Once you accept that a battlecard is a one-page brief for a live deal, the design question becomes concrete: what earns a place on a page that cannot grow?
Below is the structure that survives contact with actual reps, block by block, with what belongs in each and what to cut first when space runs out.
1. The identity line
One or two sentences: who this competitor is, who they sell to, and how they make money.
This exists for the rep who has never encountered them. It is not a company description — it is orientation. “Mid-market-focused, sells bottom-up to individual teams, monetises on seats after a generous free tier” tells a rep more about how the deal will go than three paragraphs of history.
2. Where we win
Three to five specific situations in which you are the better choice. The word doing the work is situations, not features.
Weak: “Better reporting.” Strong: “When the buyer has to report to a board quarterly, our scheduled exports remove a recurring two-day task their tool leaves manual.”
The second version tells a rep when to deploy the claim, which is the information they actually lack.
3. Where they win
The block most often omitted, and the one that makes the card trustworthy.
Every competitor beats you somewhere. A card that pretends otherwise fails on first contact with a buyer who has already noticed, and it takes the card's credibility with it. Naming their genuine strengths does two things: it tells a rep which deals to qualify out early, and it makes the “where we win” section believable by contrast.
This block should also flag when to walk away. A deal you cannot win is a deal worth losing quickly.
4. Objection comebacks
The three or four things buyers actually say when this competitor is in the deal, each with a response a rep can say aloud.
The most common failure is writing responses to objections nobody raises. Source these from call recordings and lost-deal notes, not from imagination. Covered in full in objection comebacks reps will actually use.
5. Discovery questions
Questions that surface this competitor's weaknesses without mentioning them.
This is the highest-skill block and the highest-leverage one. A good discovery question leads a buyer to notice a problem themselves, which is far more durable than being told. See discovery questions that expose a competitor's weakness.
6. Proof points
Specific, checkable evidence for the claims above. Customer names, published benchmarks, documented behaviour, dated pricing.
The rule is that a proof point must be something the buyer could verify independently. If they cannot, it is an assertion wearing a proof point's clothes. See proof points vs claims.
7. Landmines and traps
Two lists, both short.
Things not to say. Claims that are outdated, legally risky, or reliably backfire. If a competitor fixed a weakness last quarter, attacking it makes you look uninformed and hands them the moment.
Their claims that sound worse than they are. When a competitor's marketing makes a scary-sounding claim that does not hold up in practice, reps need to know before they hear it from a buyer.
What to cut first
The page fills up fast. In order of what to remove:
- Company history. Founding dates and funding rounds almost never change a deal.
- Full feature matrices. Move to an appendix if they must exist.
- Market sizing. Interesting to strategy, useless mid-call.
- Their customer logos. Unless a specific logo is being used against you.
- Extra objections. Four good ones beat nine mediocre ones.
If the card still does not fit, the problem is usually that “where we win” has grown into a feature list. Compress it back to situations.
One competitor per card
The temptation is a single card covering all competitors, since it feels efficient. It is not. Mid-call, a rep needs one competitor's information immediately, and a combined card forces them to scan past irrelevant material to find it.
Separate cards also age independently, which matters because they age at different rates.
Dating the card
Every card needs a visible date and an owner. Without a date, a rep cannot judge how much to trust a pricing claim; without an owner, nobody updates it. See why most battlecards go stale in 90 days.
Our Sales Battlecard report produces this structure filled in for competitors you name, with sources cited — including the “where they win” block, which is the one most internal cards quietly skip.