Competitive Battlecards

A competitive battlecard is a sales enablement asset that delivers brief, digestible competitive knowledge – knowledge that your sales team needs to win deals against a specific competitor. Competitive battlecards spell out strengths, weaknesses, product information, pricing information, key talking points, and more, to help your sales team identify and address objections. When it comes to sales enablement, a competitive battlecard can be a critical, empowering tool for your sales team.

What Do Competitive Battlecards Include?

A competitive battlecard is meant to help your sales team differentiate, provide value and effectively counter competitive claims with real time intelligence. Here are the key components of a strong competitive battlecard: quick dismisses, win/loss profiles, landmines, objection-handling tactics, product feature comparison, pricing and news.

Quick Dismisses

Also known as called kill points, quick dismisses are short statements to quickly disqualify competitors in the early stages of a sales cycle. It’s important that quick dismisses be used early in the sales cycle, in order to effectively position each competitor to your advantage – before they get the opportunity to make any other impression on your potential client.

Win / Loss Profiles

Providing win/loss data about a specific competitor gives your sales team the means to learn and improve their pitch. It’s important to provide both qualitative and quantitative win/loss data, for a comprehensive understanding of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. And be assured that both win stories and loss stories are equally valuable to your sales people. Be sure to boil each story down to the major reason(s) why the deal in question was won or lost and any actionable insights you can offer.

Landmines

Like Quick Dismisses, these are topics or questions that call into question your competitors’ capabilities. These can be effectively leveraged at any time during a sales cycle. Just be sure that landmines are deployed in a conversational style, for best effect.

Objection-handling tactics

At all times, it’s critical that your sales people be prepared to effectively handle competitive objections. This means your sales people must be able to knowledgeably and confidently respond when a prospect makes a claim regarding a competitive offering. It pays to devote part of your competitive battlecard to listing common objections and detailing tactics that can be used to counter those common objections.

Pricing

Pricing is a major factor in any large buying decision. An effective way to present competitive pricing information is as a side-by-side comparison with your pricing. This helps your sales team quickly get a quick sense of how your pricing model compares to that of the competition.

Current news

In most cases, your competitors will appear in the news because they want to be in the news. Maybe your competitor has launched a new product or service, or landed a new partnership or started a new venture. You can draw from these announcements in the news to equip your sales team with actionable information.

How to Create a Competitive Battlecard

Pick a template. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. There are many templates specific to the enterprise sales cycle to choose from.
Select Competitors. Depending on where you are in the sales cycle, this number can vary. In early conversations, you may want to include more competitors and group them based on high level differences. Later in the sales cycle, you may want to include only the few that are left in consideration.
Identify Key Categories. The categories you choose can vary based on product and industry. For an industry that is highly price sensitive, you should include price. For a product where pricing is stable across competitors, focus on other categories of differentiation, such as customization or new features.
Build the Battlecard. Make sure to research multiple resources (primary and secondary) to get the full picture and ensure your data is accurate.
Update the Battlecard. In a market that is always changing, be sure to update your battlecard on regular intervals or before each meeting with the client.

What is sales enablement?

In a nutshell, enterprise sales enablement means equipping sellers with the right resources to shorten the sales cycle, increase win rates, and sign bigger deals. Enterprise sales enablement, as a function, evolved in response to the evolution of the enterprise buyer. With a wealth of information available online, buyers are in more control of the buying process than ever before. In many cases, enterprise buyers can be more than halfway through their journey before they reach out to a seller.

What does this mean? It means that sellers must take the initiative to reach out to enterprise buyers, winning the buyers’ attention much earlier in their journey. This is a task typically associated with marketing. So, sellers need to think more like marketers, and marketers need to think more like sellers – about the day-to-day experiences of buying and selling.

Enterprise sales enablement is providing customer insights, content and coaching to your sales team throughout the enterprise selling process. Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.

Ultimately, the goal of sales enablement is to align the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, brand management, legal, and human resources to boost seller productivity and improve the buyer experience. In a nutshell, a sales enablement strategy is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process.

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