Winning deals in a hyper-competitive market can be challenging, especially as more and more competitors enter your space. A crucial aspect of staying competitive in a crowded marketplace is understanding your competitors’ offerings and key differentiators so you can strategically sell against them. By empowering your sales team with centralized Battlecards, they will have instant access to key information about the competition and your company’s unique positioning in a concise, digestible format, enabling them to win more deals.
When evaluating comparable products or services, identifying clear differences can be difficult for prospects. Any tools you can provide your team to speak intelligently and consistently about the competition will build trust with prospects and fast-track their decision making.
Design Your First Battlecards
Battlecards provide quick, convincing arguments to the classic question, “Why should I choose you over your competitor?” The best Battlecards are clean, concise and current, providing your sales team with a complete overview of the competition and your unique value.
The first step to creating your winning Battlecards is to identify 3-5 competitive advantage “kill points” your sales team can use to close a deal. The idea is to come up with quick and powerful statements to subtly “attack” the competition and position your product as the winning solution. These kill points can come from internal or external sources. Study your competitors and evaluate their products. What value does your product provide that theirs does not? You may also consider a meeting with the sales team to discuss how they’ve won deals when a prospect was comparing multiple options. Alternatively, you can seek input from other sources by reading reviews and listening to why customers chose you over the competition.
In addition to kill points, key elements of a winning battle card include:
- Product Overview: Analyze your competitor’s product and service offering in terms of features and value.
- Competitor SWOT: Determine points that would be considered their competitive strengths, weaknesses, opportunities (which could become future strengths) and threats (which could become future weaknesses). It is important to be honest when assessing these areas!
- Pricing Information: Outline competitor pricing and packages.
- Claims & Counters: Track competitor claims and create counters for each claim leveraging your strengths and highlighting their weaknesses.
- Differentiators and Unique Selling Propositions: What separates you from the competition and why should a prospect choose you?
Ensure Battlecards are Easily Accessible
Your team is more likely to use Battlecards that are easily accessible. This is critical when time is of the essence. Storing Battlecards online is the preferred approach. Ideally Battlecards should also be accessible directly from within your CRM. Be sure to also distribute and notify your sales team each time a Battle Card is updated.
Keep Battlecards Up to Date
Due to constantly changing market conditions, Battlecards should be dynamic living documents that are updated frequently. Consistent and accurate messaging about the competition builds trust with prospective clients. Remember that they are likely hearing the latest from your competition. Few things have more potential to hurt your credibility than being called out for making out of date claims.
The ideal Battle Card platform collects the real-time competitive data you need while enabling your team to communicate competitive intel via a feedback loop. Intel and insights can then be reviewed and incorporated directly into an updated version of the Battle Card.
Measure Usage & Analyze Results
Are Battlecards being leveraged? Track usage, including how often Battlecards are being used and by whom. Identify which competitors you compete with most frequently and the most checked benchmarks. Remember: intelligence is useless if it isn’t being used to your advantage.
To measure ROI, keep an eye on your closing ratio over the next 2 or 3 sales cycles. Notice the number of deals you win using Battlecards versus previous cycles. Compare usage statistics against your top and bottom performing reps, and you will see that the reps using Battlecards are closing more deals.
Calculate the impact of the increased closures on revenue. For example – if you previously only closed about 2 deals every 10 calls and, after using Battlecards, are now closing 4 deals for every 10 calls, you’ve won 50% more sales thanks to Battlecards.
Summary
With today’s marketplace being more competitive than ever, Battlecards are becoming increasingly important. When faced with pressure against the competition, Battlecards empower your team with accurate, up-to-date intelligence and kill points to hit the competition in their weakest areas. The end result? Fewer deals lost to the competition and increased revenue to your bottom line.
