How do you create competitive intel that is really beneficial to sales (i.e. they actually read and use it)?

I’ve had the best success with easy to digest “competitive battlecards” for sales. The simpler, the better. They should give basic company info, pricing, and how to handle objections. For larger sales teams, these are a great reference point for them to use on the phone. The ultimate goal of the battlecards should be for any salesperson - new or experienced - to be able to quickly articulate how you are different from the competition. If it doesn’t meet that goal, you’ve missed the mark. The des ...Read More

This is a little meta, but the best advice I have is to treat your sellers as your customers.  What would you do to try to understand how to get a customer to use your product?  Do some research - via interviews, observations, surveys, etc, and learn their workflows, their gaps, their pain points, etc when it comes to how they use content to prep for sales calls (and for inside sales, while they’re actually on calls).  Then prototype (if appropriate), and get them to walk you through how they’d ...Read More

Competitive Battlecards are the best asset for sales but remember to KISS (keep it stupid simple). Sales are often pressed for time so how can you clearly pick apart your differentiators (vs the competitor), give the rep a compelling reason it matters, and even lay some trap setting questions. Depending on how competitive your market is, you may also want to add some more detailed resources: An objection handling doc. If you have a lot of new reps or a more junior team, you may consider writing ...Read More

This is a fun one. An aphorism we could coin here is that "Competitive battlecards are just like datasheets. Every salesperson desperately wants a new one, but nobody ever uses them."  The challenge is that most competitive intel and content is boring, too detailed to use in the moment, hard to find, and usually out of date. What that means is that great competitive intel is a content marketing problem at heart. It has to be relevant, it has to be interesting, and it has to be easy to consume. T ...Read More

Great question and one that really hits home for me since I used to do competitive intel while sitting in the sales organization at Medallia. The best approach I've seen is first identifying the top content needed by the sales team by actually sitting in sales meetings and in front of customers. It's a great way to see where the gaps are in the messaging and content bill of materials that PMM needs to produce for Sales.  After getting some first hand knowledge, I typically work with Sales Engine ...Read More

This is a great question and one that generally takes refinement over time based on feedback from sales.  Here's what you can do to make sure your competitive intel is beneficial and leveraged by your sales team: 1. Conduct in-depth Win/Loss research - identify the key lost and won reasons that come up from your deals from the notes that reps are inputting into salesforce but also from win/loss interviews. You can hire a win/loss vendor to do this. I've personally worked with Clozd and Primary I ...Read More

As with any other sales content, find out how your specific sales team likes to consume content. This will give you an idea of the format, as well as the channels in which to share this information. This will also depend on your company culture. In my personal experience it's important to do the following: Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point people to. Share the links, and share it again, and again over time. Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitiv ...Read More

Make it snackable. Make it easy to remember. Make it impactful. Show the impact of reps applying this to amplify awareness and usage. Reps spend their days diving into a multitude of different businesses with divergent needs, goals, and deal stages. The more adaptable, simple, straightforward your competitive intel is, the more likely it is to be leveraged and applied.  As a separate note (personal pet rock): use the term comparrison cards, not battle cards. Sales is hard enough without suggesti ...Read More

When gathering competitive intel, I find the most important thing is to have the goal for it clearly mapped out. Why does Sales (or product) want the competitive intel? What will they use it for? If you start from a clear understanding of how the intel will help, it is easier to provide useful information. I recommend being as prescriptive as possible with regard to how the info can be used to help your team achieve a goal. Assuming you have intelligence that achieves your stated goals, you may ...Read More

Love this question, because if sales doesn’t use your competitive intel then what’s the point of investing time at the expense of your other competing priorities. A few things I recommend: Work with your sales leaders and sales enablement (if you have sales enablement) to determine the best format, channels, and cadence for competitive intel. Make sure it’s easily accessible since reps won’t waste time searching for it. What works best depends on your sales team and their preferences. Make it ac ...Read More

Like any good marketer, it's about knowing your end customer and how they would like to consume information. All sales teams are different and finding the right communication methods (format, frequency) is important to align on up front so that you can focus your energy on being efficient and effective. Here are some tips: 1. More is not always more - sometimes we might over correct for a lack of data/deliverables by creating information overload. Sometimes teams like sales might not "actually r ...Read More

