Use Case - Sales Competitive Positioning

Overview

Everyday, your sales team encounters competitive situations. Providing sales reps with effective competitive positioning is crucial to maximize your sales efforts.

Most teams provide their sales reps with competitive ‘battle cards’ in the form of word docs or pdfs to help in positioning their solution appropriately in competitive situations.

However, there are a few issues we regularly hear about with this approach:

1. They aren’t located where you work.

Placing battle cards in shared folders outside of the reps workflow makes it a real challenge for reps to find them when they actually need them (which is usually on calls or in demos).

2. They are likely out of date.

In today’s world, you update your solution regularly; you should expect your competitors to do the same. However, without a workflow telling experts to keep battle cards up to date, they often become obsolete quickly.

3. Experts don’t know who is using them.

Typical battle cards are documents that don’t tell the expert anything they need to know, in order to improve upon the intel. Which battle cards are the reps using most? Which ones are missing?

How Guru Helps

We believe Guru is a better way to provide your reps with the competitive intel they need to do their job. Guru was built to find the knowledge you need right from your workflow. And when you do find the knowledge, you’ll know it’s accurate with our expert verification workflow.

So now, reps can effectively position against competitors as they are on the phone with prospects. And experts can see what is working and what is needed based on sales team usage.

Here are some specific ways Guru can help your sales team most effectively position against your competitors:

1. Make battle cards part of your reps workflow.

Guru lives where your reps work, so they can access battlecard knowledge right at their fingertips as they are on the phone with prospects.

2. Contextually show the battle card based on selling situation.

Take it one step further and actually show the rep which battle card they should be reviewing based on how they are filling out competitive information in your CRM.

3. Expert verified knowledge.

Guru pings your experts on a frequency you define so they know to keep their battle cards fresh and verified for the entire team.

4. Analytics = Better Knowledge.

Guru provides analytics around battlecard usage so they can provide more robust knowledge around popular cards or create ones where there are gaps. And Guru also gives the reps the ability to comment on cards for easy collaboration with experts.

How is this setup in Guru?

We see our customers creating battle cards using 2 different approaches:

1. Create Guru Cards & Group by Board

If you are just starting and don’t have battlecard assets already, Guru Cards are a great place to start. Cards are built so reps can quickly pull them up and read them right in their workflow, making them ideal for positioning against competitors while on the phone or in a demo.

We see users creating cards with variety of structures. The most common structure we see is the following, allowing the reps to use the info at the top of the card for quick reference and the info at the bottom of the card for more detail.

• Overview of Competitor
• Short bulleted list of key differentiators: what are the 3 most important things you want a rep to know about this competitor?
• More detail, including competitive company info, market/vertical focus & SWOT analysis

You can also group cards into a Competitor Board so reps can quickly and easily access all competitive battle cards in one location. New reps that are ramping up will have one place to browse all knowledge in your competitive landscape.

2. Link to existing Battle cards

If you have existing battlecard assets you want to leverage, we recommendlinking to your existing files in Guru. You’ll still get all the same benefits you see in the How Guru Helps Section.

We see users who take this approach link the existing battle card to Guru, but still provide a quick overview and short bulleted list of key differentiators in the File Card description field.

This way, reps can still quickly access high level detail they may need while on the phone or demo, but can dig deeper into the actual document for additional detail.

If you have any questions or would like additional information please reach out to us and we can assist you (Click your avatar (the settings menu) and select 'Contact Us’) or email us at info@getguru.com.