Competition has become bonkers.  

To give you a clue, zoom into the map below and try recognizing your logo among the 49+ Martech sub-niches: 

Could you? 

It’s about the same in SalesTech. Again, you’d struggle to recognize brands in the smallest of emerging niches, even if you zoomed in: 

As you struggle to recognize brands in both B2B tech landscapes, so do prospects also struggle to notice your brand. And it’s no fault of theirs. Per the ChiefMartec tech landscape study above, we went from just 350 Martech vendors in 2012 to over 13,000 in 2024. 

That’s a whopping 7,200% increase in options!

These overcrowded options don’t just put users at target accounts in the driving seat. But it also leaves them with a choice: Use as many products as possible, only advocate for what resonates most:

As a B2B Product Marketer, this poses a new challenge.

And Marcus Andrews, Senior Product Marketing Director at Pendo, captured it best in an article for the PLG Collective. 

He wrote: 

In other words, you aren’t only taking over responsibilities originally handled by the sales team. Helping your company adopt a smooth free trial or freemium Product-Led Growth (PLG) go-to-market strategy is also crucial. 

But it is also table stakes. 

Your competitors are probably already doing the same. 

Prospects can and are more likely to have used yours and competitors’ products before becoming a lead. So, how should you enable your sales team in this new, end-user-driven era? 

Specifically, how should you rethink your sales battlecards? 

That’s what we’ll explore today. 

What Makes a Good, PLG-Era Battlecard?

PLG reminds me of medieval times. 

Then, kings won battles by wielding the most powerful swords, which were symbols of power and strength. For instance, history tells us that King Arthur’s magical sword, the ‘Excalibur,’ blinded enemies, winning him battles. Arthur’s rare sword may have won him battles. But as we also know from the history books, it wasn’t always sufficient to win him and his army wars.

Likewise, having more (or rare) product features may win you the PLG battle of acquiring free users. The war –converting those free users into customers– requires a complete, sales-enabling war plan. 

And that’s what good battlecards must do today. 

Specifically, they must:

1.  Win the battle of retaining a specific user long enough,
2. Show said user unique value to transform them into an advocate and product champion for your company on their decision-making table, 
3. Be so compelling that it wins you the war of being differentiated from competitors’ offerings: 

The sales battlecards you create for reps should address all steps above. Per a report by Korn Ferry, that’s how you give sellers the resources needed to convert PLG-acquired users into customers. 

The Global Management Consulting firm wrote:

The question is: How do you do it in this PLG era? 

Introducing Product-Led Battlecards 

PLG puts your product front and center of all customer acquisition, activation, and retention efforts. That’s how OpenView Partners, the VC that coined the term, define it: 

Sales battlecards help in the acquisition phase. 

But as noted, users are likely to have tried other products before becoming a ‘lead.’ So the challenge is to demonstrate practical value, differentiate, and make a stronger case for your product.

And that’s where Product-Led Battlecards come in. 

This new approach to creating sales battlecards aligns with the demands of PLG. An offshoot of VEC Studio’s Product-Led Storytelling approach, it involves using narratives to weave your product into every part of the sales battlecards creation process.

Why this unique approach, you ask?

Using storytelling to connect the crucial dots: 

1. It helps you personalize each of your sales battlecards per specific user or ideal customer profile (ICP) needs. Instead of trying to generalize them for all use cases. 
2. It focuses on how your product solves specific ICP pain points to demonstrate unique value. Instead of the typical competitor feature-by-feature comparisons.
3. More importantly, it beams the spotlight on showing (not just telling) how you’re different from competitors. Instead of trying to come off as ‘better,’ which is too subjective. 

In a nutshell…

Refining Sales Battlecards for PLG

As shown, storytelling is at the heart of PLG-driven sales battlecards. 

Let me explain the part storytelling plays with a quick story.

In 1964, Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard psychologist, set out to test the impact of a newly-developed intelligence identification tool. They called it the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition. 

He approached an elementary school in California and got approval to enroll students for the test. Some weeks later, Robert came back with a list of students (around 20% of the student body) who performed well with high intelligence potential. 

These students, he informed teachers, were special. 

One year later, Robert returned again to measure how the special students had performed. The first graders scored 27 IQ points (compared to 12 IQ points for their peers). 

Very impressive, right? 

Here’s the twist: The whole thing was a hoax. 

There was no newly-developed Harvard intelligence identification tool. Robert chose the said ‘high-potential’ students randomly. The real test was to see what would happen by telling teachers a different story about randomly selected students. 

Teachers, after being told that those students were special, gave them more attention, affection, and feedback. These things, Robert discovered, are what helped the students perform way better. 

Here’s how this applies to creating sales battlecards. 

Research by Gartner reveals that the typical B2B buying committee now has anywhere from 6 to 10 people involved. Imagine if 2–5 of them or more tried other competing products. They’ll probably come to the decision-making table talking about similar features.

This heightens the hurdle of converting a user who became a lead (after using your product) into a customer. A good bet would be to also transform them into evangelists within their organization who talk about your product’s unique value and differentiating narrative.

Storytelling is an excellent way to do this. 

