This article is a part of our Competitive Battlecard 101 series — this week we’re featuring the Objection Handling battlecard. If you haven’t yet, subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll send you sales battlecard templates directly to your inbox as they’re published. To view all of our battlecard templates to date, you can find a running log of the series here.
Your competitors are talking sh*t. Lies, half-truths, or simply strong depositioning skills; whatever the case may be, your sales team needs tactics to navigate these claims and come out on top.
You will need a battlecard to handle objections for every major competitor. We’ve seen this card referred to as “Objection Handling”, “Objections & Counterpoints”, and “Objections & Reframes.”
In the end, all accomplish the same thing — identifying the claims your competitors make about your product/solution, and providing tactics on how to effectively respond and reframe the conversation.
The first step to building this sales battlecard is to identify the common objections that your competitor is using. Once you’ve identified those claims, you’ll create counterpoints to each of those objections.
Identify Your List Of Common Claims and Objections
Here are three different ways you can find claims and objections to use for your battlecard:
1. Brainstorm with Your Sales Team
Conduct a whiteboarding session with your sales team. Ask them to write down all the objections they hear from prospects and clients. This is the quickest way to figure out which claims your reps find hard to navigate.
2. Uncover Common Themes From Your Win-Loss Interviews.
When we analyze win-loss data, we look at the following four questions to help guide our understanding of where we’re losing deals:
- What was the prospect’s main pain?
- What was the main reason they chose the competitor?
- What did the competitor say about us?
- What are their concerns moving forward with the competitor?
Look for commonalities in both what your competitor is saying about you, and the main reasons why they are winning deals. Together, these themes can surface the common objections and issues your salespeople need to navigate.
It’s also important to consider what types of prospects you’re losing deals to. For example, you might notice through this exercise that your lost deals tend to be with smaller companies whose priority pain you aren’t best suited to serve in your market. This sort of information might mean you should tweak your prospecting efforts to find better-suited accounts, to improve your chances of closing from the outset.
3. Listen to Demo Recordings to Surface Common Themes
A wealth of valuable information sits in your Sales team’s demo recordings. Fortunately, you can use these recording to hear first hand from prospects what competitors are saying about you as well as how your salespeople are responding.
Listen to a sample of these recordings and take note of all the claims and objections made, and the responses given. Once collected, group this information to find themes and commonalities. The benefit of this approach is that you’ll start to get a sense of where your sales team is adequately prepped to respond and where they struggle.
Finally, it’s time to craft strategies to counter the claims your competitors are making.
- Explain in detail what the competitor is claiming about your product or service, and provide counterpoints to each objection.
- Review your Strengths battlecard & Positioning battlecard to refresh on how to position your product and frame the conversation. You don’t just want to answer these questions/claims, but rather, to use it as an opportunity to re-position your product and drive the conversation forward.
- Bring your sales team together to create responses to the common objections and role-play the conversation. Reps need to hear themselves responding and receiving feedback from prospects (even hypothetical ones). The team should also discuss what to do if a buyer doesn’t verbalize an objection but it’s clear from her body language and/or tone of voice that she has one.
- Use demos/calls to find out how salespeople currently respond — some great strategies might already be in use. Find what works to keep, and identify what doesn’t seem as compelling of an objection to work on.
The Objection Handling battlecard is part of our ongoing series Competitive Battlecards 101.
Next up in our series will be the “Competitive Traps” card. Subscribe to the series and we’ll send you a new card each week(ish) so you can start building your library of competitive strategies.
If you’ve come this far and you’re still looking for more on battlecards, download our Product Marketers Guide to Creating Battlecards That Win.
Originally published at https://klue.com on March 14, 2019.
