sales battle cards

In my previous post about competition analysis, I was talking about a system to collect and disseminate information about the company's competitors.

Rather than piling up PDF brochures, Powerpoint presentations or scanned articles originated by the competitors, and have your sales people read through them in order to understand what they might be facing during a sales negotiation, you can collect all this intel in a unique, easy-to-update structure, under the name of Battle Cards.

don't call us, we'll call you

In business technology buying process, 75% of influencers and 80% of decision-makers said that they are the ones to find vendors (through research) rather than responding to a campaign [source: MarketingSherpa]. Outch.

Which shows without a shadow of a doubt where the marketing effort needs to be invested: your technology company must be visible and found in those channels and places where your prospects could be searching for vendors such as yourself. 

For those active, control-obsessed, results-driven marketers, this might sound terrible. I do many direct marketing campaigns, myself, and expect results from each of these. But if the moment and the path are not in my hands, what else is there?

Actually, lots and lots of harder and smarter work. The outcome that you're after is called Attention.