How And Why To Create Persona Battle Cards

Intro

Are you getting responses like “not interested?” over and over again in your outreach?

Your manager is probably asking you to make more calls to compensate for the low conversion rate right?! Like building pipeline wasn’t difficult enough!

Well this post isn’t about how to overcome this objection but how to prevent altogether!

Chances are if prospects are telling you they’re not interested you’re targeting the wrong persona OR the right people but with a weak message.

How do you know which one?

That’s what battle cards are for!

But most battle cards suck.

They’re a wall of text - full of information and not very practical maybe even downright useless.

What they should do is help you prep for outreach AND handle objections on the fly without having to look for information.

By the end of this post you’ll know what it takes to put together battle cards of your own and increase the number of meetings you book. Let’s do this!

What's a battle card?

Battle cards are visual aids that help you win more deals.

Different cards will support you in different areas and the 3 main ones you need to have are ICP, Persona, and Competitor battle cards.

This post is focused on Persona battle cards but if you want me to make a post about the other two as well, comment “show me more” so I know this is interesting to you.

Why battle cards work is because

they give you the right information at the right time to increase your win rates.

And no - you can’t put this off for later.

If your company is validating Product-Market Fit it will help you do it faster by learning what’s resonating with your audience and what isn’t. You can only do that if the whole team is using the same messaging. And once you have PMF it will help you scale the team faster because everything reps need to know about your audience and how to approach them is documented.

So what info do you need to capture about the persona?

Not many because the card you will use the most is a one-pager.

You need to know

1. who they are,

2. where and how to find them,

3. what their main challenges and pains are, and

4. how your product impacts those challenges.

5. As a bonus I recommend listing common objections and how to respond to them.

All of this fits onto a single slide I promise - let me show you!

Hold up, hold up! Viktor - what’s a persona?

Oh - glad you asked! To be clear:

a Persona is NOT a title but a Character someone in the organisation is playing.

Think of the stakeholders you’re talking to throughout the deal cycle. It can be anything from End User, to Leadership, to various influencers - the point is instead of creating separate battle cards for each title within the company you’ll group them by what impact they’re responsible for getting because collectively what they care about and what they will use the product for is going to be very similar.

Let’s say you’re selling a sales tool aimed at increasing rep productivity.

You can target around 10 roles, and even within those roles each stakeholder will go by different titles depending on their level of seniority. Creating cards for all of them sounds like a nightmare - not to mention knowing where to look for information! But what if you could bring it down to a total of three personas?

Suddenly a CRO, a VP of Sales, and a Head of Demand Gen all become part of the Revenue Leadership persona because they’re all looking to scale top-line revenue. They’ll care more about reporting so they can forecast accurately and find friction points in the process fast.

Similarly BDRs, Account Executives, Account Managers albeit responsible for different parts of the sales cycle will collectively form an Individual Contributor persona because their goal is to build pipeline faster and close more deals.

Lastly you have the Ops persona consisting of Revenue Ops Lead, Salesforce Admins, Analysts, and Enablement who will do most of the backend work and can influence where the deal goes.

Now let’s take a look at the template!

(Editor's note: I recommend watching the video for this section)

It’s immediately clear that I have no shot at a career in graphic design. Aside from that all the points we just talked about fit nicely onto a single slide without it feeling overcrowded.

As I prepare to prospect I’m checking which channels to go through to reach the given persona, then using Sales Navigator filter by title to get a more accurate shortlist.

After saving my lead list I can start working on my message. My goal with the message is to sell the vision of what life could be for my prospects by connecting their pain with the impact my product drives.

Imagine this is you. Whether you’ll be reaching out over the phone or via email you stand a better chance now that the message is targeted.

If you’re a leader you can go even further and use battle cards for onboarding new hires.

I recommend focusing on 3 areas and really going into the details so they have the full picture:

1. What events can trigger prospects to take action (for a revenue leader think reps leaving, fundraising, missed forecasts),

2. then write down how the person in question is affected and

3. what’s the impact on the company?

The personal impact tends to be emotional and less measurable like: “is their job at risk if they don’t take action? Can they increase their odds of getting a promotion? Will they have less stress to deal with on the day to day basis?”.

The impact on the company on the other hand tends to be logical and can be measured in dollars whether that’s top line revenue or cost savings.

‍

If you enjoyed this post why not share it with a friend?

‍

Also don't forget to subscribe to my free newsletter so you get notified as soon as the next post is live!