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Create mark adoption

hey everybody welcome to another sales hacker webinar I'm psyched for this guys I'm your host today Colin Campbell I'm the director of marketing at sales hacker I hope you if you're a regular on the webinars you know me by now today we actually have something that you the sales hacker community asked us for it because here's what's happened here's what happened a couple months ago a little while back we had my friend Ellie who's the CMO at crayon on and she talked about how to make a really really great battle card and if you don't know crayon it's a competitive intelligence sales enablement platform and it's awesome what happened during that webinar we were talking about how to make great battle cards and we got all these questions about you know from from you from the audience like I've got great battle cards but my sales team just isn't using them like how do I make sure that we get some adoption going here and then it actually sticks so what we figured we'd do is bring back crayon to talk about battle card adoption so you know what you signed up for it but just as a reminder that's what we're talking about today there's a five-step playbook that we've got for battle card adoption and I'm joined by Lauren croissants key did I get it right yes Lauren Kazansky she's the senior marketing manager and lead sales enablement as well at crayon so Lauren thanks for being here yeah absolutely always on vacation so she's you know she ties me to talk about adoption today super psyched to chat with the sales hacker community I'm psyched too and so what what I want to do a couple things before we dive right in first of all everybody go down to the bottom of your screen I'll give you a minute click chat and then you'll see a little box pop up and then where it says blue that little blue bubble thing make sure the little blue bubble says all panelists and attendees and that way you guys can have side conversation talk about what you're hearing you can ask questions you can see the questions other people are asking you can help each other get answers let's make this a real conversation right you're in the live version for a reason you know you can watch the recording later let's be here let's talk about sales battle card adoption okay the other thing I want to do is just remind everybody that we are recording it and you'll get recording later if you need to step away share it with all your friends hey Thomas from Dubai that's cool my wife's going to Dubai in a little while couple months yeah I'm excited I came jealous I can't go over there okay and then I also if we can I want to get a sense of who's here with us today so we're gonna launch a poll up in a second that's us so yeah who are you what I just want to get a sense of who's in the room with us so that we can cater our conversation just for you I know my answer couple more seconds to answer if you got to think about this that's a little weird but alright we're gonna close that poll I just want to see who's here maybe you guys are curious too I mean should be should be applicable to all these audiences I think so okay he's bred interesting so not a lot of STRs or AES a fair amount of sales enablement folks here in the right place a bunch of frontline sales managers also the right place 22% marketing and a couple of ups perfect perfect now we can make sure our conversation is just the right amount of helpful for everybody cool thank you for that all right we're gonna dive right in remember to use the chat box talk to each other talk to us no more chitchat from me Lauren take it away awesome thanks so much great introduction in your great height man : thanks again for coming everyone super psyched to talk to you about battle card adoption so you know before I dive into the playbook let's let's just level set here you know what our battle cards and why do we use them well the biggest reason is that because deals are getting more competitive than ever we're seeing tons more competitors out there sales reps on the call you guys live this day in and day out and when we turn to the data on competitive deals so this is from the 2020 state of competitive intelligence report it's a yearly industry report that we put out every single year and what we found was that out of the over 1,000 respondents from sales and marketing backgrounds 90% of those respondents said that their businesses had become more competitive in the last three years so overwhelming majority said you know they're seeing more and more competitors every single day is becoming tougher and tougher to win those deals but on the flip side of that for the people that are doing it well that are doing this stuff really well we found you know their secret sauce is sharing competitive intelligence every day and those who are sharing every single day those respondents were 2 times 2x more likely to see revenue increase so you know I think it really speaks to you know a competitive intelligence is fresh when it's actionable that's when it's at its most effective and you know putting that fresh actionable competitive intelligence into battle cards is really the strongest vehicle for it so that's really what the data set is about that on the flip side of that - before we join Lauren and I were talking about how bad it could be if your battle card is wrong we're going to get into a little bit that later but I'm sure the audience is like fully onboard that good battle card consistently well done absolutely see I really is don't know what a battle card is figured most you do because you're here today but let's just like right let's do a definition so a battle cards it's super popular tool for sales teams typically typically created by the sales enablement or marketing folks like myself and their goal is to help reps you know really overcome those compile objections at every new stage in the sales cycle so maybe you got a quick dismissed battle card at you know on your initial call just kind of those quick hits to knock a competitor out right away but maybe you know getting further down into a deal maybe you're kind of in a feature battle maybe there's something a bit more detailed for you but ultimately what a battle card is for is to help a sales rep win more deals that's what it's for and they're super useful because battle cards are probably the most tactical expression or like tactical translate of competitive intelligence so you know there's so much that's out there that competitors and everything that's happening in the market you know what kind of even just so many examples here like what kinds of marketing campaigns or your computer's running there any pricing and packaging changes any significant messaging changes new product reviews job postings there's so much out there you can't possibly just funnel all that to a sales rep that would not be useful you want to take all of that and you boil it down basically into a battle card that reps would find super useful and then they can get what they need right away and battle cards you know can have a huge impact like similar to the sad I shared about you accessing your revenue when you're sharing competitive intelligence daily when folks do battle cards super well it can have a really a big impact and obviously part of doing it super well is getting sales to actually adopt your battle cards and getting them to use them so just a quick example here from a Lego you know they rolled out battle card super well you know they were able to you know create them using best practices they were able to you know get everyone on board get them get the reps to adopt and their their win rate doubled over all their competitive win rate but the win rate against their top competitor that they were constantly losing to triple to 95% so they really yeah amazing right they really make a massive difference when they're done well but it can be hard to do them all as we as what we're here to talk about stage that's pretty epic and the other thing to think about is even if you come up with a beautiful battle car that has just the right amount of information that's up to date and you roll it out well chances are that I don't know if any like there are a couple ATS on this call so you probably feeling on this you've had some bad experience with with battle cards in the past so it's not like the Elkhart you've been given as bad it's that you as a rep may feel that battle cars in general just not that useful sales enablement doesn't quite get me you know and so like you're not just pushing adoption of the new thing you've created you're kind of pushing adoption of well you like changing a habit right or changing a view coolness which is why the rollout of oligo and like what you're gonna talk about today is so critical yeah absolutely and actually that tees up the first part of the PlayBook perfectly but that's great so the first thing so before I get into the playbook you know what is actually the problem here right like okay cool like battle cards are awesome that's what you're saying to me you're saying they have all this no win rate impact but you know why isn't everyone using them well most vampires just suck like just gonna say straight-up there's a lot of reasons for it but you know kind of the chief among them are the ones I listed here and I'm gonna really go through these and take through let me get into the playbook but first often they're just they're kind of poorly made a lot of people like to do walls of text so not great we'll get into that they're often difficult to find they don't really fit with the sales reps workflow sales is you know always looking for them they're often super difficult to measure so you know how do you know what's working or what's not often they're created with no sales feedback or input which calling you teed up super nicely and that's what I want to talk about first probably the most important part of this whole thing again and you also mentioned inaccurate outdated also an issue and just plain not rolled out properly so it's really a combination like it's kind of just like a perfect storm of making sure that Rexel never use your power cards shout out to Bruce in the chat who's taking full ownership and saying it's his job to change the experience I think something that happens is sometimes people blame the reps or they're just kind of getting to complainy mode maybe a little defensive like I created this perfect thing and put it out there and it's everybody else's fault that they're not yeah you're right yeah killing it Bruce so let's talk about the adoption playbook right is not even just for battle cards I think adoption for sales reps like whether it's a tool or any piece of like collateral it's just a messy process because there's like humans involved oh there's a lot of new ones and so I'm gonna try to like break this down into five parts and you know make it actionable help you to navigate the delightful mess of the adoption book cool so let's go through each of these steps so I got some playbook we're gonna get sales to use them love them and when what which is the most important thing so first you know we want to we want to talk we want to build together - you established a partnership between sales and marketing or sales and sales enablement who's ever building the playbook excuse me building the battle card we want to make them awesome follow those visual best practices making our battle cards look great put in the exact right information make sure the information hierarchy is there then we also when you integrate with the sales workflow making sure that we are giving sales what they need that that it actually fits into their workflow into their day shadowed again - Bruce who's like it's not coming on us to help help sales here not the other way around earning our sales reps trust which is a big part of battle cards in any type of competitive collateral but you know I'll get into that and then measure and iterate you know measuring success or lack thereof and iterating on objective metrics and feedback weight build together here we go so this is the first thing I really calling you you teed up nicely is really making sure that in the beginning before you even build a battle card sales and marketing or sales and sales enablement have that partnership and they start building these together because I think what often happens is that a marketer or sales enablement person will build something in a vacuum they'll build you know about art and being like this is awesome like I'm crushing it this is amazing a hero of the sales work often um you create something that no one asks for this example who came up with that you know so yes so the micros example that I use for you guys today [Music] Cheetos lip balm this is a real thing I think it was in like the late 80s early 90s an example of okay you know probably a few marketers or a few product people were like yeah this is a great idea that's just like not anyone about it or maybe told themselves the story of you know the market versus reality right and I think that's some kinds of you know you know us marketers or sales enablement folks can do is like hey like you know this is all the information they need this is gonna be great this is how they're gonna use it but not asking sales about it and you create this thing that they just don't find useful and that they've never asked for you end up with essentially I will tell me I had a lot of examples but something Colin but I decided to do Cheetos lip balm I I think it's the most memorable so gross so yeah definitely you can kind of imagine what exactly what it would be like it's super gross Steve Williams says pop rocks toothpaste question mark which also are necessarily bad so on this yeah I kind of don't want to know on this topic of building together you share a little bit of what that looks like like is it the usage at is it like one kickoff meeting and say hey we're gonna build this give me your feedback now or like how is it how iterative is this process so let's start with the first stop so I think the first step is just getting feedback right like so so we have existing battle cards like right now and you're like yeah these need an overhaul