Recently we got a chance to catch up with Prakhar, the first employee at WhatFix. He swears by battlecards as an important tool for onboarding new hires. Here are his thoughts on the topic and some interesting experiences.

Quick intro about your company

Whatfix is a Digital Adoption platform (DAP) that disrupts the way application support and learning content is consumed inside of an application. Whatfix has the concept of real-time walk-throughs, that can run as a skin on top of any web application and can provide contextual and interactive guidance to the end users.

Whatfix has market presence in 35+ countries spread across 500+ customers (10% of them being Fortune 500).

‍What does your sales team look like?

We have a remote hybrid sales model in place and 95% of the sales are completed remotely. We have a 4 tiered Sales structure:

1. BDRs - do the demand generation.

2. SDRs - do the discovery call with prospects coming inbound through various marketing channels.

3. AEs - who do the product demos and take the deal to closure.

4. Sales Engineers - for supporting the team with technical implementations and running the POCs.

With such a model, it becomes very easy for the customers to have clarity around the process and how the buying cycle works. We focus a lot on need analysis so our relationship oriented and value-driven pitch can best tie to it. We are the leading provider in our category (DAP) so the product is of great value in general.

More than just being Salespeople, we try and be trusted advisers to our customers.

What is Sales enablement in your company?

Sales enablement for us is doing everything to:

1. Increase the win ratio

2. Make the buying cycle shorter

3. In short, enable the sales people to do their jobs better

Sales Battlecards - how do you use them?

Battlecards are a key part of our Sales strategy.

Without them for our new hires, it would be like fighting a battle against an army tank with a rusted knife :)

They provide the necessary ammunition to be well prepared and confident.  These include:

1- Common objections

2- Customer Case studies (organized by market segments & usecases)

3- Third-party Product Reviews

4- Product Collaterals (Articles, Feature Docs, etc.)

5- V/s Competitor Documents

6- Videos/Scripts on how to handle scenarios

They come handy in:

-   Winning more deals

-   Reducing the buying cycle

-   Ramp up time for new hires

-   Educating customers on our industry and vendor landscape

How have battlecards evolved?

They haven't evolved a lot. I joined as the first employee at Whatfix. The first battle card I remember creating was a doc with a table of v/s competition, objection handling talk track, etc. It was a living internal document. And then one day, a customer wanted the same to be sent to them. The format had to evolve, the text had to be refined and then I created our first customer-facing one.

Next was another case when a prospect was confused in a build v/s buy decision. I created a quick excel document comparing the two options across several parameters that could help them in making an informed decision.

Since then, after several iterations, we have PDF versions of these battle cards managed by our Product Marketing team currently that are being used for in house training as well as for being shared with prospects.

In the hands of sales reps...

The new sales reps struggle to internalize all the information before hitting the phones. Some try and make notes in a physical notepad, others create notes on their phones as screenshots OR open the battlecards ahead of a sales call.

One of my team members set up a v/s competition battle card as a desktop wallpaper to keep all the information handy.

Mistakes/challenges in leveraging battlecards

1. Sales people often don't remember the battle cards available to them.

2. Priority of a talking point may vary depending on the situation. Sales people sometimes miss on an important point out of the 5 and forget to cite it in a customer conversation.

3. Sometimes sales people find it hard to relate an objection to a particular talk track. Hence they might struggle to recognize which battle card would best fit a particular customer objection.

4. Keeping a track of all the new battle cards that are being added to the existing artillery.

We have a quick refresher session on them at least once every quarter for the team.

Next evolution of battle cards?

There are some new age Sales enablement platforms that are trying to provide access to all the content with ease. Making sure users are able to keep a good track on the new updates/ battle cards being added would bean advantage as well.

Maybe it would be more to do with presenting the content better, creating a recall of the existing content and ensuring the engagement tracking with those battle cards would probably shape the future of SalesEnablement.

Any final tips on Battlecards?

You don’t want to climb Mt. Everest without proper training OR your trekking gear in place, the same applies to Sales.

Battlecards help in a lot of ways:

1. Your new hires can get ramped up faster.
2. Your reps are more confident during demonstrations/meetings because they know any scenario they face can be handled.
3. Using battle cards well can make a great impact to your top line and increase the win ratio
4. Right battle cards at the right time can help you reduce the sales cycle