The Ultimate Guide to Creating Sales Battlecards That Close Deals in 2023

The business space is highly competitive. The continuous increase in customer demands and growing needs make it imperative for existing companies to expand their scale while allowing new ones to fill the market gaps.

Not forgetting the steady growth rate of digital technology tools, trends, and practices, the sales field has become a battleground where salespeople have to constantly upgrade their skills, enhance their processes and always be on top of their toes to keep up with growing sales trends and competitive marketplace.

As a result of this fierce competition, it is now more critical than ever for salespeople to create sales battle cards – a game plan that helps you plan how you can beat your competitors and make your mark in the market. A sales battle card is a crucial tool that helps sales teams become more successful by creating consistent, compelling messaging and sales plans to close deals and help the business grow

Easier said than done, sales battle cards can be much harder to create than we say, which is why we created this guide. You will learn what sales battle cards are, why you need them, and how to make one to build a winning sales strategy.

Table of Content

• What is a Sales Battlecard?
• Who Creates Battle Cards?
• Why Do Sales Teams Need Sales Battlecards?
• What are The Types of Sales Battlecards?
• What Are The Crucial Elements of Sales Battle Cards?
• How Do You Create an Effective Sales Battle Card?

What is a Sales Battlecard?

A sales battle card is a comprehensive document with a concise, actionable summary of your business, products or services, market, customers, and competition. It equips sales reps with essential information and plans to have fruitful interactions with clients with its product’s value proposition. It also prepares them to have worthy responses to important sales questions, objections, and prospects’ needs.

Aside from providing information, sales battle cards also serve as visual ads that help sales teams compare their company’s product, service, features, and pricing to their competitors. The complete overview of your competitor’s performance lets you measure your company’s performance and values.

To give you this view, it must include statistics, figures, and information about the competitive intelligence, product/service, unique selling points, pricing, possible customer questions, and other important information about your customers and sales market during the sales process to deliver accurate information that helps sales reps win deals.

What’s Not a Sales Battlecards?

It is essential to understand when creating a sales battle card because it is a document that clearly outlines your competitive advantage and its unique selling point. The focus should be on what sets your brand, products, or services apart from your competitors rather than bashing or unnecessarily putting down your competitors and their products or services.

For better understanding, we have identified four things that sales battle cards are not.

1. A sales battle card is not an essay, ebook, white paper, or book report.
2. It is not a comprehensive, detailed document that should be stored in your drive or computer where no one ever opens it.
3. It’s not a long document; hence, ensure it is concise, clear, and easy to understand.
4. It is not an opportunity to put down your competitors but let your brand and products shine

Who Creates Battle Cards?

The Marketing team is in charge of creating sales battle cards like other sales and marketing collaterals. Since the marketing team generally have several individuals with varying skills and experience in developing content and implementing strategies to promote brand awareness and increase the sales of the company’s products or services, it is only natural they also create the sales battle cards.

Additionally, marketers have adequate knowledge of the company and its products or services combined with their writing and communication skills to create compelling sales battle cards.

However, marketing teams don’t work alone to create a more comprehensive and all-encompassing battle card; they collaborate with product leads, a customer success team, engineering, customer support, and business development teams, whereby the sales team provides real-time feedback on the use and effectiveness of the product.

Why Do Sales Teams Need Sales Battlecards?

Sales is a highly intensive and competitive field. A large percentage of the product and service market has become very saturated, making it much more challenging for sales reps to connect with their clients and encourage them to purchase. Sales reps need all their help to make this process easier and less complicated. Here are the five crucial benefits of sales battle cards.

1. To track competition

How do you get better than someone? What do you need to do to make this achievable? The key to positioning your brand, products, or services better than your competitors and even outperforming them is constantly monitoring them to determine their strengths, weaknesses, and sales methods. No other sales document can help you achieve this better than a sales battle card.

Salespeople can closely monitor what competitors do on social media pages, websites, new wins, goals, and expansion plans. Doing this lets you find and filter relevant information in the battle cards.

2. To create a winning sales pitch

Sales battle cards help to create and deliver compelling pitches that accurately reflect the company’s unique selling proposition and competitive advantage. The amount of research the sales and marketing teams put into creating battle cards also enables them to understand customer pain points, needs, and interests to position the brand as the best.

