How to Use Champions to Improve Adoption of Competitive Intelligence

Champions (a.k.a. advocates or evangelists) are coworkers who encourage their peers to consume the content you produce. They are essential to the success of your competitive intelligence program.

So how do you find them? A couple of thoughts:

➡️ Make sure everyone knows that you are the CI person.

Champions, by definition, are excited about CI—which means some of them will proactively reach out to you. All you have to do is make them aware of your existence.

An easy way to do that is to join team meetings and introduce yourself. If you want to go the extra mile, ask HR if you can give a brief presentation to new hires during their onboarding. Margaret Hoffecker, who runs CI at AB Tasty, is great at this.

➡️ Pay attention to who’s using your content.

You know how you need to start exercising in order to feel motivated to exercise? Annoying, I know.

Finding CI champions is a similar situation. You need to start publishing content (e.g. battlecards) in order to find the people who will evangelize it.

So go ahead and ship that battlecard that you've been tinkering with. No, it's not perfect—but it doesn't need to be. Ship it and pay close attention to which sales reps use it. Early adopters make great champions.

Got your champions? Great. Now here's a couple of ideas:

✅ Create success stories. That seller who's been using your battlecards and winning deals? Ask them to collaborate with you on a brief presentation to the sales team. "How I Won a $50K Deal Against Competitor XYZ." Boom.

✅ Assign small responsibilities. Let's say you have 4 champion sellers. Once a month, each of them should have the responsibility of sharing a call snippet in which they do something exemplary—handle an objection, use FUD, etc.

Now go find a champion today!

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If this blog post was helpful, I suggest reading The Secret Formula for Stellar Battlecard Adoption.