Workiva: Battlecards
Transforming and redesigning solution battlecards for sellers so that they sellers can use them and go!
Build
Role: UI Instructional Designer, Intern
Team: Marketing, Sales Enablement, UI Designer, Sales
Tools: Figma, Wdesk, Workramp LMS
Why + Problem
Sales battlecards are a tool for Sales teams. It is typically a one-page cheat sheet internal document of high-value talking points created to help the sales team close deals. In fact, 71% of businesses that use battlecards say they have increased their win rates as a result.
Despite the impact battlecards have for the Sales team, the current Workiva Sales battlecards are completely messy and overwhelming. It was our job to transform these battlecards so that sellers could use them as intended to in turn, close more deals and bring in revenue.
Battlecards have had two main designs so far. One included information overload that has as much information as possible stuffed onto it. The other design was a modified attempt from a Sales Enablement team member who came to us to build her design.
The main issues we saw with both designs were that both contained too much information at once and even though the battlecards were supposed to be quick reference guides, none of these were quick to scan or read through at all.
Research
Personas
Wireframes
My manager and I did a quick 15 minute design sprint to each come up with three wireframe designs of how the battlecards could look. Here are the three wireframes designs that I came up with! Additionally, we narrowed down what information to include after discussing with a Sales Training Manager what the most important information was.
Design #1
This design emphasizes personas the most through a funnel visual. It is a funnel because sellers will need to go through key contributors to get to Champions and then Economic Buyers (EB).
Design #2
This design places the person section on the side and follows a simple list format which would allow fore more text. Additionally, the remaining information is organized in a grid-like format.
Design #3
This last design is similar to a quadrant and provided approximately equal spaces to each Battlecard subject.
Mock Ups + Design Review
We ended up going with my three designs so I created mocks up to gain a better sense of what it might look like.
Design #1 - winner!
The design received the most enthusiastic response from everyone. I ended up changing the funnel design to arrows to make it more clear that each person leads to the next. Additionally, this design held an adequate amount of space for each section.
Design #2
Spacing proved to be a little tight in this design as shown in the POV statements and there was excess space in the Key Value Drivers and Required Capabilities boxes. Furthermore, two colors was not enough to differentiate each category and taking away the directions in the personas was a step backwards.
Design #3
I experimented leaving out Require Capabilities because there is another Required Capabilities in the Mantra Example box. However, after reviewing this design with the Sales Training Mangers, they preferred to include a Required Capabilities box because it made it clearer what the capabilities were.
Competitors Design
The Sales Team Training manager enjoyed the Battlecard design and asked us to expand upon and create a Competitors and Objections card.
Design #1
This design uses a simple black and white table to compare Workiva’s features to its competitors. However, there was so much competitor information that the text would become hidden and is still quite difficult to read.
Design #2
This second design is simplified into a table made with shape elements, not the built in table features. While this one is neater, there is still too much text and this is after cutting out a lot of text. Additionally, in this design we left out Workiva’s information to make more room for the competitors’ information. Additionally, keeping in mind that this will be a template, this design may be easier to mess up and sellers may find this format more confusing than a simple table.
Design #3
This design includes the most competitors (7) and simplified the text. While most cells are tightly packed, this one is the most easy to read. The colors are a bit too distracting and it would be better to separate the rows by two different colors instead of four since this looks too off from Workiva’s brand.
Objections Design
Design #1
This was the original objections template format where the objection is labeled at the top and the discovery questions and responses follow. Once again, there was a lot of text that needed to fit within this slide so it was only natural that I cut unessential information out.
Design #2
This design is similar to Objections Design #1 except that the Discovery Questions have been reduced to one and the objections are placed in the middle. This is because the most important the objections card is the objection itself and how to respond to it. Those, we changed to order to make the flow more natural and to place greater emphasis on the objections and responses.
Design #3
Building off of Objections Design #2 and focusing on how this is supposed to help sellers in real life, I took the conversational aspect of objections literally and put the text into speech bubbles to illustrate how this information is supposed to help sellers. I also added some of Workiva’s hand drawn elements so that sellers could use these to highlight certain parts.