looking to like you know revamp here getting feedback directly from sales is so important so you want to figure out hey like what do you think of this battle card what's an ass like pointed question like what's not working like get really specific you know what what certain sections aren't useful to you are there certain things that you've said you use it on a call and didn't really resonate with a prospect what's missing here you know are we missing some you know product comparison tables or feature comparison tables we missing you know reviews like what are we missing and also like how awesome just like how often they use it it's better to have usage like a view metrics which we will discuss later because you want that objective metric because sometimes they might want to make you feel better and then like I use it all the time and they don't but most of my experience sales reps tend to be fairly honest Bunch pretty straightforward with their feedback um just understanding how often and they are using battle cards you know I'm just getting that overall feedback to be like hey like you know where do we stand like what is the perception of battle cards right now if you don't have all the guys right now I think just getting feedback on like if you have any type of competitive collateral like maybe got a one-pager matrix a deck whatever it is because that feedback can still be good context to apply to build you know to your battle cards I think so after your feedback you want to interview your brass and the idea here is to really you really want to dig deep into how you know reps are actually handling these competitive objections right like you know what you know okay who are you running up against the most in deals is a competitor XYZ are there certain questions that you know that they struggle to answer so like an example I guess would be like if your competitor has 24/7 customer service or something on a customer support let's say like and you don't but you have some other things and you see that during your interviews you see that like reps are struggling to answer that then that's really indicative of you know something you want to put in your battle card so actually to the next point is like after all of your interviews you want to surface those key themes that those common themes that you have between all your interviews and your anecdotal date I would say so you know if you find like the 24/7 customer support example right you find that they either struggle to answer that or that all of them have different answers for it which is still a dick it was like okay this is a problem because we can't all be saying different things so being sure that you surface those themes and then we'll help you focus your your creation of battle cards and it will feel less daunting when you start to create them so in terms of timing what do you just do this when you set out to create battle cards because you made a point earlier that it's important that the battle card is always up to date right and I assume it would also be important for us to be getting the sales teams feedback on a regular basis do you have like a monthly sit-down with them to talk about battle cards or how do you do it so I would say like so in this particular context that we're talking about this is like hey I'm building battle cards and I'm gonna get everyone check them so that's right and it should you know hopefully you have a you know you can establish that kind of culture and your sales and working org that feedback is constant and and sought out I would say the easiest way is to really give them the ability to comment directly on battle card so whether you're using the tool that maybe you're using you know if you said use a Google lock like whatever to you know give them the ability to comment directly on there and like just give that feedback because that's real time yeah so what's real time and also like you don't have to do this like quarterly like time to update the battle cards and it's miserable like no one likes it I do think even if you have constant feedback if you like establish that process and that feedback loop I would very much encourage um I would very much encourage maybe like every few months just in maybe slightly even repeat this process again cuz even if you're getting constant feedback every now and then it is useful to be like hey like let's let's sit with the sales reps let's understand that you know let's make sure everything's going well yeah definitely sorry go ahead oh nothing I'm sorry yeah that makes sense so so it's like iterative feet like a real-time feedback loop because crayon reps are just commenting right on your battle cards yeah but then every couple months you sit down and like you have an in-depth conversation what about these works what doesn't exactly we're not really competitor those are kind of like some signals to be like yeah also get in on sales rep calls I love listening to sales calls actually it's super fun this tells me I'm a marketing person but I would say you know after you do your interviews you want to listen in on calls with you know we're gonna be competitive you know have some of your rep pals put you on a competitive call so you can listen in and the purpose here is to compare well you want to compare your results from the call like what you hear on the call to what you just did and what you heard in the interview is because sometimes when you're asking you're asking interviewing a rep you're getting like their perception often which isn't necessarily wrong or anything but you know perception is you know a little bit different so you can actually you know if you're on the call you can actually hear and hear it for yourself of how prospects are asking questions about competitors and how reps are themselves answering those questions and again similar with the interviews surface just common themes and pain points and you know cross-reference them with the interviews you know again either common themes that cross or maybe there's some new themes that have come up that especially if you're listening on the calls it could be new themes that maybe reps don't actually realize as a problem and they didn't bring up an interview so just a really good way to round out that perspective okay so let's say you create the battle cards you know we're gonna go into a little bit creation best practices but we jump a little bit ahead in terms of the build together piece and a great way to you know drive that adoption is just simply host some trainings I think you know especially if you're doing battle cards for the first time in your organization and maybe if you have like a less experienced SEAL team doing it in person training can just be super helpful you know it can really you to dive deep almost like a demo like showing them how to use the battle card but I would say that's key here is selecting you know one or two reps as your co-presenters and then like I said like we've established that partnership in the beginning with the sales reps right so it's like you know they are your co-presenters they are your partners in this