Why sales hates your battlecards & how to fix them
When I joined Sprout five years ago to build the competitive intelligence program, sales seemed to collectively scream at me, “WE NEED BATTLECARDS.” But CI wasn’t a centrally owned responsibility at Sprout so our battlecards had sparse details and weren’t easily accessible to our reps. I identified our top competitors and got to work on new battlecards.
Unfortunately, I made a lot of mistakes.
Sure, V1 was an improvement over what we had at the time. But I still wasn’t putting sales in the best possible position to win competitive deals. I included information that was way too granular. The battlecards were way too long. I let perfect be the enemy of good when it came to data.
Five years later and I’ve learned a lot about what works well and what doesn’t. Our competitive win rates have maintained or increased every year that I’ve been at Sprout. Our RPS has increased. And we’re simply competing in and winning more deals where we never had a chance a few years ago.
So from my failures, here are three things that I learned along the way that will make your sales team fall in love with your competitive battlecards and help you win more deals.
Problem: The content is too feature-focused
Sales loves to sell on features. Competitor X doesn’t have feature Y. You won’t be able to hit your goals without it.
To be fair, that will work some of the time! But the overwhelming majority of deals are not won or lost on a single feature. Good CI practitioners lead reps into more consultative selling that focuses on strategic outcomes and business value rather than individual features.
The bigger issue is that single-feature weaknesses can disappear overnight. Unless you are into some nefarious sneaking, you won’t know your competitors’ roadmaps. And that one feature you’re selling against may be in the works or already launched. So now you have to update your battlecards more frequently and your reps may be sharing outdated information, which hurts their credibility.
Solution: Focus on themes and pair with outcomes
So if you aren’t selling on a single feature, you need to have broader differentiating themes that reps can use to guide their sales cycle. What parts of the competitor’s product isn’t getting the investment it needs? Where has the competitor left itself open to bigger attacks? What do your customers that came from that competitor say about them?
You need to help your reps tell a bigger story beyond a single missing feature. If they can’t explain how your product approach is different and better than your competitor’s, you’ll be stuck selling single features.
And once you have those themes, you need to help your reps bring it to life. Every thematic weakness should be paired with a competitive customer win that highlights why that customer chose your solution over your competitor’s. It isn’t enough to just have the win though. You need to highlight how they have gone on to succeed with the advantage you bring in that product area.
Themes should be something you can base an entire competitive sales cycle on. Features are not.
Problem: Your content is too long
Brevity has never been one of my strengths. I love getting into the nitty gritty details. When people walk me through their work, I want all the context I can get.
The problem is that it is often way too much detail for the vast majority of folks, especially those in sales. Reps shouldn’t be expected know every in-and-out for your competitors. And if you document every bit of minutiae that you have collected, your audience will immediately exit out of that page.
Your job is to identify the signals in the noise. Battlecards should amalgamate little pieces of intel into the larger themes your reps need. If you’re highlighting double-digit weaknesses, you’re doing your teams a disservice. Without filtering that down, your reps are being asked to digest too much information and they’ll ultimately walk away with nothing.
Solution: Keep it snappy
A question I like to ask myself when reviewing intel is “does this help me understand the competitive landscape better or would it help a customer?” Nine times out of ten, the answer is that it only helps me. That tells me that the intel doesn’t need to be in a battlecard for now.
But if it is something that would help a customer make a more informed decision, I focus on packaging it up as a tight soundbite that reps can use effectively with minimal effort. There shouldn’t be paragraph long explanations. It should be 2–3 sentences tops and provide just enough context that your reps look like market experts and your customers are better informed.
Honestly, you will probably be bad at this at first. I know I was. It takes practice. It requires you to refine, refine, refine and refine again. But over time you’ll start to see and hear what works when customers consistently respond positively.
So you need to do two things with your battlecards:
- Aggressively filter out intel that isn’t immediately relevant to the customer
- Practice writing tight summaries that reps can use on the fly
Problem: Perfect is the enemy of good
If you are anything like me, you want your intel as accurate and detailed as possible. This means collecting, cleaning up, verifying and then publishing. I want it as rock-solid as I can get it. But this mentality can actually be harmful in CI if you are holding back intel for too long as you try to verify it.
Pricing is an area where this is particularly salient. Enterprise vendors almost never publish their pricing. Customers all have different spend levels for the same products based on region, budget, timing and competition. So that means that any hope of a price list should go right out the window. You are never going to get perfect pricing data, and that means you can’t hold back what you do collect in the meantime.
Solution: Know when to use directional data
As you think about what your teams need, often times giving them a crumb is better than making them wait for the whole pie. This is particularly true when it comes to pricing. If you’re able to share some historical ranges and use that to provide reps a best guess, they’re going to be better off with that than if they are flying blind. It is really important to have somewhere that you document this consistently so you can see how these pricing trends have evolved over time. The data won’t be perfect and you’re likely never to get it spot on, but this directional data shouldn’t be held back while you wait for the perfect set of data.
The work to build a battlecard may be complete, but the refinement never stops. Whether you are starting from scratch like I was or you are tweaking existing battlecards, these are three learnings that should help you deliver content that your reps return to consistently.
