Sales Battlecards
What is a Competitor Battlecard?
A great battlecard is a visual aid or document that helps your sales team compete on product, pricing, features, and other comparisons.
Battlecards are generally one-page long and often come in the form of a PowerPoint slide.
Here are some traditional Sales Battlecard Examples:
Pros and Cons of Battlecards
| Pros | Cons |
| A single battlecard can contain a lot of information. | Can become dense and hard to read, containing too much text at small font sizes. |
| Can be stored on the cloud or saved locally and used when needed. | Static content quickly goes stale and needs to be manually updated by an administrator. |
| Powerpoint and PDF are familiar formats for many users. | Documents can be difficult to modify. Users want to personalize static content for their needs. |
| Contains text, images, and news about a competitor. | Static text and images quickly go stale and need to be manually updated. Difficult to include videos. |
| Communicate intel to many people at once. | Often shared at quarterly or monthly intervals, intel is tough to locate in real-time when needed. |
Greg Fitzgerald, Co-founder & President – Sevco Security “To know oneself is to better one’s self. Knowing oneself in comparison to other industry peers enables specifics for improvement.”
Are Battlecards Still Effective?
Battlecards are meant to transform competitive analysis into a tool that the sales team can use. A great battlecard can be effective if it has these two qualities:
- It provides accurate intelligence when you need it.
- The information is constantly refreshed and updated.
That said, these are also the hardest parts of making battlecards. Here’s why:
The data you need may not be there when you need it most
Battlecards are often provided to teams when they are not needed, such as at a Sales Kickoff (SKO) event. The majority probably won’t read the content, few will actually remember it, and even less will want to go looking for a battlecard when it’s time to compete for a deal.
The data might not be accurate anymore
Battlecards are rarely refreshed and updated. They’re often saved as a static document and left unused until they’re necessary. This leads to stale, out-of-date cards that leave people disappointed when they’re actually looked at.
More often than not, sales teams will complain that a battlecard doesn’t have the information that they need, or worse, the information will be out of date. This can lead to embarrassing situations where the customer knows more about a competitor’s product than you do.
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A New Way to Generate Competitive Battlecards
Using PowerPoint to make your battlecards is outdated and ineffective because it doesn’t give sales teams the right information at the right time. A better solution is to use a real-time battlecard generator that can answer questions automatically with point-in-time intelligence.
The trick, however, is to not create battlecards at all.
The new way to do this relies on Knowledge Automation to generate answers when you need them.
How 1up replaces battlecards with Q&A
1up’s automated competitor intelligence takes the enablement aspect of battlecards to a new level by making it easy for sales teams to get the information they need. 1up’s knowledge base keeps itself updated, and most importantly, delivers answers to the sales team when they need it the most.
With 1up, businesses can automate the process of battlecard generation by going beyond the static PDF. More importantly, they can get answers directly in chat without having to navigate anywhere.
The Old Way
- Static Powerpoints and PDF Battlecards that rarely get used
- Outdated competitor intel that quickly goes stale and is absent when you need it most
- Humans spending hours watching, reading, and digesting competitor materials
- Competitor data that lives across docs, spreadsheets, emails and CRM
The New Way
- A beautiful web interface that delivers answers when you need them
- A constantly refreshed stream of intel that gets updated automatically
- Fully automated intel collected and digested by a powerful AI
- A dashboard thats fully integrated with your favorite sales and marketing tools
FAQ
Do I need battlecards in my business?
That’s a good question. Do you have a sales team? Do they encounter the same competitors time and time again? If the answer is yes, then you should create battlecards.
What if my battlecard has too much information?
This is a common complaint. We naturally feel inclined to load a template with as much information as possible, but remember that the purpose of the document is not to educate the sales team about the company. Rather, it’s to help them win deals with small bits of critical information.
“When everything is being screamed, nothing is being heard.” Your battlecards should contain specific, up-to-date information that can be used in the field. It should be treated as if it were a Q&A mechanism. If you limit the scope of what belongs on a sales battlecard to this criteria then you’ll be able to keep them clear and concise.
How do I keep battlecards up to date?
People think battlecards become stale because they are not updated regularly enough. While this is somewhat true, the reality is closer to, “out of sight out of mind.” A battlecard is not something you look at every day or on every sales call. It’s a reference document that gets reviewed in preparation for a call or during a customer Q&A.
Some people think they can address this by setting a reminder to review a battlecard every few weeks, or once a quarter. The problem is your competitor’s information stream doesn’t move at your desired speed. You might check in at regular intervals only to find that not much has changed. Alternatively, you might check in regularly and find that you can’t keep up with all the data.
That’s why you need to automate the process. The best way to keep competitive content up to date is with a competitive analytics tool like 1up.
How do I create a custom battlecard template?
You can use off-the-shelf templates or you can create your own in PowerPoint. Unfortunately, as we’ve already explored, these quickly become outdated and are not always an effective way to track the competition. With 1up, you can reimagine the battlecard and create a competitive dashboard that’s easier to update and easier to use.
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