battle card you know initiative and they're really your champions right like you know you guys have champions when you're you know and as prospect on your calls these reps are that you'll present with are your champions and will help you know drive adoption get get their fellow reps super psyched about battle cards I'd also recommend some role-playing that which very common in sales trainings but you know some whole playing exercises using the pedal cards can be super helpful just because it gives a you know gives like a real view of you know how to use them and just very straightforward so listing trainings always good I love that you said it's like a normal product demo because the more I listened to you and Ellie you teach me about paddle cards the more I think of them as as a product so if you sell any kind of product or service think about how much work you have to do to get people on boarded that's in your customer success team and your support team or service whatever it is is spending a lot of time there's a whole onboarding there's a whole process built around that and you know if the product is bad then the experience is bad so if you think of your battle cards and your rollout as a product for your sales team it's really good question yeah because really like what you're doing is at the end of the day you're not creative I'm not creating these for myself I mean sure it's my job but like it's not I'm not using them the sales are they are the consumer the user they're the buyer you know whatever it's it's really for them so deeply understanding you know what their needs are um it's just so important to create a battle card slash product that is gonna solve their problems and fill that need so yeah I think that's a very question night you know I definitely think about that way cool I like that I think of these webinars as a product to by the way I mean yeah no more for folks that are a bigger company so if you can't have like you're kind of in a more enterprise-e organization maybe you have multiple sales teams you know multiple multiple sales teams and rolling anything out is like kind of a big deal I recommend just running a pilot pick your pick a sales team maybe usually kind of the smaller ish the better just so you can have like that tight feedback loop but yeah it's like a sales team to really just pilot your battle cards test them out still you know interview and do all the stuff I said before but rolling out to a certain just a small sales team set some clear goals so maybe it's you know upping your win rate which we'll get into maybe it's like usage just you know set some guidelines there and just iterate on feedback and in the results that you get from that team because I think you know again there's a few like you know really positive things that come out of this right there's one that you just get that really tight feedback loop Chris you're working with a small sample size and you can just kind of like create you can move a bit faster in a large organization but also it's really kind of like an internal case study for the sales teams because it gives you some success 2.2 so that they're more encouraged yeah it builds your credibility especially if you're like at a really big organization and like maybe you don't know everyone on the sales team and like you're the marketing / sales enablement person you're like hey use these people like all right I guess you know having you know a sales team being like hey you know we use these for you know X amount of months we use these for two months here are the results you know and have them I guess I'm like they're you your champion right right they're selling it internally to the rest of the organization so pilot can be a really it might sound like you're like might be I was just battle cards like a whole pilot but I think if you're in a big org it's really worth it to like kind of slow down a little bit because it will pay off for you in the long run beautiful alright so building together and then so you have in this make them awesome section this is a sneak peek if you haven't seen part one with Ali this is a sneak peek we're just gonna fly through this really quickly because if your product is crap it doesn't matter how hard you try to get people to adopt it it has to be good so there's just a couple quick examples like good bad and then we're going to move on to the adoption stuff yeah perfect right like make them good in the first place if you make something that's crap like what's even the point so let's just go over some like quick best practices again we got watch part one there's also a blog post on the sales hacker site about building battle cards so you know we reviewed those Sunday you want to start just by building your foundation um you know so if you're starting to build up battle cards whatever exists internally like scoop up all that competitive information so whether it's a competitive analysis with it you've done it or maybe you know someone else in your org has done it get those takeaways and analysis any kind of landscape reports or market landscapes and you can put a profile anything that is any competitive in nature just kind of like bring that all together because it's just going to give you like a nice base to understand you know what might you want to include in your battle card um but as we know you know you want to build a foundation right but it's not static things happen in the market really quickly and really fast so good you want to establish a process to just track the intelligence going forward so you know you have your foundation and then you say okay like you want to make sure that you're monitoring your competitors across you know you know their digital footprints so if there's you know what kind of marketing campaigns are they running there are significant messaging changes on their website that's something that's going to be it has to be boiled down and put into a battle card because clearly they're shifting position you know monitoring new product reviews that they get or even like job postings right you know if you see you know a job posting for your competitor and like a certain maybe it's last certain type of you know product manager or something like I can tell you a lot about a company's strategy and where they might be going and could make its way out into a battle card so just making sure you're tracking those Intel types going forward so what's actually like include in the battle card so these are like the typical things that you would include like what I would recommend starting with um so I would say what I would say here is just for the sake of time um absorb it for a few seconds but if you want to really get into this I put the link to the last webinar in the chat so you can go watch that is this example though this visually just the layout and the display of this is this this is a good example yeah it looks pretty good yeah just absorb this for a minute differential key differentiators warning signs all this stuff really includes important really important to include a novel card here we go formatting best practices so again it's actually the same example but yeah so I think the most important thing here is making sure that it's just very digestible right because sales rep is on a call with the prospect and that can be like hold on and like you don't go through a bunch of things it needs to be digestible and visually you know bullet points at your friend and you can see here like this is super visual you can see like you know videos you can see images you can see colors and text so that your eye is drawn to important information so just keeping it very very visual very digestible short to the point is super important and each component like I went over in the previous slide you know competitor overview things like that that should all have its own section kind of like you see there shouldn't be it shouldn't be like this long document like the example you have that do not do this exam yeah exactly and actually will go into this example right so again this is an example of a good one right and I already kind of threw it but highly visual right lots of videos lots in I would say what's different here is also battle card being framed for sales reps right like so they're actually positioned you know it has you know soundbites things a salesman actually say and isn't sort of written like some robot which i think unfortunately a lot of you know sales enablement marketing people like myself okay let go this is the information not like here's what you actually say on the call so making sure it's totally framed for your sales rep were you sir and then just finally some third-party data is always great to include and reference so I think like G to crowd trust radius if you have great reviews there and maybe your competitor does not those are always really good things to reference on your call because third-party data you know it's it's you know case studies are good right but they're made by you and obviously it's a little biased third-party data is always good to like kind of include in there okay here's a bad one from Cooley I need Silicon Valley fans in the house I'm sure yeah so good so this is example of a really crappy battle card um there's like very few bullets there's just kind of a wall of text going on there's not like a lot of variation in colors so it's just kind of like look nothing really stands out if you can actually see it's also multiple pages page one of six there's no reason to have a six PayPal card ever um that's about a book yeah exactly just look at that point and then again this is not a tall frame for sales reps it's very like you know bit robotic not really about sound bytes and what a rep might actually say yeah the conversation exactly it's not conversational based at all and also updated pricing you can see this from 2016 surely the pricing is different at this point so we'll talk about outdated information but that is definitely you know a massive massive issue of battle cards all right we got we got through make them awesome now what will will slow down a bit and dig into the rest of these good actually I have a couple really good questions I want to throw this feels like a good time okay okay so Steve asked one of the things Steve said is back when we were talking about interviewing sales reps he said you know one of the things I hear is that people have trouble actually finding the battle cards so on the topic of integrating with sales workflow where do you put them because you said it's not like you can't just send it as an attachment an email right no you can't thank you actually yeah so yeah you should be your battle cards and this is exactly what we're about to talk about is your battle cards need to be integrated entirely with your sales reps workflow so basically where your reps spend most of their time actually I'll just dive into it this is for you Steve so you know I get this all the time is like hey where are those battle cards and um you know marketers and sales they look at we do this all the time like oh I just sent it to you but blah and I'm not dogging on the reps here it's the opposite you know it's incumbent on us say no no like we're gonna make sure that this is easiest for you one use case like problem I often see and that I've experienced in the past is you know maybe you know you're on the marketing team or sales Nabal team and you guys use like confluence right or you use a wiki like tetra one of those and you're like okay this is where the ballot cards gonna live but if your sales team like does not really use the wiki like you shouldn't put it there because that's for you it's this isn't for you right it's for them so so so if if a rep is spending 80% of their time in salesforce each with them there right if they happen what about an outside rep this is actually a question we got from Lori because we're talking about like if you are on the phone with the prospect and you have the ability to have a screen up that they can't see you can reference a battle card really quickly have you ever had or heard stories from people who have outside reps like how would you use a battle card if you're in the field yeah so again it's still the same you are still accessing a CRM you're still accessing you know a platform if you're able to access that via mobile just you know putting putting that there is you know I think it's kind of the same right it's still you know you're accessing battle cards where you spend most of your time even you know if you are so you also like you know make sure it's mobile or something like that is also really helpful if you're like literally in the field and you don't have your computer and you have like your phone making sure you can just access you there as well right so it may for the outside rep it may be that they just have to study it beforehand a little bit more because they probably want to have it printed out like in front of you in the meeting like yeah no that's fine that's probably my fault for asking a crack like wording Lori's question not well Steve says that Steve says field reps could get tattoos or the battle cards and just like you know put it on your tattoo it on your palm it's a good idea Steve so yeah so in general about you know making sure that you're fitting into the sales reps workflow is you know accessing battle guards and make sure that reps can just access like you said where you spent 80% of your time so yeah they're not using your wiki like they don't care they're not kind of what like two reps are gonna bookmark that get them in Salesforce or any whatever CRM using HubSpot sugar yeah um sales enablement platforms are good too I know everyone uses them but you know if you have like a big seismic or high spot definitely a good option to keep them there too if that's where the reps are more comfortable accessing that information or you know even slack or chat it's not my personal thing but if you know reps are spending a lot of time and slack you can also keep them you know store them there as well probably a little less common than the other two um but definitely an option and then I think another way to make to make it easy to make it you know to integrate more the