Our recent product update makes our enterprise search solution even more powerful and well suited to search competitive battlecards. Indeed, sales organizations are among the most affected teams struggling with outdated information. Battle cards for sales are notoriously lagging behind competitors’ updates. Cronycle proposes an alternative solution, relying on searches. However, searching a sales battle card is just one example among many in need of streamlining information access.
This post describes:
- What has changed on Cronycle boards related to filtering
- Search competitive battle cards that are up-to-date
- Search in market intelligence
- Real-time content curation collaboration
Cronycle strongly believes that making information flow within the enterprise is a key find success in competition. This is why filtering information is the main challenge we set ourselves to solve.
What has changed on Cronycle boards?
Cronycle boards are living knowledge hubs with business information search built-in. Boards collect both external and internal information, fully index text and make it searchable. For example, text in uploaded PDF, PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents can be searched. This is true even for text in tables (unless it is an image of a table). Teams can also synthesize information right there, on boards, into small digestible content form (equally searchable). This is a great way to extract insights from long PDFs for example and to prepare competitor battle cards one can search.
Beside freeform searches, board users also greatly benefit from adding tags to their content. For example, a board with competitive intelligence often has a tag per account or competitor (their name). It can also have a tag for the market segment or the category of information – such as “battlecard”, “talking point”, “weakness”, “M&A”, “price”, etc. We’ll describe a few scenarios further down. But you can already imagine that it enables searching battle cards for sales… and much more value.
Search with boolean operations
Our update to empower search focuses on enabling boolean operations. Indeed, with this update, board filtering now gives you additional control with the tag filter. You can decide whether you want to find content with all selected tags, or with at least one tag.
To start, click on the Tags button in the board menu, then select several tags you want to filter for. By default, the results are based on an OR basis. Appears any content that has at least one of the selected tags.
Now, you can switch to see only the intersection by clicking on the OR⌄ button and selecting AND. All ORs switch to ANDs and the results update to only show content with all the selected tags.
Naturally, you cannot filter for content without tag (No tags) AND any real tag. A warning informs you about this impossible scenario.
Recap of search and filtering options on Cronycle boards
Board search and filters work on an AND basis at the top level. For example, if you add a data range and a user, you’ll see what the specific user has added in November 2022. This is useful to monitor competitive analysis metrics. Equally, if you add a tag, you’ll see content added in November 2022 by that user with the specified tag.
At the secondary level (within each search capability), the logic varies. Here is the list of searches:
| Search type | Scope | Logic |
|---|---|---|
| Find word or expression | Text in any indexed document including titles | N/A |
| Filter by date | Date or range when content was added | N/A |
| Filter by approval | Whether content is marked as approved or not | OR |
| Filter by content type | One or several among 7 types of board content | OR |
| Filter by content tag | Combine (AND) or aggregate (OR) different tags | AND or OR |
| Filter by user | One or several users who added the content | OR |
At the secondary level, the approval, type and user filter work on an OR basis. If you filter by 2 users, you’ll see content added by either one of them. Following convention, the time filter is only allowing one selection at a time. However, you can add several consecutive years, months or days. Finally, as described above, the tag filter gives you the option to switch between either tag (OR) or combination (AND).
Search across all boards for competitive battlecards or other information
When you don’t know in which board information sits, or need information that can be spread across several boards, you can easily switch to searching across all boards. For example, you can search competitive battle cards for sales across several segments or markets and get an overview. To do so, click on the down arrow by the search and select Across all boards.
Discover the power of Cronycle for competitor battlecards
Get in touch with our team to see how Cronycle can help your business with sales battle cards:
Application scenarios
As Cronycle empowers several teams in businesses, there are several use cases where enterprise search is improved:
Search an up-to-date competitor battlecard or talking points for sales
Sales reps may search competitive battle cards to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a competitor’s products or services, in order to engage in conversations, win deals and increase revenue. They also want to anticipate and respond to questions about the competition or objections that may come up during sales meetings with prospects. As mentioned in the introduction, marketing and sales enablement teams struggle to get up-to-date information about their competitors and prospects, in particular when delivered in the form of a competitive battle card. Meanwhile, sales enablement teams struggle to set best practice processes and tools to ensure a constantly updated set of battlecards and talking points to be efficient in competition.
This is largely due to the relatively rigid format of battle card for sales, inherited from paper cards. As we discuss in a dedicated post on competitive battlecards, the steps to maintain a competitor battle card adds friction and delay. Weeks, and even days of delay put your sales reps at risk of losing trust and attention from prospects. The value of battle cards wane, part of the money invested is wasted.
An alternative to stale competitor battlecards
But there is an alternative. We’ve seen our most successful competitive intelligence users embrace the smooth insights discovery and extraction workflow of Cronycle. It enables them to produce regular snippets of up-to-date insights and facts about their competitors, important leads and accounts.