3. To prepare for customer’s challenges in the future

When you understand your customer’s needs, goals, interests, and pain points, you can be well-prepared to help them solve these challenges. Additionally, monitoring competitors and your product market can help gain better insights into common challenges that people face and how your competitors have solved these problems to determine what you can do to provide an answer to the problem.

4. To stay ahead of competitors

The product market is highly competitive. Several brands offer the same products or services to the same customers. Hence, salespeople need to position their company, products, and services in the market to create an impact.

A sales battle card contains important information about your company’s products or services, competitive advantage, and of your competitors. By studying this for improvement, you can fill in the gaps where your competitors are lacking to stand out and stay ahead of them.

5. To support sales efforts

Sales are challenging. Aside from that, the market is already over-saturated, so many factors come into play when connecting with clients and convincing them to purchase. This is one of the many reasons sales reps need all the help they can get to make the sales process more direct, easy, and productive.

Sales battle cards are a powerful document that can prepare salespeople to be better at their jobs, showcase their professionalism, and make them helpful and valuable to customers.

What are The Types of Sales Battlecards?

Not all battle cards are the same. Sales teams can use different battle cards to increase their sales closing capabilities. They include the following:

1. Product Battle Cards

Product battle cards include all the essential information about the products your sales teams need to know about your product. These documents are meant to be educative materials for sales reps to learn and use in their sales pitches.

An excellent example of product battle cards is a product comparison battle card by HeroPay that compares three popular Point of Sales systems such as Square, PayPal, and Verifone, based on three parameters such as their fee, equipment they provide, and user experience. This document also includes an assessment of the three companies to help sales reps understand how the three products compete against each other.

2. Competitive Battle Cards

Competitor battle cards contain all vital information about your competitors and their business offerings. It mainly details the competitor, market value, annual run rate, customer profile, and solution overview. It allows sales teams to be aware of and pick out vital information about their competitors to prepare their pitches appropriately.

The competitor battle card helps you, a sales rep, be fully ready to face your target customers when asked how the product is better than the competition.

3. Question-Based Battlecards

Question-based battle cards have information about the product and market to prepare for any questions their prospects and customers could ask during sales. Depending on the type of questions that sales reps often get, the battle cards could be smaller compared to their competitors to enable them to handle customer questions effectively.

These documents answer questions that a salesperson will likely face when trying to sell their product and, importantly, enable the reps to have good conversations.

4. Comprehensive Battle Cards

Comprehensive battle cards are an all-encompassing sales document that covers many more details than other battle cards. Even though the battle mentioned above cards contain all the essential information about the products, the comprehensive battle cards contain even more detailed information about your products or services

5. Value-proposition Battle Cards

Value proposition battle cards contain essential information on target customers, qualifying questions, value proposition, opportunity registration process, and why you must choose the product or service. It states explicitly how customers can benefit from using their product or service.

6. Use Case-Based Battle Cards

Use case-based battle cards have information on applicable use cases of how the product could fit into customers’ needs and qualifying questions. It also contains scripts and templates that sales teams might need during customer conversations.

7. Partnership Battle Cards

Partnership battle cards highlight a company’s partnership’s crucial features and key differentiators, challenges, sweet spot, and qualifying questions.

What Are The Crucial Elements of Sales Battle Cards?

Sales Battlecards are important sales documents to enhance sales conversations and prepare the reps for better sales outcomes. Hence, you must include all the essential details or elements in the battle cards. We have identified all the crucial elements of a sales battle card to prepare you for sales success.

1. Information about Your Company/Product/Service

First, sales reps are brand ambassadors beyond just selling the products or services; hence, they must know about their company’s history, management, business categories, and geographic locations. Importantly, they must also be well-informed about the product features, benefits, USP, and other technical details.

Although most of this information is already on the company website, sales reps need to have this information memorized to improve the sales conversation and easily convince the client. Before you create sales battlecards, ensure you have all the above information ready.

2. Customer/Target Audience Profile

Who is your target audience? What do you know about them? Your sales battle cards should have the ideal facets of a buyer persona. It should specifically identify all the traits, needs, goals, pain points, interests, and current situations of your customers and target audience.

When you have complete information on your target audience’s business priorities, budget, preferences, etc., you can effectively speak to them in a way they can understand.

3. Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Your company’s product’s unique selling proposition is what makes it better than the competition. It’s a specific and clear benefit that sets your brand apart from your competitors and should entice your clients to choose you over others.

Your sales battle cards should clearly state your unique selling proposition to communicate what makes your product or company better than others and convince prospective customers to purchase a sales call.

4. Benefits for Clients

Your sales battle cards should clearly state the benefits of the product or services you are trying to sell. It forms a significant part of your sales battle cards and must be crafted to increase your customer base and boost sales.

5. Use Cases Applicable to a Client

A well-written sales battle card must include a separate section on how your product or service solves familiar clients’ challenges. A crucial thing that clients want to listen to during sales conversations is evidence of how your product has solved your client’s problems or helped them achieve their goals.

Instead of reiterating the benefits of your products, you should focus more on how your product has helped your other clients in the same industry.

6. Industry Trends

Sales reps must be aware of the trends revolutionizing their product industry. Hence, your sales battle cards must identify incumbent players, government policies, regulations, newer entrants, and other key trends to help your sales professionals better handle customer conversations.

7. Use real-life success stories

Nothing beats social proof when conversing with your clients. Give your clients real-life evidence of your existing customer’s success stories to motivate them to purchase.

8. Differentiating factors

Your sales battle cards must also state the key factors differentiating your solution from your competition. Since customers are mostly faced with many similar products, they always want to understand the key differences between them to make a decision. So ensure you do your in-depth research to stay prepared for unexpected questions to help close more deals.

9. Potential pitfalls

In as much as you want to avoid talking about your product’s weaknesses in the face of your competitors, you must prepare for questions regarding this from your clients. Hence, your battle cards must cover your product’s pitfalls and specifically state what reps should say in this situation.

10. Answering Counter Questions

The product and service market has become highly saturated. Hence, people are faced with similar products and services daily. When preparing your sales battlecards, include answer templates for potential counter questions that clients might have regarding product features, budget, and other factors during sales conversations.

How Do You Create an Effective Sales Battle Card?

To get the best results from your sales battlecards, here are the practical steps that salespeople and marketers must take.

1. Do an extensive research

The foundation of every effective sales battlecards is well-grounded research. It involves scanning the internet, websites, social media platforms, and other digital channels to find information, data, reports and analysis of the company’s industry news and trends, competitors business, products, and marketing and sales strategies, as well as customer research.

The goal of a battle card is to prepare your sales teams for sales success, hence, you have to do the work to get them to the desired level.

2. Analyze your competitors

It is not enough to research and store important information about your competitors. More importantly, you need to extensively analyze their product features, existing customers, pricing, sales and marketing strategies, and social media marketing approach. All this important information will be combined to create a concise overview of your competitors.

3. Customize Battle cards

Sales battlecards differ depending on the size, goals and objectives of a company and its sales teams. Hence, you need to always ensure that your battle cards are customized based on the set requirements and tailored to fit the exact situations.

4. Store the cards properly

Sales battlecards are important business documents that must be stored properly. For this reason, ensure that your sales battlecards are storable and retrievable using a common database such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive for easy access and use.

Importantly, you must also categorize them according to the purpose you have created them for using tags so salespeople can search for it easily.

5. Distributing battle cards

The next step is determining the best way to distribute your battlecards after creating them. Aside from creating these documents and saving them in a folder that will never be opened, you must ensure that every member of your sales team is fully aware of their existence so they can use them to support their sales strategy.

Additionally, if you have an existing battle cards that is updated regularly, keep your sales folks informed so they constantly stay ahead of trends. You don’t want your sales reps promising offers or mentioning benefits that you no longer offer. Aside from affecting professionalism, it can also significantly affect your brand reputation and credibility.

Sales Battlecards: The Conclusion

Sales battlecards are crucial sales document that prepares sales teams for better sales presentation, leave a positive impression on their clients, and importantly, increase the customer bases for higher sales. As a result, sales and marketing teams must collaborate to create well-researched, concise and valuable sales battlecards that help sales teams become better at their jobs.

Also since, it contains helpful information about the business, clients, industry, competitors and market trends, you must ensure that the battlecard is updated regularly and is easily accessible for salespeople. This way you can increase your sales team efficiency to boost sales.