workflow is really you know enable reps to give you like Intel from the field right so maybe they're you know at our conference or something and there's a one-pager that your competitor is giving out and you know they can you know easily like I append that to a battle card or append that like you know send that send that to you in some way that you know gets the battle card updated because you also it's not just about finding what's on you know your competitors digital footprint it's also finding you know you know what reps are hearing out there in the field whether it's like literally in the field that you know sales meeting or you know out in um you know a certain event or something I'm getting that Intel from them is also really valuable because they're just hearing things that we're not finding right speaking of okay speaking of availability of information yeah this might be it this is a good topic time to ask Kirsty's question I'm gonna try to rephrase this Kirsty so bear with me so Kirsty says that she works for a large multinational corporation big legal department working hard to make sure that they comply with all the applicable legislation and what she has seen is that the information they use to discuss competitors with prospects needs to be available in the public domain but the terms of conditions on company websites often prohibit the use of that information for competitive reasons so what they end up doing is inventing a fake company like imagine company a where XY and z are the features of the product and their service structure is you know ABC and then the the the prospect is left like having to read between the lines and try to figure out what company a really is so her question I guess this is a long question and I apologize but her question is basically are other people just kind of avoiding the legal department like what workarounds are there for doing this in a compliant way but also having information that's useful yeah actually you know I'm not like I'm not a legal person you know I don't open all the legalese but I mean anything you know that is available publicly you know even if it is on their website you know because that all cards are internal like you're not you know taking something from their website and you know making it public right you're you're doing this is all internal so I would just say you know anything that is you know public on not even just on their website but also like I think a good example is like reviews on like gee to crowd or like a trust radius thing like those are totally public that is there and also offers a great source of competitive intelligence so yeah I guess that's mostly what I would say there I can dive into some legalese later for courtesy but I think that no that's a great question I guess that they may be one distinction is that when you create a battle card you're not giving it to the rep saying here are the exact things you can tell prospect about your competitor the goal of the battle card is to educate the rep so that they can ask good questions not to just be sharing everything that they know openly necessarily right it's more like it's really like handling the competitive objection and it's also just like the way to like steer conversation yeah you know what I mean like and actually what I think is a really interesting thing and we didn't get into it earlier but I think a really useful thing for a battle card is also being able to tease out when a competitor isn't deep bill but a prospect doesn't share that with you there's a lot of data you put in a battle card is like hey like you know a prospects warning signs right like they might ask if someone asks about an X type of integration you can bet this competitors in the deal because that's what they have and I think that is a very useful thing in battle cards because often like a lot of prospects and you know reps on the call probably a familiar with this that like they like a process is always going to just tell you that they're looking at a competitor you can safely assume that they are but you know if you hear certain questions you can kind of like tease out in your head you know if your competitors in the deal and then it will help you kind of like steer the conversation I love that that's a really insightful way to use them I hadn't even occurred to me to be honest probably everybody else here is like yeah yeah oh that's cool hopefully that was helpful Kirsti yeah hopefully you know my email addresses at the end of this so happy to take it offline Chrissy and me and we can chat you're not layers your mileage may vary so trust so this is a really I think I mean this even goes beyond battle cards but I think you know a key way to drive adoption on your battle cards is your battle cries for sales is making sure that the reps trust you and Trust the content because and here's my thought take hunt take alert I would say that an inaccurate outdated battle card is worse much worse than having just no battle card at all and the reason I say that is you know reps on a call with the prospect and you get a question about a competitor and you share you know information that's just wrong like maybe it's a feature that they actually do have now but the battle card didn't indicate that um that's pretty bad you know it's not a good look as they say and you know I think for a rep at best you look uninformed and at worse you look petty and dishonest and and that's the fault of the battle card creator right like they know their threats doing what they're supposed to do you know it's not incumbent on the reps with like search what's going on with the competitor it's really on the the marketer or the sales name one person who created a battle card so if that happens you know I'm sure a lot of really great Russians call they can recover quickly you know they could feel like am i market or something I don't know um or whatever you know you guys you know you guys are skilled I'm sure you can recover quickly but sometimes you know it just it doesn't happen and you know the trust is broken with the prospect which think every rep on this call knows how integral that is that your prospect trusts you but also sales rep Trust is broken in the marketer or sales an Immelmann person they there they don't have any trust in that battle card so you know it's super important that we are earning our reps trust with up-to-date content that is in sync with the market so you know there's pretty much two real key things never ever ever ever ever ever have a date eval card and I know that's tough because you know lots of changes happen out there lots of you know kind of information that's lying but you really want to be able to you know integrate your competitive intelligence you know with your battle cards to make sure that you know your battle cards are always up to date that you have the most relevant information and then it makes it to the battle card and I would say in addition to that you know let's say you updating your battle cards they're being updated in real time but let's say you know there's a major shift in the market right let's say