Crayon

I had never touched a competitive battlecard before this job.

A battlecard is the short brief a sales rep reaches for when a prospect mentions a competitor. I ran user interviews to learn what reps actually needed, then designed and led delivery of an embedded battlecard feature that lives inside Salesforce.

Learning how the job really works

Before I designed anything, I wanted to understand how product marketers and sales reps actually handle competitive intel: where it comes from, how it gets turned into something useful, and where it needs to show up next. These whiteboards are where I worked that out.

Left: the product marketing workflow, from finding intel to measuring what it does. Right: gathering intel, making sense of it, and getting it in front of people.

Early thinking about how the feed, stories, and battlecards connect, and how they reach Salesforce and Slack.

Battlecards that live inside Salesforce

The feature launched with Competitive Advantage, SWOT, and Kill Sheet formats, live inside Salesforce. Reps need answers fast, so a card has to be quick to read and, just as important, quick to update.

I built an inline editor so non-technical users could update cards without help, and designed mobile friendly layouts for reps in the field. The cards ran through a third party embed, so the design had to degrade gracefully instead of breaking when the embed misbehaved.

The battlecard editor. Tiles for strengths, weaknesses, landmines, pricing, and more are added and edited in place.

Talking about intel where it lives

Once cards were live, sales and marketing needed a place to talk about them. I added commenting so they could discuss intel in context, tile by tile.

Comments attach to a single tile, so the conversation stays with the intel it is about.

Then I noticed something. The reps were a great source of new intel themselves, so I built a way for them to feed it straight back into the platform.

Beyond battlecards

Insights: the week’s top stories, and a saved search that lets a team follow a single competitor.

Trade show booth graphics, explored in three directions.