As Robert’s experiment showed, infusing stories that go beyond what your product does into sales battlecard content can give prospects more reasons to care. It can also help to leapfrog your product above feature-by-feature, competitor comparisons. 

More importantly, it arms users who have experienced your product’s unique value to frame that value per your company’s narrative. At a time where anyone can steal and build identical features, storytelling helps to set you apart from competitors. 

To put it all into action, the Product-Led Battlecard has a complimentary content creation framework. 

 As illustrated below: 

Let’s unpack each stage of this framework. 

1. Know

Consider this the crucial information-gathering stage of creating PLG-driven battlecards. The goal here is simple: Creating battlecard content that empower your sales team to tell stories that go beyond feature-by-feature, competitor comparisons. 

More importantly, the content you create should resonate with who specific prospects’ are, their needs, and pain points. 

Achieving this requires more than prospects’ personas.  

You want to: 

1. Know who they are specifically (i.e., their place on the decision-making table, what interests them most, etc.),
2. Know their needs and what pain points they want to solve. 
3. Know why solving those pain points would be important to them (i.e., what desired life transformation will it unlock). 

Either the regular buyer personas or jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) concepts aren’t enough for gathering all this information. This is because personas focus mostly on demographics and JTBD on problems prospects want to solve without much emphasis on who those prospects actually are. 

However, by combining both concepts, through the ICP StoryScripts Framework, which takes it one step further, you can more succinctly know the who (persona), what (pains and problems they want to solve), and why (why they’ll act). 

Here’s what it looks like: 

The good thing about using the ICP StoryScripts Framework to gather information and know your target buyers in more detail is the foundational context for framing your product’s story for different target buyers. Context, I must emphasize, is vital for creating effective B2B SaaS sales enablement content.

David Bloom also emphasized this:  

One last thing you want to know as part of gathering info about target buyers is intel on competitors they’re also considering. 

For instance, what new features have they launched? What integrations do they have? How are they framing their story, etc.? The context of your sales battlecards should have updated intel to help reps dismiss the most recent competitor updates. 

2. Lay

After information-gathering comes the application. 

In this second stage of the Product-Led Battlecard content creation process, the goal is to craft resources that enable your sales reps to advance the conversation with prospects in your favor. 

Your battlecards should empower reps to: 

1. Lay landmines to help dismiss the competitor, and
2. Lay landmines to tie-in your product’s value and how it uniquely solves target buyers’ pain points. 

Landmines, in this context, can be in the form of questions or statements. And those suitable for PLG-driven battlecards will help reps lay them by using storytelling to frame each one to either: 

• Expose a competitor’s weakness (while shining a light on your product’s unique value and strength), or 
• Downplay a competitor’s strength (while taking the spotlight away from your product’s perceived weakness). 

Once produced, it’s important to organize landmine resources in an easy-to-retrieve competitive intelligence platform. Some popular brands in this category are Klue, Crayon, Kompete, CompeteShark, AlphaSense, and Contify. 

A competitive intelligence platform removes unnecessary context-switching when sales reps are working on deals. You can create and resources available in one place. They can focus on conversing with prospects, knowing any resource they need to close or move deals down your pipeline is a click away. 

As you create these, stick to a story that’ll resonate with the prospect on the receiving end. More importantly, your framing should help the sales team project your brand’s big-picture narrative (and not just a feature-based comparison).

Again, Marcus Andrews shared why:

3. Show

Prospects who your sales reps can hold their attention past the stages above know your product can solve their problems. But if they’ve used your competitors’ products, they probably would also know that your competitors’ products can do the same. 

So at this point, your sales battlecard needs to do more than just help reps to remind them about the problems you solve. You need prospects to visualize possible outcomes and the differentiated value of choosing your brand over the competition. 

Your battlecard content should enable your reps to do just that. Specifically, infuse summarized win/loss stories to help reps guide prospects across the sales, closed-won line. 

Specifically, your win/loss stories should help reps:

1. Show similar companies who switched from competitors a target buyer is considering to your product. 
2. Show testimonial excerpts that highlight relevant reasons why companies switch from competitors to your product.
3. Show results achieved after relevant existing customers switched from a competitor, or started using your product.

In a Sales Hacker article, Lauren Kersanske, the Principal Growth Marketer at Axonious, noted why using win/loss stories to bolster your sales battlecard resources is crucial. 

According to her: 

A competitive intelligence platform helps here, too. 

An excellent one gives you a central place where you can easily curate these vital resources, use them in creating your battlecards, and make them available to reps at the click of a button. 

Enable Bottoms-up Sales With Product-Led Battlecards

The race to adopt PLG isn’t slowing down. 

And the reason isn’t far-fetched. Users are now in the driving seat of the sales conversation, only becoming leads after they’ve experienced value. Competition is at cut-throat levels, and customer acquisition costs are ballooning. 

No wonder, per Gainsight’s PLG Index study, over 58% of B2B SaaS companies have already begun implementing PLG by putting their products front and center of all acquisition efforts. This go-to-market strategy shift means Product Marketers must adjust how they enable reps in an era of bottoms-up sales. 

A critical part of that enablement is making your sales battlecards ‘product-led,’ too. You can achieve this by using the Product-Led Battlecard framework detailed in this guide. 

Quick reminder of what it entails?

Here you go: