Are you a sales battlecard fan? Because we sure are. Sales teams can greatly benefit from using sales battlecards  in their daily responsibilities. From reinforcing training lessons to empowering reps with the knowledge they need to speak with customers, sales battlecards will help your sellers overcome challenges and get through the toughest parts of the sales process. If made and used correctly, battlecards will ultimately enable your team to close more deals. Curious to hear more about how battlecards can help you boost sales? Here are some common questions and answers relating to sales battlecards to help get you there.

Sales battlecards can be useful for a variety of teams and leadership levels within your organization, but the main reason they are created is to assist sales representatives during actual sales conversations. Battlecards help sellers employ focused messaging on calls, answer questions with convincing evidence, and comprehensively address buyer objections.

In the simplest terms possible, a sales battlecard is a resource that summarizes information relevant to the sales process. To better understand what a sales battlecard is, it might be useful to clarify what it definitely isn’t. A sales battlecard is not a lengthy document that requires a lot of time to read and process - it should be a high-level summary of key points. In practice, it resembles a flashcard a lot more than it does an elaborate report. A sales battlecard is also not an instruction manual or a conversation crutch. If your sales reps are floundering helplessly about during conversations with customers, they likely need additional support; battlecards are not a substitute for sales training and onboarding. Training sales reps to engage with prospects just got a whole lot easier with Attention. Attention enables sales reps with real-time coaching and suggests battlecards specific to the conversation at hand. When your individual sales reps start to sound more competent and professional, your entire organization benefits, so don’t miss out on this real time conversation intelligence software.

While there is no hard rule on what battlecards should include, they typically compile information to accomplish two main goals - delivering accurate information (factual) and facilitating engaging conversations with prospects (enabling). The former will require information such as your company overview, figures and statistics, company strengths and weaknesses, market approach, facts on competitors, and pricing. Enabling information will include guidance on how to identify leading competitors, a list of questions to ask prospects, answers to common buyer questions, objection handling strategies, and so on. For inspiration on competitive battlecards, enablement teams should go beyond the content on the internal drive and take a look at resources like your competitor’s social media pages, review websites, forums, and news articles.

Think clear, not crowded — simple, not over-formatted. Don’t waste space on content that is not meaningful, and don’t get too fancy with the organization of the card itself. Ask your sales reps for advice on what templates and styles they found most easy to read and interact with. As a general rule, keeping battlecard templates direct and to the point is the way to go, so please don’t invest excessive time on formatting decisions. Your team’s time would be better spent curating and updating battlecard content!

The short answer: it depends. The style, formatting, and length of battlecards will affect the amount you need to create, as will the amount of information you need to include for your particular company’s situation. However a general rule is that it’s preferable to create one comprehensive battlecard for each relevant theme rather than break up one subject into several incoherent cards. So rather than focus on an exact number, prioritize the inclusion of all relevant sales enablement content and take measures to ensure it is organized in an intuitive and cohesive manner.

One of the most common sales battlecard mistakes is neglecting to keep them current. Don’t treat outdated battlecards as a harmless oversight; having inaccurate information on cards is a serious problem that can sour seller-buyer relationships down the line. Buyers trust sales reps to provide them with the most updated information available; if your team is consistently citing battlecards with factual errors on them, it’s inevitable that buyers will lose trust in your company and move on to your competitors. 

There’s a lot to say about how to encourage your sales reps to interact with sales battlecards, but the big idea is to keep battlecards relevant for sellers and make them as simple as possible to use. One way to make battlecards more readily available is to adopt technology like Attention, an AI-powered tool that integrates with your communication platforms to give sales reps access to specific battlecards during sales calls using voice-activated cues. To make sure battlecards stay relevant, nurture a company culture of active participation in sales enablement content improvement and actively seek out your sales reps’ opinions on the state of your sales battlecard collection. Use their feedback to update battlecards as needed. Fine-tuning your organization’s sales battlecards and accompanying sales enablement strategy will take some time, but it will be well worth it once you start to feel the effects of their use on sales outcomes!