How to Improve Sales Team Agility with Competitive Battlecards
To achieve sales team success, your team needs to be agile and ready to leverage new competitive intelligence (CI) at any moment. Your sales team is continuously in motion, whether they’re prospecting, giving demos, or closing the deal. When a competitor gets brought up at any stage of the sales process, even your top reps may be thrown off track. The last thing you want is for your sales reps to be blindsided by a competitor.
Ideally, you want them to be prepared with all of the information they would need to handle whatever competitive objections come their way. That’s why sales team agility is critical. One of the most helpful tools for your sales team is dynamic, up-to-date battlecards. Leveraging battlecards is the key to enabling your team to win more competitive deals. Let’s take a look at how you can improve your sales team agility with the help of competitive battlecards.
Competitive Intelligence at Your Fingertips
Competitive Intelligence is an integral part of your sales strategy. Your sales team needs to have CI at their fingertips if they want to beat their competition. Having a deep understanding of your competitive landscape is important for any successful business. While your sales team needs to be well-versed in your competition, they need to remain agile. As new intel comes into play, your sales team should be ready to provide their prospects with the most recent intel.
The best way to deliver this up-to-date intel is by building competitive battlecards for your team. Battlecards are organized resources that provide your team with company information, positioning tips, and comparison details about each of your competitors. What’s included in your battlecard is up to you, but it’s important to keep your tiles dynamic to ensure your sellers have accurate and helpful intelligence.
Dynamic Battlecards For Sales Success
Battlecards are one of the best tools for sales reps to use in any competitive deal, because they’re loaded with easy to digest competitive intel tailored to sales situations. If you want your battlecards to positively impact your win rate, create dynamic tiles within your battlecards. Here are three examples of competitive battlecard tiles that will take your battlecards to the next level.
Dynamic Element #1 – Video
Putting videos on your battlecards will be a game-changer. Whether the video is embedded within your battlecards or you put a URL for your sales team to access, videos are an excellent way to help your sales team absorb competitive information.
While videos can’t help at a moment’s notice, since your sales reps can’t stop a demo to watch a video, they can help your sales team prepare to head into a phone call where they anticipate competitive objections. Videos can contain the latest intel, news, common objections, tips from other reps for taking down specific competitors, and more.
Dynamic Element #2 – Field Intel
Keeping your battlecards dynamic and enabling your sales team to be agile is a two-way street. Not only are you creating and updating these battlecards, sales reps in the field can capture and share additional intelligence from the conversations they have with prospects. Field intel can be the final piece to knocking out a competitor and closing a deal.
Field intel is competitive intel that someone may have heard at a conference or through another sales conversation, that hasn’t yet been picked up by your intel team. This intel may not be public knowledge, so when your sales rep leverages it in a call, they’ll be positioning themselves as experts on your competitive landscape. Field intel can include detailed pricing information, upcoming product improvements, and other details shared offline.
However, ensure that you’re fact-checking the data before it appears on all of your battlecards, so you avoid battlecard bias. If the information you’re providing to your sales team is out-dated or inaccurate, that can cause your team to lose the deal rather than win.
Dynamic Element #3 – Recent / Latest News
Missing a news update can be critical for your sales team. To avoid missing news about your competition, include a tile on your battlecard about the latest news updates, press releases, and major announcements.
If you want to take this one step further, you can split your news tiles by most recent news and most valuable news. That way, your sales team is ready to reference the most impactful piece of intel, and know how to respond to questions citing recent events without a second thought.
At the end of the day, sales team agility is critical to success. Your team needs to have up-to-date competitive intel at all times, and the best way for you to provide your team with that intel is through dynamic battlecards.
At first, creating battlecards may seem like a time-consuming task, but once the bones are there, all you need to do is update your battlecards regularly. A great way to ensure that you’re staying on top of your competition is by integrating your battlecards with a CI software solution. You also want to make sure that you store battlecards somewhere your sales team can easily access them, such as your CRM or Sales Enablement platform. To avoid any confusion, hold a sales training – you’ll be able to let your sales team know the ins and outs of their new favorite resource.
Now, your sales team is ready to tackle any competitive objection that comes their way. Agility is an important trait of every successful sales team, and pairing that with the best competitive intelligence tool will help your sales team win more competitive deals.
About Emily Dumas
Emily is Marketing Manager at Crayon, a market and competitive intelligence platform that helps businesses track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside their four walls. At Crayon, Emily is responsible for content marketing and SEO initiatives, and has grown the Crayon competitive intelligence blog 10x in less than two years.
