"They Just Named a Cheaper Rival." Here Is Your Answer

It is going well. Then they say the name.

"We are also looking at [competitor], and honestly they came in a bit cheaper."

And you say something. You always say something. But be honest with yourself about what you said last time. It was probably a feeling dressed up as a fact.

A battlecard that lives in a shared drive and was last updated in March is not a battlecard. It is a historical document.

So we built one that rebuilds itself from the same numbers as the rest of the report, in the order a salesperson actually uses them.

Price first, because that is what they just said out loud. Read from the competitor's own catalogue, this week, not from a slide someone made once.

Complaints second, because that is your opening. Not "they have 4.2 stars", which is useless. The themes inside their review text, so you can say the specific thing their own customers keep saying.

Proof third, because you have to close the loop with something you can back up.

The rule we care most about is the boring one: if a block has no data, we write why it is missing instead of writing nothing. A blank line on a battlecard gets read as "no problem here", and that is how a rep gets ambushed.

There is one more rule that cost us an argument internally. The answer block, the actual "here is what you say" line, only appears when both sides were measured against the same floor and the gap is at least five points. Below that, we are handing a rep a talking point built on noise, and they will use it, and it will be wrong in front of a customer.

Two things we cannot do yet, and you should know before you rely on it.

The price line reads from a product catalogue, so if you sell B2B software with packaged pricing, that line is currently blank. We know. It is on the list.

And a card is only as fresh as the last run, which is every fourteen days. If your competitor changed price on day three, you find out on day fourteen.

One thing to do next: write down what you said the last time someone named a cheaper rival.

Then go check whether it was true.