After years working in competitive intelligence (CI), I learned a simple truth: the speed of market change outpaces the speed of enablement. Competitors adjust their positioning and messaging weekly, yet sellers often get static battlecard updates once a quarter.
The Battlecard You Updated Yesterday Is Already Outdated
Picture this: a sales rep sends you a Slack message:
"Hey, do we have a battlecard on Competitor X? My client's asking for our POV on the new product they announced today."
You drop what you're doing, dig through your enablement folder, and finally find the battlecard… only to realize the last edit was two months ago.
It's not a one-off annoyance, it's an industry-wide pain point. CI professionals struggle to keep battlecards current, while most sellers admit they use them far less than enablement teams would like.
The reality is simple: battlecards expire faster than they can be refreshed. A competitor's pricing, messaging, or product features can shift in days, instantly making last week's "final" version obsolete. When the content feels old, sellers hesitate to use it; when they do and it's wrong and outdated, credibility suffers. Trust in the intel quickly erodes when insights feel stale.
Traditional battlecards often live in static decks that reps rarely open. I've seen PMMs spend weeks updating slides, only for them to go untouched. It's an exhausting update hamster wheel, by the time you finish one refresh, two more are already outdated. The "set it and forget it" era of battlecards is over. Sellers need real-time intel, not another quarterly PDF upload.
The Lagging Indicators Trap
Another broken piece of the enablement treadmill is how success gets measured. Too often, CI programs are judged by lagging indicators, for example, "Did win rates against Competitor X improve after that new battlecard?" The problem is that many factors influence win rate, and by the time results show up, the insight is already stale.
As Forrester's Peter Ostrow notes, enablement teams are frequently measured on outcomes they can't directly control (like revenue) rather than the leading indicators they can influence. He suggests flipping the script: measure and own the inputs. Are reps ramping faster? Are they using the battlecards you built? Are competitive insights changing behavior in live deals? These are measurable immediately, and they tell a far clearer story than any quarterly win-rate report.
If you aren't tracking those inputs, you're flying blind. It's like throwing darts in the dark and checking the score after the game's over. When enablement teams instrument usage and feedback loops, they can iterate in real time. Maybe one battlecard isn't being used, That's a signal that it's hard to find, irrelevant, or untrusted. Without that data, you'd never know. As the saying goes, you can't improve what you don't measure.
From Stale Slides to Continuous Competitive Enablement
It became clear that the old model of quarterly refreshes and vanity metrics was broken. Sellers and customer-facing teams need competitive intelligence that's fresh, actionable, and measurable, the three qualities that became my north star for a high-impact CI program:
Fresh: If intel isn't current, it won't be used. Competitive insights should update as fast as the market moves, whether it's a new pricing model, feature launch, or competitor tweet. I've seen firsthand how even a two-day delay can turn a "new" battlecard into old news. Ensuring freshness means automating data collection, setting real-time alerts, and closing the gap between discovery and delivery.
Actionable: Information only matters if it drives the next step. Actionable intel translates complexity into clear, confident moves. It gives reps what to say, how to position, and where to steer the conversation, not paragraphs of background, but focused insights that shift outcomes. A battlecard should help a seller respond to a claim, frame a differentiator, or neutralize an objection, in short, move the deal forward.
Measurable: Finally, track how intel drives outcomes. Don't just celebrate a bump in win rates next quarter, instrument usage now. Which insights get referenced most in conversations? Which materials are resonating in competitive deals? If a pricing comparison keeps showing up in winning opportunities, double down. If a new asset gets zero engagement, fix or retire it. Measurement turns CI from reactive to strategic.
Breaking the Treadmill with Signal Labs CIx
All of these lessons led to one conclusion: the future of competitive intelligence must be continuous, not cyclical. That's why Signal Labs CIx was born, to make competitive enablement as dynamic as the market itself.
We're introducing CIx, an AI-powered competitive intelligence and enablement platform that automates routine tasks like tracking competitors' moves and generating or updating battlecards. It helps CI teams enable GTM, product, and executive decisions faster. CIx isn't meant to replace existing CI programs or teams — it's designed to make them faster, smarter, and more accessible by automating the manual work so teams can focus on creative strategy and insight.
Our mission is simple: help teams access real-time, trustworthy and actionable competitive intelligence.
Signal Labs brings automation and intelligence into the CI enablement workflow, generating real-time battlecards, surfacing competitive shifts the moment they happen, and turning static updates into living, evolving insights.
We believe in democratizing competitive intelligence and empowering teams with tools they can actually use, not quarterly decks that age in weeks, but living, on-demand intelligence they can tap into whenever they need it.
The role of CI leaders is evolving. Instead of organizing shared drives, they can now shape how their entire organization consumes competitive intelligence. CIx is fully customizable, allowing enterprise leaders to add their own playbooks, data sources, and templates, with their company's unique perspective, tone, values, and proprietary intel automatically infused into every battlecard their teams generate, all within clear guardrails that keep messaging consistent, compliant, and on-brand.
Throughout my career, I saw firsthand how CI can influence far more than sales, from informing product roadmaps to shaping messaging, partnerships, and even M&A exploration. Done right, CI becomes the connective tissue of go-to-market strategy.
The CI treadmill has run its course. It's time for enablement that moves as fast as the market. Every team, from sales and product to marketing and leadership, deserves intel that's fresh, actionable and measurable.