When done correctly, sales battlecards put the right information into your sales team’s hands at the right moment. Perhaps no section better demonstrates this than “Quick Dismiss,” your team’s go-to answer when a potential customer mentions a competitor’s name during the sales process.

As its name suggests, the Quick Dismiss section is a short, one-or-two sentence response that sums up why your product or service is superior to that of a competitor. This is not the place to get into a point-by-point breakdown of your respective offerings; in practice, your sales team may only have a few seconds to scan the information you want to convey, so it’s important to cover the key points of comparison as concisely as possible. Ideally, they should be able to read off your Quick Dismiss during a sales call, so it needs to be worded as though you’re speaking directly to a sales prospect.

In order to find key points of attack to use against a particular company, take a close look at the competitive intelligence information you’ve gathered about it. What are some differentiators between its offerings and your own? If you’ve competed against them in the past, what helped you win the sale the last time around? What type of customer do they typically serve, and what do those customers typically complain about?

The goal is to identify a few critical points that your sales team should cover as soon as a competitor is mentioned, in order to remove them from contention, or at the very least, taint your prospect’s opinion of them going forward. Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to turn those points into a sentence or two that your sales team can read aloud, verbatim if necessary, during a sales call. This gives you an opportunity to carefully consider not only the information you want to get across, but also the phrasing that will most effectively position your company as the better choice.

When a competitor comes up during a sale, a well thought out Quick Dismiss gives your team a go-to response that packs a punch without sounding overly aggressive or rehearsed. It’s one of the easiest sales battlecard sections to create and use, and one of the most useful tools you can give your sales team.