your competitor raises a huge round of funding or has a major product release obviously you want to update your battle card but you should also just like separately just alert the team you know talk to the sales team about it give them some context and say hey you know fellow cards updated but you guys should know so-and-so you know release this integration here's why it's important here's how you should talk about it you know see the battle card for more details but you know I'm just giving them that context so they know that like you're on top of it you're you are you are a reliable narrator and the source of information and it can just help them prepare you know for their calls and to be able to message that I also think Trust is you know it goes the other way too right so I think another way to earn the trust of the reps isn't just know hey always having a great update of battle card that's awesome but also what we talked about earlier Collin is you know enabling sales reps to give feedback on a consistent basis you know directly all in the battle card so if you have a battle card school or you know like I said maybe you're using like a Google Doc or something you know having that kind of like common functionality that sing and also the reps like yeah I'm here to take your feedback your feedback is your feet not like a corporation but your feedback is important to us and you know we're listening and we are incorporated or responding to that feedback and I think when those kind of comments are public kind of like an effect of like a Google Doc or something you know other reps can see it and will also probably encourage them to like join in and also give their feedback it just shows that you're really invested in their success and that you're listening and you're taking their feedback and again it will just help drive adoption because they know you're you're on top of it and they're just going to keep giving their feedback so the more people use they like it right so you never even give that seed of doubt a chance to take root yeah I love it that's a good tip earn the trust okay so we're on the final portion here we want to measure the success of our or lack of pal cards and iterate on that both iterating both on those objective metrics and anecdotal feedback and everybody we've got 12 minutes left so we'll have a couple minutes I think after this last tip from Lauren for questions so I have one from Sarah that I haven't gotten to yet still got it Sarah any other questions you want to throw out we'll take them go for it so yeah how do you know your battle cards working you know what are the indicators and so you know we talked about feedback and obviously feedbacks awesome but you're gonna want some metrics to tie to your battle cards to understand you know is this actually having an impact so there's three ish metrics that I would go through here so I would say chief among them is the competitive win rate competitive win rate is simply the percentage of time that you are winning deals against a competitor you know and you know it's probably the most I would say it's it's definitely the most relevant metric that you can actually tie to your battle card because you know it's it's the sole purpose is you know when helping you win competitive deals helping you handle competitive objection so it's by far the most relevant metric secondary to competive win rate I would say is just simply view metric so you know just measuring the usage what are say how often are sales reps using them and on a consistent basis I would say you know again you can develop arts tool that gives you almost visibility I know sales enablement platforms like seismic and high spot and all them also give you visible you metrics and what not even wiki's I think Atlassian I don't know if it gives you unique views but it does give you like you know you metrics into pages and stuff so you can get pretty much getting V metrics from anywhere and then a battle card leaderboard um less of a metric but it's it's kind of a fun thing that if you're able to get that kind of visibility into how often each individual rep is using battle cards you know so maybe your super top reps are like you know using battle cards consistently and that's visible to everyone you know reps want to you know replicate the success of their peers or do and do better than them so leaderboards kind of a cool way to you know measure the success of them on your side and also help to drive that adoption and get other reps excited okay so how we actually do that I'm gonna get a little deep and tactical here um so first just use your statistics on your battle cards I already went over that just you know a wiki battle card tool something that's going to give you that insight into usage and then for competitive win rate what you really want to do and some of you might be doing this is creating fields in your CRM to identify competitors in any deal so like when you create an opportunity and maybe there's one two three whatever competitors in a deal you want to indicate that and I mean this is a Salesforce a fake Salesforce shot but you know whatever you're using you should be able to do this if you're not already and the idea here is that we're trying to get a handle on competitive win rate so again the percentage of time that you're winning a deal against a competitor so you know create a picklist in your CRM at the opportunity level identify so you can just identify those deals and the goal is to understand over time how you're performing against a competitor so you know there is overall competitive win rate right there's just all the competitive deals ever how are we doing and then you know doing something like this it gives you the ability to actually slice the data and to you know pick in attack you know how are we doing against them you can kind of see over time how we are doing and then we just want to iterate based on the results so you know let's talk win rate first right so if you have low win rates you know overall win rate this you know obviously a problem but if you just have lower rates across you know overall and with different over certain competitors um it's just really saying that your battle cards are not doing what they or they should be doing they're not using them which you can look at low few metrics for that but if they are using them and you know like in this example you know you're losing deals to intercom I think in this example here if you can take a look at that graph you know if you're losing deals to a certain competitor it's like all right well this battle card clearly it's either out-of-date it's not it's just not what the sales arts need so you that's like a like we talked about like indicators on when to really step back and look at your battle cards this is a key indicator of like move our wrists not good commended win rate against this competitor especially like we gonna do something about that Lauren you made a good point before we joined about deal cycle and sale like sales cycle link so how do you think about win rate changing over time when you've just launched a whole new