Hah! You kinda answered your own question here. Create competitive intel that is easy to read and applicable to how Sales will use it! Sales doesn't want a novel about each competitor. They want high-level bullets that help them understand how to put their own company in context of that competitor if it comes up with a prospect.  And most likely, competitors come up in sales conversations when a buyer is evaluating multiple options or if you're trying to replace an incumbent. Consider including ...Read More

The best advice I can give is to not throw everything including the kitchen sink into a competitive battle card. I've seen competitive intel of 5+ single space pages given to sales teams and you can guess how many people actually read it. When preparing competitive intel for sales, keep in mind that sales teams are typically looking for the following: Why is this competitor participating in the sale in the first place? How does the competitor address customer needs? What do they do well and what ...Read More

I think of competitive intel like product managers think about their product.  The first step is to listen to your stakeholders (or internal customers) from sales, product, customer success and marketing to understand what they want and need in competitive intel. What are their gaps in intel? In content? How do they best consume the information and content you develop for them? What form factor(s) should it take? What cadence do they want it in? Once you have those insights, you can develop cont ...Read More

Get them involved. Interview them to learn about their encounters with competitors. Here are things that I regularly ask my sellers. Which competitors are coming up most in conversations with buyers? What are buyers specifically asking about? What assets would help you win more competitive deals? Here's something that I put together. Is this helpful to you? When you build a genuine relationship with your sales team, you'll notice that adoption will rarely be a problem. They'll see their contribu ...Read More

First of all, it needs to be rooted in the day-to-day realities of sales and the conversations their having. If Product Marketing is coming up with competitive intel in a vacuum without input from Sales, then it will naturally fall flat.  As you should do with positioning, make Sales a key part of how you create competitive intelligence and what it needs to include. Most great sales reps and managers will already be doing some of this themselves, so start by learning what their doing. If you hav ...Read More

I try to create competitive intel at a couple of different levels of abstraction: High-level: Usually in the form of a 2X2 which demonstrates the biggest difference between us and the rest of our field. The point of this is to give sales teams a highly memorable soundbite at a categorical level, e.g. "Unlike point solutions, we are comprehensive." "Unlike clunky enterprise platforms, we are easy to use." Detailed: For the most frequently encountered competitors (we're talking 2-3 here not 8-10) ...Read More

I try to use the Pyramid approach to all content. Start with just absolute essential information, then expand. This way sales reps are able to capture the exact right amount of information in the most efficient way possible.  For example, say we are an apple company and our competition is those pesky orange growers from across town. I would structure my competitive teardown content like:  Main message Your time is valuable, don't waste it peeling an orange. Apples are ready to eat at a moment's ...Read More

I first start with really solid positioning, which should clearly identify how your offering is differentiated from other competitors in the market and lean into that. Second, I listen and shadow sales to see how often/why competitors come up in conversation. Then I can create appropriate messaging. Depending on your position in the market and how competitive the space is, you may go head to head in a more visible brand campaign, or if you're a category leader, you may keep an eye out and handle ...Read More

One of the key things to consider with any information provided to a sales team is making sure you answer two questions: Why does it matter? What should they do with it? When it comes to competitive intel, keep in mind the following factors to deliver value to sales: Timeliness Impact Action Is the intel you are providing timely? Is it new and relevant or is it old news? If it's old news and most sellers are already aware, but you still think it's valuable, think about just adding it to backgrou ...Read More

In my experience, the best way to communicate with sales people is to speak with them. They are so busy, and I find they don't read emails from PMMs, especially emails not directed to them personally.  In my opinion, the best way to share competitive materials is in a short team meeting, through the sales engineering/solution consulting teams and by directly responding to questions they have (where you can send links to prepared materials).  It also helps to be very clear about your competitive ...Read More

Simple answer: You treat your sales team like a customer.  Interview them to understand their competitive needs and challenges when articulating "value" or "differentiation" vs. competitors. Co-create internal enablement and customer-facing assets with them to ensure content adds value to their process vs. more complexity. Capture feedback on content, assets, and process by developing a sales advisory board.   Track competitive content and messaging performance by analyzing how your sales reps u ...Read More

