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What is a sales battle card?
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To position account reps and sales teams for success, sales organizations must help them in understanding their customers and distinguishing their products and services in the marketplace. Part of that strategy involves creating and using sales battle cards.
This guide will explain the meaning of sales battle cards and why both sales and support teams need them. Furthermore, it will explore the process of crafting these cards by enablement teams to accelerate and optimize the sales cycle.
Learn about sales battle cards:
What is a sales battle card?
A sales battle card is a concise educational resource that empowers sales reps and teams to competitively position products and services, increasing customer acquisition. These cards encapsulate key messaging around competitive analysis, buyer personas, value propositions, handling B2B buyer objections, and more.
Using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales teams can enrich battle cards with real-time, first-party data about prospects and competitors, ensuring their messaging is informed and tailored for success.
information.
Why are sales battle cards important?
Creating battle cards for sales teams equips reps with the information they need for crafting customer pitches, proposals, and support decisions. The result is higher revenue projections, more closed-won deals, and better retention rates.
How do battle cards improve sales strategies?
Below are ways sales enablement battle cards help account reps and teams improve their sales strategies.
1. They equip sales teams with valuable buyer insights
These cards contain useful buyer personas or insights about the ideal target customers. Moreover, they highlight job challenges, pain points, and criteria of these buyers when shopping for new solutions.
With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, reps can go a step further by identifying and analyzing prospects who match these personas. Using advanced search filters, they can uncover key information like professional roles, interests, and recent activity—helping them refine their approach.
2. They highlight unique selling points and differentiators
Additionally, battle cards help sales teams understand their product or service’s unique selling points (USPs), value propositions (e.g., the solutions customers seek in a valuable solution), and key differentiators that set their business apart.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator complements this by allowing teams to monitor competitors’ activities—such as company updates or employee movements—offering real-time insights into how to refine differentiators.
3. They help new sales reps assess and pitch competitive advantages
Using the intel about buyer needs and a summary of product comparisons, sales reps can assess each prospect’s unique challenges to tailor a pitch highlighting competitive advantages.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps sales reps track prospects’ engagement with competitors, such as viewing relevant posts or following competitor companies, to further tailor their messaging.
4. They reduce buyer fears and support objection handling
Sales battle cards should also provide key messages and FAQs to assist account reps in overcoming common buyer fears and objections during their pitch and proposal process. For example, the cards can answer common questions about pricing in relation to leading competitors.
Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales representatives can be notified when a buyer expresses concerns or discusses challenges publicly, reps can proactively address these in their pitches.
5. They boost overall sales enablement and prospect engagement
Finally, sales battle cards provide tips that help teams to effectively engage prospects in meaningful conversations, propelling the sales cycle. For example, the card might feature a list of considerations for speaking with a prospect, such as showing genuine interest, understanding their industry, posing thoughtful questions, and avoiding jargon.
Sales teams can deepen this engagement by saving prospects to their profiles, tracking interactions, and staying informed about changes in roles or interests with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Different types of sales battle cards
Some organizations create multiple battle cards to equip reps for all scenarios.
Different types of sales battle cards can include:
Competitor-specific battle cards
In cases where a sales organization contends with several key competitors favored by prospects over their product or service, creating separate battle cards for each can be helpful.
However, small to medium-sized businesses can also create a short section on one card with a high-level competitive analysis. The larger the sales organization is, the more likely it will be to create more than one battle card – highlighting the key details sales reps need to handle objections and position their product or service ahead of leading competitors.
Product or service-specific battle cards
When a business has multiple products, services, or brands, distinct battle cards can equip sales teams with the right points to pitch each individually.
For example, if a sales organization has an enterprise product and a product tailored to small businesses, two cards would be necessary to cater to their ideal customer profiles (ICPs) or buyer personas.
Marketing battle cards
By creating these battle cards, marketing departments can better grasp the key branding messages used by competitors on websites and promotional materials to position their product or service in the marketplace and gain a competitive edge. Marketing teams could also share them with sales as supporting intel.
How to create effective sales battle cards
A lot of work goes into researching and creating the content to be used in sales battle cards. Below are steps to follow to get started.
