/compete

Battle Card Design Reference

Purpose: Sales-enablement one-pager that equips reps with head-to-head positioning, objection handling, and "why we win / why we lose" narratives for a specific competitor. Battle cards convert raw competitive intelligence into deal-winning ammunition at the moment of need (discovery call, demo, late-stage objection).

Scope Boundary

• compete battle: design and govern battle cards as living artifacts — structure, freshness rules, distribution, win-rate measurement.
• compete matrix (default, elsewhere): feature comparison matrix across N competitors — input to battle cards, not a substitute.
• compete swot (elsewhere): strategic SWOT for executive decisions — battle cards are tactical, SWOT is strategic.
• compete positioning (elsewhere): positioning maps and category design — battle cards operationalize the positioning, they do not invent it.
• compete winloss (elsewhere): post-deal interviews. Win/loss feeds the "why we win / why we lose" sections; do not author them from internal opinion.
• voice (elsewhere): real customer feedback. Use Voice quotes as battle card evidence; do not synthesize testimonials.
• field (elsewhere): empirical user-research interviews. Field informs persona-fit talking points; battle cards are not research artifacts.
• echo demand: synthetic-user assumption challenge. Echo[demand] stress-tests battle card claims that lack real-world validation.

Workflow

INTAKE   →  pick one competitor; confirm tier (direct/indirect/substitute)
         →  pull win/loss themes, deal review notes, recent product moves

DRAFT    →  fill one-pager template (overview, why we win, why we lose,
            objections, traps, landmines, proof, pricing posture)
         →  every claim cites a source (URL, deal ID, quote attribution)

REVIEW   →  product validates feature claims; sales validates objection realism
         →  legal reviews competitor-naming risk before external use

DISTRIBUTE → embed in CRM (deal-stage triggered), pre-call brief, deal room
           → announce in sales standup; train via role-play once per quarter

GOVERN   →  90-day max freshness; weekly micro-updates on competitor moves
         →  measure adoption + win-rate lift; sunset cards below threshold

One-Pager Structure

Objection-Handling Pairs

Every battle card must include the top 5 objections in Their Claim -> Our Reframe -> Proof triples. Examples:

Pair authoring rule: never refute without proof. Refutation without evidence trains reps to lose credibility.

Freshness Governance

Freshness rule: any battle card untouched for 90 days is auto-flagged stale and pulled from active distribution until refreshed. Stale cards destroy rep trust faster than no cards.

Distribution to GTM

Embedding rule: battle cards delivered in the rep's existing workflow (CRM, Slack, deal room) achieve ~85% adoption; standalone wiki pages achieve ~30%. Author for the consumption context.

Win-Rate Measurement

Tag every competitive deal in CRM with competitor_present, battle_card_used, and outcome. Compute the lift formula:

win_rate_lift = win_rate(card_used) - win_rate(card_not_used)

Healthy program targets: +5 to +10 percentage points within 2-3 quarters; battle card users report up to 30% win-rate increase in mature programs. Adoption thresholds: <40% = content quality issue; 60-70% = healthy; >80% = excellent.

Anti-Patterns

• Outdated cards in active circulation — anything past 90 days erodes rep trust. Auto-sunset stale cards rather than pretend currency.
• Sales-only authoring — without product/CI input, claims drift into sales fiction and break in technical evaluations.
• Marketing-only authoring — overweight branding language, underweight tactical objection handling.
• No win-rate measurement — without battle_card_used tagging, the program cannot prove ROI and gets defunded.
• "Everything is a differentiator" — listing 15 why-we-wins dilutes the top 3. Force a 5-bullet cap.
• Refutation without proof — every objection reframe needs a source or it teaches reps to bluff.
• No "why we lose" section — pretending the competitor has no strengths makes the card useless in honest conversations and trains reps to freeze when objections land.
• One-time launch, no governance — battle cards are living artifacts, not deliverables. Without an owner and refresh cadence, they decay within a quarter.
• Universal card per competitor — segment cards by deal-size or vertical when objections diverge significantly (SMB vs enterprise objections rarely overlap).

Handoff

• To Voice: pull customer quotes for proof points and testimonial validation. Voice owns the source-of-truth quote library.
• To Field: when objections lack empirical backing, hand off for moderated user/customer interviews to validate the reframe.
• To Magi: if win/loss patterns reveal a structural strategic gap (e.g., losing the entire enterprise tier), escalate to Magi for strategic simulation.
• To Spark: when "why we lose" patterns repeatedly cite a missing capability, route as a feature idea with competitive evidence attached.
• To Growth: when objections center on brand authority or category framing, route positioning fixes to Growth.
• To Lore: validated objection-handling patterns that work across multiple competitors become reusable institutional knowledge.