This is where powerful searches comes into play. Rather than turning to a folder to search a sales battle card, sales teams can easily filter by a company name. They can also filter by the type of information they want – product release, pricing update, sales battle card, differentiators, customer stories, people, etc… As a result, this constant trickle of carefully curated insights combined with the search of competitive battlecards supports sales reps with real-time information:
Notably, it works equally well for competitors, prospects and customers, providing valuable insights and facts for objections, opportunity finding and conversation starters. Think of a family of content types, each with their own difference, objective and card template.
Alongside the search of competitor battle cards, Cronycle board integrations make it easy to disseminate to other platforms used in companies. Our tips here? For sales teams, intelligence newsletters (often for a weekly round up) and Slack or Microsoft Teams channels are particularly impactful. They make it easy to collect quality feedback from sales reps and feed relevant facts into the sales cycle.
Enterprise search in market intelligence
Product marketing, strategy and product innovation teams all need to efficiently search through up-to-date market intelligence information. Nowadays, this is a growing element of enterprise search. This information can be in the form of online content such as industry articles, press releases, results, posts, reviews, or internal documents (focus group transcripts, survey reports, analysts’ presentations, etc). Unfortunately, most enterprise search solutions born out of knowledge management focus on internal documents. Cronycle enables both internal and externally sourced information to be processed. This puts searching through a vast amount of information at the core of the user experience.
In marketing intelligence, a major portion of documents are either too long to process or quickly outdated. With the information discovery, market intelligence collection and insights extraction flow of Cronycle, your team can easily deliver digestible snippets of insights to everyone who needs it. It saves people time and businesses costs.
Let’s take an example of board search. When filtering for both emerging players and a topic using two tags, you can quickly access fresh insights about how new industry players are moving. This works whether the information came through an article, document, note, email…
The information filtered can then be used to identify industry trends, positioning opportunities and even innovations. All teams can be on the same page, increasing global performance, revenue, feeding growth and improving brand positioning.
Real-time content curation collaboration
Here comes a last example of the updated tag filter improving search experience. This time, we’ll talk about ways it improves content curation, a key activity in content marketing and thought leadership.
Real-time content curation collaboration is a process that involves collecting, organizing, and sharing relevant content on a constant basis. It allows marketing teams to quickly and easily share content with each other and with external stakeholders who will value it. This is especially useful for teams working on fast-moving projects or in dynamic environments. Giving ways to quickly access and share the most current and relevant information is critical.
So here again, the Cronycle flow enables researchers to deliver nuggets of near real-time information. In addition, context added in summaries helps content writers, campaign managers and others build on collected knowledge. All across teams.
For example, a content writer can search for all content mentioning an emerging term at the intersection of an established topic of interest:
This search applied to collaborative content curation is very powerful in large organizations. It ensures all team members have access to the same information, work on the same issues. This is especially important in large companies where information is often scattered across different systems and locations. Recent information and insights added by a collaborator can easily be found and used. Equally, earlier information provides additional sources and makes up for stronger stories and analysis. We even see teams extract and analyze performance metrics based on tag filtering and exporting to CSV.
How to get started to search competitive battlecards?
See Cronycle search with your own eyes
If you believe your team could benefit from searching for sales battle card, market intelligence or curated content, we’d be happy to discuss your needs. We’ll also show how Cronycle can help you. The first step is to get in touch with our team to request a demo:
If you are already using Cronycle and want more powerful search for competitor battlecards or other content on your boards, please contact us.
Resources to dig deeper
- How to improve sales outcomes with better battlecards – coming soon!
- Our search capabilities is based on the most advanced searching technology available from Elastic.
- Learn the day-to-day workflow for competitive intelligence:
- Guide to learn how to monitor sources of competitive intelligence
- Methods to collect information and curate content for competitive intelligence, from many places
- How to analyze competitive intelligence
- Guide to learn how to share competitive intelligence to stakeholders
- We have an Board Content Search API you can use to ingest and search content in your own CMS and other enterprise search solutions.
- Search and filtering is also powerful on Cronycle feeds – learn how to filter incoming information here.
- Teams can set a controllable taxonomy for tags across boards.
- Why chose Cronycle to empower your sales enablement content strategy for competition.
- How Cronycle powers market intelligence with a few case studies.
- The benefits of using Cronycle for content marketing with a few case studies.
- How to avoid the 8 common mistakes in market intelligence and competitive intelligence research
FAQs related to searching with tags
What is enterprise search?
Enterprise search is a technology that makes information from multiple sources searchable for collaborators in a company. It is in effect a search engine. Traditionally it focuses on intranet and internal information. However, it is expanding to cover a mix of internal and externally sourced information to avoid information bubbles and navel gazing.
What are competitive or sales battlecards?
Also known as battle cards for sales, a competitive (or competitor) battlecard is a summarized overview of a competitor. It collects key points helping sales teams with objections and strong arguments. These often include a competitor’s positioning, pricing, objection handing, strengths, weaknesses and recent key clients. Battlecard templates are well structured and visually consistent to make scanning for information quick and easy. This post describes the search of competitive battlecards which is a key challenge.
What is a tag?
On a Cronycle board, a tag is a label attached to a piece of content (article, file, note, image…). A tag or set of tags can later be used to filter information. That’s why teams benefit greatly from using a consistent taxonomy.
