to figure it out.”

Jessica says that compete pros need to be focused on providing content in the format that works best for their reps’ needs.

The better you are at accomplishing that, the more your reps will use the content and the happier you’ll all be.

Check out Jess and dozens more spectacular speakers at Compete Week 2023. Save your seat

2️⃣ Update your content on a regular basis 2️⃣

HubSpot has a handful of major, direct competitors. They also have a huge quantity of tier-two, three and beyond.

Keeping your competitive content fresh is crucial. Outdated intel renders your content unreliable. At the same time, with this many competitors, updating all your battlecards is a huge task,

So how often does HubSpot do it?

“We tier our competitors in groups of five, based on how often they come up in deals, market focus, etc. For tier one and two competitors, we update our battlecards every quarter. The rest, every six months “

Beyond updating battlecards, the competitive content update cadence stays the same for all sales collateral (think landing pages/comparison pages).

Watch Klue’s resident Compete Wizards Clara Smyth and Brandon Bedford break down how to make your compete program the best it can be

3️⃣ Promote your competitive content internally 3️⃣

If you build it and they will come may have worked wonders for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but it won’t work for compete content.

Instead you need to build it, and then shout about it from the rooftops.

“No matter how good your content is, if you’re not making sure it gets into the hands and that people are using it, it doesn’t matter.”

HubSpot’s compete team accomplishes this in three ways:

Always include new or updated compete content in your competitive intel newsletter
Monitor Slack channels and get involved in relevant threads or conversations
Set up an auto-email for reps to receive as soon as they fill out the competitor field in the CRM

If it’s good enough for HubSpot, it’s good enough for your compete program.