Battlecards are undoubtedly one of the most versatile tools you can give your sales team. They offer a wealth of information in a concise, user-friendly format, and they can make the difference between closing a deal and leaving a prospect undecided. However, if your sales team isn’t convinced of their value, your carefully crafted battlecard deck is likely to go unused. Garnering interest and investment from sales is important, so here are three ways to ensure that your battlecard deck will become a critical part of the sales process…

Get sales involved in battlecard building: Your sales team is an excellent resource when it comes to understanding your competitors—after all, they are in constant contact with customers who are often talking to your competitors at the same time. They know what the competition is saying about you, and they’re in an excellent position to help you prepare. Listening to the sales team’s recommendations also helps ensure that you are building battlecards they’ll find useful. Garnering investment early will position battlecards as a tool for your sales people to use, rather than a new system that’s being foisted on them without their input.

Make them accessible: Even the best battlecards you create will go unused if you don’t make them easy for you sales team to access, particularly when they’re working from home or out on the road. If finding the most up-to-date version of a battlecard involves contacting someone at the office, searching old emails, or digging through the company’s file system, then chances are, your sales people will find unofficial workarounds or simply stop using battlecards all together. Using an online battlecard system ensures that wherever your salespeople are working, they’re able to view the most recent and relevant information.

Update, analyze, and improve over time: Once you’ve introduced battlecards to the sales team, keeping them up-to-date and relevant to the sales process should be an ongoing goal. That means making timely updates when new competitive intelligence comes to light, and ensuring that only the most recent information is being disseminated to your sales people. It also means keeping the battlecard system itself up-to-date by looking at feedback from users on a regular basis. This can be done proactively via user surveys and one-on-one feedback sessions, and it can be done passively by analyzing user statistics to see how and when your salespeople use battlecards, and whether that use correlates to better sales outcomes.