Battle Cards

What are battle cards?

Internal papers called “sales battle cards” are short and easy to read. Sales teams use them as a quick reference during sales calls. They have essential details about the company’s goods, messages, and value propositions. Most of the time, they also look at competitors’ goods and decide how to position themselves against them based on their strengths and weaknesses.

Most fight cards are one page long. It’s set up like a table, with bullet points, lists, and short lines. Depending on what’s inside, it may also have charts and graphs to help make complicated information easier to understand.

Battle cards give sales teams the information and tools they need to answer customers’ questions and correctly set their goods apart from competing ones. They are an essential tool for sales teams to have on hand because they keep them aware and ready for interactions with customers.

Synonyms

• Sales battle cards
• Competitor battle cards
• Competitor profile

Why battle cards are essential for sales and marketing

For buyers, each sales meeting is somewhat unpredictable—you can’t be sure what the prospect will say, do, or need. Having a battle card on hand is a simple way to stay ready for dozens of situations, like using a cheat sheet for a test.

Battle cards help marketers remember the value proposition and message they want sales teams to share. They also ensure that the way the company’s goods are positioned against competitors is always the same.

Know Your Competitors

Battle cards are a valuable way to show competitive intelligence, which can be hard to read and understand. Because they focus on individual competitors, they are an excellent way for salespeople to learn more about their rivals.

Learn About the Product

Sellers can learn about their product’s pros, cons, and abilities by comparing it to others in the same industry. They can also get to know the company’s other products by using battle cards. Some battle card templates have sections for essential data, features, and benefits that help salespeople make better pitches.

Figure out your target audience.

The key demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits of a salesperson’s ideal customer are listed on battle cards. These cards show the problems the ideal customer has and how the company’s product or service can help. This way, salespeople can tailor their pitches to meet the needs and interests of each potential client.

Brand messaging that stays the same

Strategic sales tools, like battle cards, are essential for ensuring that a brand’s marketing and sales messages are consistent. Salespeople and marketers can effectively communicate the brand’s core messages to potential customers using the same language and key details from the battle cards. This keeps the brand’s identity, builds customer trust, and avoids sales discrepancies or misunderstandings.

Train the sales team.

Because they’re visual, battle cards are one of the easiest and fastest ways for new sales reps to learn about a product or service. They speed up onboarding, help reps remember what they’ve learned, and reduce the time they need to get to know the product or service before they can start selling it in real life. When it’s time for sellers to start cold calling or managing incoming leads, they can do so with confidence because they know they’ve learned it.

Getting ready for sales conversations and objections

There’s no way to know what customers will say or ask, but salespeople hear some objections more often than others. Battle cards have examples of common customer objections and the correct sales responses to help people have good conversations about the company’s products and services.

Different Kinds of Sales Battle Cards

There are three kinds of sales fight cards: competitive, marketing, and product.

Battle Cards for Products

Product fight cards help your sales team learn about the company’s goods by showing them things like

• the main features and perks
• problems that customers are having and how the product fixes them
• unique things that set them apart
• choices for price and packaging

It’s possible for a product battle card to only talk about one product, or it could compare several goods or use cases.

Battle Cards for Marketing

Marketing battle cards break down a competitor’s marketing plan by showing who they’re selling to and how they’re reaching those people. They’ll have details about the competitors, like

• their sales partners in the channel
• their plan to sell through multiple channels
• the types of businesses they work with
• how they run their business

The sales team mainly uses marketing battle cards to determine where their product stands compared to others (for example, a high-priced, high-quality business product vs. a low-cost alternative). This helps them talk about price and value.

Battle cards for the competition

As far as several cards, competitive fight cards are the best. They have details about your brand’s direct competitors in the same business, such as:

• services and goods provided
• good points and bad points
• information about the target group
• What people might say against you
• is how to compare the company’s goods or services to the competition’s
• comparisons of certain critical areas of value, such as “CRM integration.”

They have everything a salesperson needs to know about the industry and how to speak effectively in a sales conversation. You can also use them to play different roles, train salespeople, and guide them.

What Does a Battle Card Have?

Each fight card is unique. You can include or leave out certain parts depending on the product you sell, the people you want to buy it, your company’s sales goals, and the reason you’re using the fight card in the first place.

However, most fight cards have some or all of the following parts:

Details about the company

On almost all battle cards, the first few lines describe your business briefly, including its name, mission statement, and value proposition. This part helps sales reps determine what makes their company unique and how to place it in the market. This part doesn’t need to be very long. It only needs to show off the most important things about your business that make it unique.

Advantages of a Product or Service

You should also put information about the object itself on product battle cards, such as:

• Name of the item
• Important features and skills
• How prices are set
• How it works
• Verticals of industries
• Tools that work with or can be integrated with other ones
• Things that the product can’t do or signs that it won’t work well

Comparisons of Products

Today, battle cards are more like a review site like G2 Crowd or a page on your website that compares products. They have pictures instead of words. For example, “cloud-based,” “Salesforce integration,” and “customer support” are some of the critical performance and value areas that are listed in a table with three or four rows that show your product and its main rivals. Another part of some of them is a summary that shows how the company’s product is better than others in each area.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

This is where you answer the most common arguments that customers or prospects have that sales reps hear all the time. Some objections could be about the price, the product’s limitations, or the rivals’ features. Add a standard answer with a point that gets around each argument.