set of battle cards totally yes so I mean you know obviously you want to remember the date or you know P marks in some system when you created the battle card but when really measuring it depend on how long your sales cycle is so for it you know something you want to call feels like a two-week sales cycle you know you can get this data pretty quickly and understand your win rate for most lot of you folks probably in SAS businesses maybe are 30 to 45 to 60 days sales cycles takes a little longer so I mean I would say just wait try to wait a little longer than the of your sales cycle from when you start the battle card yeah a little longer than the length of your sales cycle when you launch a battle card so you kind of get that full picture because if you're like all right battle card and then you wait like two weeks and your sales cycles 45 days like that just doesn't even tell you anything so yeah length of sales cycle is like a really big part of it cool and then with this graph tell me if I'm reading it right the blue is total competitive opportunities one so like darker pink is competitive ops lost - intercom specifically and then the light pink is other competitive opportunities lost mm-hmm and so what happened here is like pretty flat through the spring on on all measure is more or less but then in August we saw a more competitive opportunities one in total but also more competitive opportunities lost to intercom in total right yes so when if you if this was your battle your little set of data here you see this happen in August more competitive opportunities won but also we Lowe's we lost more tend to come what do you take away from this and what do you do yeah absolutely and actually this is why it's so important to have the competitor because if so like if I was just someone that was like hey like a checkbox on an opportunity if the deal is competitive well it's like okay and if I didn't have that dark pink ever intercom I'd be like I'm killing it like win rates awesome I committed one right it's great but it's so important to have that visibility so what I would say it was like okay cool like seems like overall you know competitive win rate is doing well it seems like but there's a pause in a problem like that's what we take with us and it's like let's get into that battle card let's figure out what's going on even repeat some of your earlier steps that we had of like let's maybe interview some reps like let's get some let's say we have the hard data here but let's get some of the anecdotal data let's really just kind of do a revamp or just figure out what's going on but um I would definitely you know what I would do based on this data is just immediately dive into the intercom battle card and be like what's going on and you'll find a whole host of things maybe you sit down with some reps and ask them about it and yeah cool okay um I think we've got time for if it's okay with you one more question from Sarah this is a pretty cool question so Sarah is part of a big company multiple products and what she finds is that she tries to present like a total company versus a total company battle card can be overwhelming because there's almost too much to consider so me do you think it's more appropriate to do like a specific product versus a specific product battle card yeah especially yeah Sarah that's an awesome question and I reach out to me after this because I'll have some blog posts to share with you just based on that but I would say yeah that's a great idea because if you're selling in like that kind of market where it's like you know multiple products it's just way too overwhelming for one battle card like we said before visual formatting is so important you know if you're just going to sit back card um you know it's it's not gonna work so yeah I highly recommend doing that yeah it's like giving it its own battle card and it just made it easier for the reps you know they they know they know what they want and they can get what they want quickly so awesome question thanks Sarah yeah and I think yeah that's pretty much almost wrapped me up and then finally you know I kind of already went over it but the leaderboards yeah like yeah you know you can create some FOMO with your reps if your top reps are crushing it and they use battle cards a lot you can surface that in a leaderboard if you have that kind of visibility you know those reps are crushing it the other ones will not replicate that success so highly recommend doing that and then this is really my last spar is it's just you know the recap of the adoption playbook you know build them together make them great be where sales is integrate with their day or in their trust and you know make sure you're measuring for success and iterating and that's really the adoption playbook and it is a thing of beauty I have to say I'm really grateful for you and Ellie and everybody at crayon for being so thoughtful about battle cards because I think they've been an afterthought for me at least and for a lot of the people that I speak to nobody's thinking about them in depth at this some granular level like this so thanks for the advice anybody who just wants to learn more about battle cards or competitive intelligence in general can reach out to Lauren here go to crayon Co look up on LinkedIn all of those things yeah I also want to just add if anybody sees any value in reviewing game tape like myself I sometimes go back and watch my old webinars to see how boring I am and try to get less boring and so if any of you spend time watching your own demos or watching demos from wraps on your team you may want to consider watching demos from other reps so sales hacker has a new show out called demolitions my buddy Scott Barker and his pal Dave sit down and they want a real sales demo and they give their best tips and advice and you can sit there with them and watch what the rep says watch the what the prospect says get their advice get their hot take it's cool to see something from outside your own company and you can check it out at sales hacker comm slash demolitions and let us know what you think too because this is a brand new thing for us and if it's not useful then it's a bad product right just like just like we're talking about with with battle cards and there's my tie-in definitely thanks everybody for the great participation to Steve Sara Lori Bruce Kirsty awesome ideas and questions and comments it's always fun to have the whole gang together sales hacker community never lets me down I was just gonna say it especially big thank you to you Lauren I really appreciate it thanks for having me I want to thank everyone else on the call I love the sales hacker community and I also want to say thank you for coming at the end of the month which I know is like super stressful for you guys you're trying to crush your quota I know you're gonna do it but you know I really appreciate that you guys came on the call and you know I hope it was helpful I think it was I learned stuff okay okay thanks everybody we'll see you on another webinar sales hacker webinar soon take care have a good rest of your week