Ask who owns the battlecard your reps rely on in deals against your top competitors, and the honest answer is usually a job title attached to someone whose actual responsibilities lie elsewhere: Sales, Product Marketing, RevOps, Insights, or maybe even Strategy?
The Cost of an Informal Owner
When ownership is informal, so is upkeep.
Most battlecards get built during a moment of organizational pain, where a deal goes sideways, leadership asks why, and someone gets tasked with making sure it does not happen again.
The committee will dedicate some resources to build a great battlecard, ship it out to the team, and then it sits….then it stalls.
Whoever inherits the battlecard maintains it with whatever time is left over after their actual job is done, which in practice means never. The moment that person gets pulled onto something more urgent, the battlecard never gets looked at or updated again.
Even worse, when that person leaves the company, the program doesn’t formally end, but it just stops. Most organizations do not notice for two quarters or longer, because the battlecards still exist and still get pulled up during new sales rep onboarding. They just get less accurate every week nobody is updating them.
A Job Title Was Never Going to Fix This
Most companies would just formally name a new owner and then let that person manage and update the battlecard, problem solved.
But that doesn’t work, because the battlecard still depends on one person’s bandwidth. It’s accurate only as long as that person has time to update it. Every day they don’t, it gets a little more out of date.
What actually fixes the problem is a continuous feed of information which automatically updates the battlecard. This is easier said than done, but it’s not impossible.
The best way to build this out is by connecting what reps are hearing in the market to your enablement system without requiring any one person to remember to collect it or find the time to update a file.
It runs whether or not the organization has a dedicated function behind it. Nobody has to notice the market moved, because the system is built to notice on their behalf.
What This Looks Like in Practice
This is what we built FieldForce to do. It runs on a continuous cadence leveraging an AI-led interview engine that checks in with reps on a structured schedule. Sedulo analysts validate the insights that are collected and then the output routes into your CRM and call-prep tools.
For the full breakdown of how a static enablement program turns into a continuous one, read our Sales Enablement tips here, “Competitive Intelligence for Sales Enablement: A Practical Guide