As a PMM, it can be frustrating to put a lot of work into something and have it sit unused. But I have a lot of empathy for my sales colleagues. Their lives are super busy and they're overwhelmed with information. It makes sense that it's hard to get their attention! When working on competitive intel for a new competitor, here are some action items that will help you to optimize sales engagement: Prioritize the right competitor. Within PMM, we get a lot of one-off requests for comp intel and we ...Read More

At a high level Sales needs to operate on three planes. Defending against weaknesses, driving towards strengths and disseminating fear. Long written thought papers are the wrong format. I believe in short simple bullet points supported by an explanatory video to get the message across. Ultimately it is the seller that needs to deliver the message. in person or over tele / video call. It is also helpful to draft answers for email based communication. Only challenge with that is that it leaves a t ...Read More

I love how candid this question is! It's true - we build a lot in PMM and largely don't know if it's being used. If you have a tech stack that has a social listening tool (gong) + enablement tool (klue, crayon, guru) you should be able to build, track and measure efficacy of the PMM programs you're building around competitive intelligence. One way we reinforce this at Crossbeam today is by using quizzes and courses in a tool called workramp - that way we test our sales teams' knowledge and make ...Read More

Getting sales buy in on what type of information they want early on can be really helpful (it can also be useful if they change their mind later on). Starting with a proof of concept then circulating the first battlecard among sales leadership before you start building out other competitors.  Set a standard of how battlecards will be used. Normally battlecards are a strickly internal only resource. I would highly recommend you don't make the assumption that sales or other parts of your organizat ...Read More

Timeliness and accessiblity are also key to providing value to your team.  Providing a list of month-end/ quarter-end killshots speaking to the most up-to-date intel and positioning you have on focused competitors (maybe trending that month) is not only going to be acknowledged, but can boost morale and (product) confidence in your team.  Creating a Slack channel or Salesforce group for competitive intel can be a great way to get new intel in front of people as it appears—and can be contributed ...Read More

Real time competitive insight direct from buyers. Easy way to collect this information is via a win/loss interviews. Simply ask questions regarding who else they considered and why. Dig into areas such as brand, product, sales experience, pricing, culture. Sales teams always perk up when the data has been collected from the very buyers they are selling to. It gives them a strong frame of reference for how the market views their solution versus the competitition. It also may help to shed light on ...Read More

One practice we had to inform competitive positioning strategy and enablement was analysing Closed Lost reasons in deals where we lost to a competitor. Here's an example (sorry some details need to remain high level):  We did a CL analysis and saw we were losing to our competitor for 1 of 3 reasons - a unique feature they had, pricing, and brand awareness/loyalty. We then partnered with Account Managers and CS to find customers who had used us and the competition. We did customer interviews to g ...Read More

Battlecards, training documentation, or whatever medium you choose to deliver this information should be built specifically for sales as the audience in mind. A couple quick tips: 1. Keep information concise and easily digestible. 2. Get real-time feedback from your sales team. If there is an example from a recent deal or prospect, this is gold. Sales teams love to hear from peers vs. objective information or research. 3. If pricing information is available, share it.  4. External facing documen ...Read More

In short: focus on enablement, not on battlecards. I don’t know how and why battlecards became the golden standard but I always felt that format miss the mark because it’s hard to read and impossible to process in real-time (i.e. on a call). And as marketers we know that packaging and delivery matter. So, here are elements that I find more helpful: Deliver competitive news regularly - either 3 bullet points on a dedicated slack channel once a week or in an internal newsletter, but think of a cha ...Read More

If you're banking that your sales teams will use your materials then you ask them first! Start with the top 2-3 sales reps or a sales manager who has a low-down on the biggest objections and reasons why deals aren't closing.  Prioritize the top objections and construct your battlecard. Make sure that there are supportive links or any other collateral that supports talk tracks and arguments you are saying.  This isn't all. Your battlecards need to be easy to use. (Most of the) People don't want t ...Read More

3 words - length, ROI, searchability.  Length: Sales reps and customers alike want things to be short and to the point. I like to keep it to a punchy header with 2-3 supporting bullet points if possible.  ROI: The benefit to the customer should be clear in the header. For example, "[Customer] saved an average of 10 hours per week and $250,000/yr by switching from [competitor] to [your company]".    Searchability: Sales will forget 90% of the things you present in enablement. Not to mention, new ...Read More