A description of the ideal customer

The person you want to buy from is shown in your ideal customer profile (ICP). This kind of customer gets the most out of your product or service and is more likely to buy something and keep buying from you. List the industry, company size, job titles, pain points, and goals.

Problems that customers are having

The “pain points” make customers want to find an alternative to your goods. People buying things right now have issues with their tools or processes.

For instance:

• Not enough help
• Hard to get in touch with
• Bad experience for users
• Expensive

Link every one of your pain points to a tool that can help you with it. That way, your sales reps will know which ones to show off during demos.

What Makes Them Different

Differentiating a product can be done in several ways: price, quality, market placement, features, customizability, and customer service. With your team, figure out each area where you are different and write them on your fight cards.

How much

If you use battle cards, a big part of your business is inbound and outgoing sales. This kind of company is usually in the B2B SaaS area, where prices aren’t always transparent.

You could put information about your price levels, model for users and seats, free trials, monthly and yearly subscription costs, and what comes with each plan on a fight card. Just put this together like a page on your website with prices.

Use Cases and Stories of Success

You don’t have to include whole case studies on your fight cards, but you should include proof that your product helps the person you’re selling it to.

As an example:

• “Our platform helped Company X boost their sales by 30%.”
• “Our tool told them they could report in 10 hours less each week.”

Your success stories should be specific to your business and focus on results your target customer can relate to.

How to Make Battle Cards for Sales

When making fight cards, the most important thing to remember is that not all the information will fit in one. Each one should be one page long, and its ideas should move smoothly from one subject to another. You’ll need to make more than one to give your sales team all the specifics they need.

A lot of people use sales card templates to make their own. Follow these steps to make your own and add your information:

Set goals for sales.

First, list the sales goals you want to reach with our fight cards. These should be able to be tabbed.

As an example:

• “Get 10% more people to buy product X.”
• “Get $1MM in new sales from the launch of our product.”
• “Raise sales by 15% in a new area.”

How you use the fight card will depend on your business goal. This is the best way to prepare your sales team for a new market: give them marketing or competition battle cards. Product fight cards are better if they’re part of your GTM plan.

Get information about the product

Talk to your product team and get important information about the things you’re selling. This will have things like

• what the product does
• how prices are set
• cases of use
• integrating
• things that make your goods stand out from others in your line
• things that make it different from other items
• limits
• USPs

Group the features and perks of a product by how they will be used. Make sure the battle card has distinct sections for each use case, for instance, if the sales and marketing teams can both use your product.

Look at your target audience.

Next, find out essential facts about your ideal buyer and put them in a list. These will be included:

• firmographic and demographic information, such as business and company size
• psychographic data, such as pain points, preferences, and hobbies
• the tech stack or tools they use now

But a buyer’s persona is a different document. On the battle card, you might want to include some basic information to help your sales team find suitable leads and make their sales pitch more effective.

Look at your competitors.

Please learn about your direct competitors’ goods and services, prices, target market, and what makes them different. This is very important if you want to make competitive battle cards that put your name ahead of the others. Suppose they find out how they sell to customers, such as their sales process, strategies, and methods.

Remember to keep researching because the market and your rivals may change.

Put together the information into a template.

Once you have it, put all the information you need into a sales battle card design. This can be a simple text file with parts for each data type or a template with pictures and graphs.

You can make templates for your cards in a few different ways:

• Making ones with your logo from scratch using Figma or Canva
• Using pre-made templates from your sales enablement tools that you can change to fit your needs

No matter what you do, make sure the style is effortless for the sales team to read and use. Separate each part from the others. For example, put a comparison of your company to a competitor on the left and a table for objections and answers on the right. Also, don’t fill up one page with too much. You can divide it into several pages with different categories if necessary.

• It’s best to give your fight cards color and depth.
• Make it easy to read the most essential parts of the text, like a unique selling proposition.
• Use green checkmarks and red Xs to clarify which items do what on lists of products.
• Use graphs, charts, and pictures to break up long blocks of text and help buyers understand complicated data.

Get the sales team ready.

Let your sales team use your sales cards once you’re done making them. You probably won’t have to teach reps how to use them (since they’re just for informational reasons), but you should use them when you train and coach in the future.

You can share and give out your fight cards in a few main ways:

• Make them easy to find by adding them to the company’s wiki or website.
• Please include them in the training you give to new employees.
• Please bring them to regular sales team meetings so everyone can practice and act out different situations.
• Use them as a guide when coaching sales reps to help them have better customer conversations.
• Please print out and give each salesperson a digital copy of the battle cards to keep at home or on their desk.

Keep track of how battle cards are used.

If you don’t use sales training software, you won’t be able to tell who is reading and writing them. If you do, you can look at document usage and engagement data to see how and when they are used.

You’ll know if reps use battle cards in their daily work, training, or having essential talks. With this information, you can teach others and improve your fighting cards. Also, ask your salespeople how the fight cards help them.

How to Use Battle Cards Most Effectively in the Sales Process

1. The battle cards should be short and easy for the sales team to understand, so stay away from industry buzzwords and hard-to-understand language.

2. Keep them up to date on the latest news about your goods, your competitors, and market trends.

3. You teach the sales team how to use not only their knowledge but also how to use it in real-life phone calls.

4. Ensure your fight cards are updated based on what the sales team tells you and how well they do.

5. Your battle cards should have information, case studies, and success stories to help your sales team understand the value proposition better and help them sell to potential customers.