Step 1: Identify and explain the target audience and goals
Start by researching customer profiles and information to facilitate reps’ understanding of exactly who the target audience is – from their age and geography, to their job title and responsibilities. Additionally, help salespeople understand a buyer’s psychographics, including fears, motivations, and interests.
Step 2: Gather relevant buyer insights and create personas
Once the research phase is complete, distill the most critical information onto the sales battle card, to give reps the details they need in a concise and scannable format.
Some sales battle cards include an outline of customer needs or criteria during solution research and a brief buyer persona section. Many sales organizations also create more comprehensive buyer personas as separate documents and train sales reps to use them for enhanced customer comprehension.
Step 3: Create a competitive landscape overview
Conducting a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) can also help sales teams understand how their product or service compares to leading competitors.
Provide high-level details on a sales battle card, while keeping a more detailed competitive SWOT analysis document available for teams to access when needed as for supplementary intel.
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Step 4: Highlight key differentiators and value propositions
Next, create a section that lists a product or service’s unique selling points and value propositions that distinguish them from leading competitors. It should be a quick, scannable list of key messages that sales reps can glance at on a call.
Some key messages to highlight in a sales battle card might include the following:
- A trusted and reliable brand
- 24/7 global customer support
- The largest network or customer reach in the country
- A fast connection or quick turnaround for client requests
- An affordable solution compared to other products or services on the market
Step 5: Offer objection-handling strategies
To help sales reps quickly address their prospects’ fears and key objection statements, collaborate with sales teams to devise answers to their most common questions. A list of three to five top questions and answers should fit easily onto a one-page battle card.
Step 6: Create a pricing grid
Finally, some sales battle cards include a section on pricing to explain how a product or service’s costs compare to competitors and what value prospects can anticipate from the product or service as part of those fees.
Sample sales battle card template
Use the sample sales battle card template below to structure one properly.
How to implement sales battle cards internally
A lot of work goes into researching and creating the content to be used in sales battle cards. Below are steps to follow to get started.
Collaborate with marketing and product teams
Take the time to interview sales, product development, and support teams to gather intel on details that should be included to help everyone succeed.
Train account and support teams
Host an in-person meeting to present and train all team members on how to use the sales battle cards. Discuss how the cards can be used alongside other sales tools, like detailed buyer personas or pitch decks, to streamline and enhance the sales process.
Incentivize sales reps to use them
Some sales organizations offer incentives, such as cash, gift cards, or non-cash rewards like event tickets or tech gadgets, to ensure reps use these sales tools to their advantage. We’ll discuss how to track that usage next.
Integrate them with sales processes and CRM systems
Explain how reps can use battle cards throughout the sales process in the training session. They can track card usage when inputting notes on sales calls in their CRM accounts. That way, sales leadership can see precisely when, how, and by whom the battle cards were used.
Gather feedback to improve them
Regularly gather feedback from sales teams to understand how they can be improved. In-person feedback meetings can be extremely helpful. Sales organizations can also send quarterly online surveys to uncover what sales enablement tools, like sales battle cards or buyer personas, are working well and how they can be refined to serve the team’s goals better.
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Measure their success and update as needed
After having sales reps monitor battle card usage in a CRM tool for a set time, assess if this impacts the sales cycle. Check for increased closed-won deals, shorter sales cycle, or higher rep pipelines compared to prior periods.
Create battle cards with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales battle cards provide customer insights and key messages for account reps and support teams, enhancing sales pitches and accelerating prospect movement through the sales cycle. The sales battle card instance in this post, along with the recommended steps for its creation, aids businesses in getting underway.
Using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator sales teams can gather real-time, first-party data about over 850 million professional users worldwide. This intel empowers the crafting of robust sales battle cards to develop stronger client relationships and generate highly qualified leads.
Advanced search and filtering tools on LinkedIn aid teams in identifying prospects and current customers who match their buyer persona profiles. This enables them to delve into their professional positions, interests, and challenges.
Additionally, sales reps can save those users to their LinkedIn Sales Navigator account profile to monitor their social media activity, like visits to a company page or posts about related products and services that can help them address their evolving needs and pain points.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator integrates seamlessly with CRM systems like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. This feature enables reps to track their use of sales battle cards throughout the sales cycle and keep their account data up-to-date, especially when a client changes jobs or gets promoted.
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