Business Based Battle Cards
Not Your Momma's Battle Cards
We've all seen the typical boring battle cards. They put your solution in the left hand column and list all the features down the page. A check mark or green dot tells the seller you have that feature or capability. The rest of the columns list our your competition and boxes are either checked or blank or they have a green or red dot indicating whether they have that feature.
So what!
Do we really want to get into feature battles? Is that how you want your sellers to sell? Have you ever seen a product with fewer features get selected? Of course you have. These stoplight charts often do more harm than good. They teach the seller to sell features vs. business value. People don't buy features, they buy the outcome of your product or service. The outcome of the product or service related to much more than features!
What if your battle cards actually allowed your sellers to tell a story about the competition which was factual and compelling?
Not Your Momma's Battle Cards.... Business Based Battle Cards
What if your Company Profile above provided interesting data such as:
Employee Data:
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Total employees,
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Median Employee Tenure,
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Employee concentration in key departments that make a difference to you customers such as support, service or consulting
Revenue Data:
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Current year revenue
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Revenue per employee (productivity)
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3 year revenue trend
Market Data:
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What markets are they strongest and why?
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What markets are they the weakest why?
Company History:
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How has the company performed over the last 10 years?
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Are they stable?
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Are they about to go bankrupt?
Acquisitons:
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Have they achieved growth via acquisition?
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Have they made multiple acquisitions?
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Are they any good at integrating acquisitions?
What if you gathered Intelligence and made some inferences which were confirmed in Glassdoor.com:
Revenue:
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Was most of the revenue growth attributable too acquisitions while organic revenue is in decline?
Risk:
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Does their company history, employee tenure and revenue trend make them a risky choice as a vendor?
Acquisitions
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Have they demonstrated the ability to successfully integrate acquired companies or have acquisitions disrupted even their core business?
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Is the evidence of this disruption?
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Does this growth strategy create additional vendor risk?
Strengths and Weaknesses can now be understood in the business context. They will include:
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Logical business deductions confirmed via Glassdoor
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Field gathered and confirmed intelligence
- Data correlated to company profile information
- And of course, capability data
Competitive Pricing as available rounds out our first battle card.
The second page of the Business Based Battle Card provides Recent News regarding the competitor, How They Sell and How to Position your strengths against their weaknesses. Trap Setting Questions are included which are both business and product based. Lastly, Wins and Losses are tracked and provided against the competitor.
The third page of our Business Based Battle Cards is often the most compelling. Gathering data from online sources can be very revealing. What employees will say about how the company actually operates will speak volumes. As a seller, you don' t have to bad mouth the company, the employees do a great job of this themselves. These comments often corroborate the Company Profile and Intelligence information. In this example you can see a Customer Success Manager telling prospective employees to "RUN"!!! In addition, high turnover is mentioned which confirms the short median tenure. "Frequent upheavals" confirms the struggles with so many acquisitions.
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The forth and last page of our Business Based Battle Cards tie together everything learned into a one or two stories which may be told about the competitor. I call it the Cause Effect Result or CER Analysis. Because this competitor has had public listing, de-listing and multiple sales to private equity firms, the effect on the company has been a thinning in support staff, cost cutting measure, poor supplier relations and frequent layoffs. The Result, courses are outdated, the support team is deemed unresponsive and when they do respond, they provide superficial answers. Why wouldn't they? How can support keep up with all the acquired products when costs are being cut, salaries and manpower are reduced. A "Bottom Line" summary of this competitor is provide to net things out at a high level.
Conclusion
If you are sending your sellers into battle and your not equipping them to fight your competition at the business level, you may get beat on features and if you competition is fighting at the business level, you may lose your deal and never know what hit you.
Deliverables:
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Business Based Battle Cards
Pricing:
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$10,000 per competitor
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Expenses billed at actuals