Mindy Regnell

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 organization won't be tempted to share this information directly with a prospect or a partner. Word of caution, if you have partners that work with your organization that could also benefit from competitive intel be sure to have a discussion on how much of this information you are willing to share externally. While partners can be a great source of potential intel, if you share too much with the wrong partners you can be handing your competitors It's also important to establish with your sales team if they are wanting to have a base knowledge of a lot of competitors or going deep on just a few (I would personally say the latter tends to be more important for your primary competitors and then potentially building much more lightweight battlecards for competitors that come up less often). From my own experience, it helped to include information on strengths, weakness, any known gaps as well as diving a bit deeper into any marketing talking points. For us, it seemed like sales knew the main points (ie: We are better at x) but couldn't get much deeper. When you make a claim, it is built on some feature that is important. So I focused on flushing out those details so our sales reps had more specific details they could answer. Helping the build the value on why something is important and being able know what feature is the real driver. Once you have established your baseline of competitive intel, you will want to think about the ongoing upkeep. How often do things in your industry change? Do your primary competitors have annual conferences when they make announcements about the coming year? If they do this is probably the time you want to plan on updating your battlecards. Keep your intel in a 1 place and keep in mind who might benefit from having that information. I personally use a folder in Google Drive that only myself or other PMMs can edit but others in the org can view. Chance are there are other parts of your organization that could benefit from understanding the competition. This can give you an additional way to measure success (or at least a wider audience). Again in my own experience, building a solid foundation tends to be the more challenging part of the process (especially if you have more than 1 sales team that deals with different competitors or wants to use other information). Setting a schedule for upkeep based on how often things in your industry changes is what keeps the foundation you've built current, relevant and prevents you from having to rebuild the foundation in a few years.