“Sales Card” or “Battle Card?”
Product Marketers Often Blur What Should Be a Clear Distinction Between These Two Terms.
It’s not uncommon that I hear from Sales and others in the organization including Product Marketers that we need a “Sales Card” or “Battle Card.”
“Hey, we really need a battle card to tell us how to position our offering,” or “Can we get a sales card on us versus Competitor X?”
Just the way the items are asked for tells a lot about the lack of understanding between the two terms and the fact that these two terms represent similar but very different sales tools.
Sales Card – A Sales Card is a higher-level soup-to-nuts abbreviated version of all things important for sellers to know about our offering and how to position it effectively in the marketplace. The Sales Card does not focus on one particular vendor but it may have guidance on beating the overall competition. However, this part of the Sales Card is very limited as the Sales Card covers a lot of ground. And did I mention that a well-designed and effective Sales Card is 1 page (front and back at most) or 2 slides if done in PowerPoint?
Battle Card – A Battle Card is designed in a similar abbreviated format as above but instead of being all things about your offering, it’s about your offering as it relates to Competitor X’s offering. The Battle Card pulls in competitive analysis and learned insights to help your sellers know where and how to position your offering directly against the competitor’s offering. That’s it. It does nothing more than that.
By the way, here’s a tip. Use a Sales Survey (see our Gaining Real Insights from Sales post) to help you identify the competitors that your sellers are coming up against with regularity. It’s possible to pull similar information from Salesforce or other CRM tool but I’ve found that less than helpful in the past.
As a Product Marketer, David has successfully launched products, services, solutions and platforms across a number of disciplines in the technology industry. David’s passion for Product Marketing and his eye for seeing how Product Marketing can lead to even stronger business outcomes led him to bring his expertise and knowledge to Shoot the Curl Marketing.