Battlecards

What a battlecard is

A battlecard is a single internal page about one competitor, written so that a salesperson who has just heard that competitor’s name on a call can find the right answer in the few seconds before they have to say something. One competitor, one page, no scrolling. It is a working document for your own people and it is never published.

It is not a competitor comparison, which is written for the buyer and has to be fair enough that a sceptic believes it. It is not a comparison page on your site, which is a public page the competitor will read. A battlecard says things you would not publish, including where the other firm is genuinely the better choice, and it is written in the plain language people use internally rather than the language of marketing.

When you need one

You need these when the same three or four names keep coming up and every salesperson answers differently. You need them when someone new joins and spends six months learning by losing. And you need them when a competitor has changed something — a price, an owner, a product line — and half your people are still answering as though it were last year.

You do not need a set of them if you have one salesperson and one competitor, because that knowledge is already in their head and writing it down changes nothing. You also do not need them if buyers rarely name anyone and the objections are about price, timing and risk instead; that is an objection handling document, which is one document rather than several and costs less.

What goes on the card

• How they win. The real reasons buyers choose them, stated without sarcasm. If the card is dishonest here, the salesperson stops trusting the rest of it.
• How we win. Two or three differences that are true, checkable and matter to this buyer. Not adjectives. Each one with the proof point that supports it.
• Where they are the better choice. The situations in which you should say so and walk away. This is the section that makes the card credible, and it saves more time than any other part of it.
• Three questions to ask. Questions that are fair, that the buyer can put to the other supplier, and whose honest answers happen to favour you. Better than a claim, because the buyer reaches the conclusion themselves.
• What never to say. The line someone in the business likes using that is inaccurate, out of date, or simply makes you sound frightened of them. Written down as a prohibition, with what to say instead.

Everything else — company history, funding, a feature grid — goes in an appendix or nowhere. A page that has to be scanned in ten seconds cannot carry a second subject.

What you get

One card per competitor. A single page each, in an editable document and as a printable sheet, in the same five-part shape so a salesperson learns where to look once.

The talk tracks. For each card, the two or three answers written as spoken sentences, short enough to say naturally rather than read out. These are what people actually use.

The review schedule. A named owner and a fixed date, quarterly, for checking every card against what the competitor is currently saying and doing. A battlecard nobody has checked in two years is worse than no battlecard, because it is confidently wrong and it is believed. The schedule is part of the delivery, not an afterthought.

A worked example

An illustration. A 16-person managed IT provider in a mid-sized Canadian city loses deals to two national firms and one local rival. Its salespeople each have private notes, and a call recording shows three different answers to the same question about after-hours support in one month.

Three cards get written from four salesperson interviews, six call recordings and the published material of each competitor. The card for the local rival says plainly that the rival is the better choice for a client under ten seats who wants the cheapest workable arrangement, and gives the sentence to say when that is the situation. The card for the larger national firm says they win on after-hours coverage, which is true, and pairs it with the one question worth asking: who answers the phone at two in the morning, and where are they. The what-never-to-say section retires a line about the national firm being “a call centre”, which was inaccurate and had been said in front of a buyer who used to work there. The cards are reviewed every quarter, and the January review is the one that catches the rival’s new fixed-fee package.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which names come up, how often, and what usually happens next. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Number of cards agreed before anything starts.
3. Interviews. Thirty minutes with each person who sells, separately, because they will not say the same things in a group.
4. Listening and reading. Recordings of won and lost calls if you have them, plus everything each competitor publishes about itself.
5. Drafts. First card within five working days for you to argue with, then the rest. Arguing with the first one is how the shape gets settled.
6. Handover. Final cards, talk tracks and a 45-minute session with the sales team, ending with the review date in a calendar and a name against it.

Two to three weeks for a set of three or four cards is typical.

What it costs

Battlecards are not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so the price is fixed in writing in CAD after the half-hour call. It depends mostly on how many competitors there are and how much is already known about them. Quarterly reviews can be quoted as a small standing piece of work or handed to someone in-house with the schedule and the template.

What happens next

Once the internal version is honest, the publishable one usually follows: a comparison a buyer is allowed to read, built from the same research but written to be fair. If the cards showed that the same objections arrive regardless of which competitor is named, the answers to those are a separate document. And a new salesperson needs more than a card, so onboarding material is where the rest of it goes. None of that is assumed. A set of battlecards is a complete piece of work on its own, and once it is in use the job is done.