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Most competitive programs hit the same wall: too many competitors, not enough time to maintain content for all of them. The result is either a sprawl of stale battlecards, or a gap where coverage doesn’t exist at all. How it feels managing competitive content This guide walks through a setup that solves both problems — thorough coverage for the competitors that matter most, and reliable fallback guidance for everyone else — without creating an unmanageable maintenance burden.

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The Two-Tier Approach

The core idea is to separate your competitive coverage into two tiers: Tier 1 — Named competitors. Your top competitors get dedicated battlecards built from deal data and kept current with automated workflows. These are the names that come up in most of your deals. Tier 2 — Category competitors. Everyone else gets covered by category-level battlecards that address the type of competitor rather than the specific company. When a rep encounters a competitor you haven’t built a named card for, Hindsight can generate tailored guidance on the fly using scoped web research — grounded in the right category strategy. This means you’re not starting from zero for long-tail competitors, and you’re not trying to maintain 40 individual battlecards.

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Step 1: Understand Your Competitive Landscape

Before building anything, get a clear picture of who you’re actually competing against and how they cluster. Use Hindsight to research your tracked competitors and look for patterns. A useful starting point is to ask Hindsight to summarize win/loss themes by competitor, then look for common threads — similar objections, similar buyer profiles, similar positioning. The goal is to group competitors by the pain they create for your buyers, not by product features or market category. Competitors that look different on paper often create the same friction in a deal. If your strategy for beating them is essentially the same, they belong in the same bucket.
Example prompt: “Summarize closed-lost deals from the last 6 months grouped by competitor. For each competitor, what were the top objections and what did buyers say they valued about their solution?”
Once you have a read on the landscape, define your categories. Three to five is usually enough. Give each one a name that reflects the buyer pain — something your reps will immediately recognize from their deals. Categorize competitors in Hindsight You can also use your own frameworks or bring in external research at this stage. The categorization doesn’t need to come entirely from Hindsight — what matters is that it reflects how competition actually plays out in your deals.

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Step 2: Build Category Battlecards

For each category you’ve defined, build a battlecard that gives reps a strategy — not just a feature comparison. A strong category battlecard covers:
  • What type of buyer gravitates toward this category of competitor and why
  • The core objections reps will hear, and how to respond
  • Where your solution wins and where the real risk is
  • What to probe for and what to avoid saying
Use Hindsight’s built-in recipes as a starting point, or write your own. If you’re building from deal data, a specific recipe will outperform a generic one — pull from closed-won and closed-lost deals against the relevant competitors, not just one side.
Example prompt: “Search closed-won and closed-lost deals where any of [Competitor A, Competitor B, Competitor C] were evaluated. Identify the top objections in losses and the win themes in wins. Build a category battlecard covering: buyer profile, top objections and responses, win strategy, and 3 things to avoid.”
See Creating Competitive Content for a full guide on building and refining content in Hindsight. Where to build: You can create content directly in Hindsight, or use an integration like Google Drive or Notion and sync it in. Native Hindsight content is easiest to maintain — updates are reflected immediately across the platform.

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Step 3: Build Named Battlecards for Top Competitors

For your Tier 1 competitors, follow the same process with more specificity. Named battlecards can go deeper: specific pricing objections, known product gaps, recent announcements, rep talk tracks grounded in actual deal conversations. The tighter you scope the recipe, the more useful the output. Use Workflows to keep these current automatically. Set up a workflow that runs your battlecard recipe on a cadence — weekly or bi-weekly — and surfaces suggested updates to your library when new deal data or intel comes in. You review and accept; nothing overwrites without your sign-off.

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Step 4: Configure Each Competitor in Hindsight

Once your content is built, set up each competitor in Hindsight to make sure the AI draws from the right sources when reps ask questions. Add a category. On each competitor’s profile, add the category you assigned in Step 1. This is how Hindsight connects a named competitor to the right category battlecard when a rep encounters someone you don’t have a dedicated card for. Add competitor category in Hindsight Set URL rules for scoped web research. For each competitor, you can define which web sources Hindsight is allowed to search. This keeps the AI grounded in authoritative sources — their documentation, support pages, changelog, pricing page — rather than pulling from anywhere on the web. To configure URL rules: go to the Competitors list, hit the three-dot menu next to any competitor, and select Edit URL rules. Add the domains or subdomains you want to scope research to (e.g. docs.competitor.com, competitor.com/pricing). Manage URL filters for a competitor This is especially valuable for Tier 2 competitors you haven’t built named cards for. When a rep asks about them, Hindsight can pull live, scoped web research and combine it with your category battlecard to give a tailored answer — without any garbage getting into the context window.

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Step 5: Organize Your Asset Library

How you tag and organize content in your library determines how well Hindsight retrieves it when reps need it. Named battlecards go under the specific competitor. Tag them with the competitor’s name so the AI can surface them in relevant deal conversations. Category battlecards go in the asset library with a label matching the category name you defined in Step 1. Don’t file them under a single competitor — they’re meant to cover the whole group. Tag asset with category label A few other things that matter:
  • Title assets clearly. “Battlecard” is not a useful title. Use something like “Price-Focused Competitors — Category Battlecard” or “Competitor X — Enterprise Objection Handling.” The title is how Hindsight finds and cites your content, and how reps know which one to use.
  • Add a last-updated note at the top of each document. This tells your team how fresh the content is and when it’s due for a refresh.
  • Use markdown. Hindsight retrieves and cites markdown most reliably. Clean formatting improves answer quality.
  • Prefer multiple short documents over one long one. A single 20-page competitive doc is harder to retrieve from accurately than four focused ones. Split by segment, use case, or deal stage if needed.
See Library Setup for full guidance on importing, tagging, and organizing your knowledge base.

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Step 6: Configure the Slack Assistant

Once your content is in place, configure the Slack Assistant so reps can get fast, accurate answers without leaving their workflow. Go to the Slack Assistant settings and add Custom Instructions to shape how the assistant responds for your team’s specific needs. One pattern that works well is an “on a call” mode — instructions that tell the assistant to give shorter, more direct answers when a rep signals they’re mid-conversation. For example:
“If the rep says they’re on a call or asks for a quick answer, respond in 3 bullet points or fewer. Lead with the most important thing to say, not background context.”
You can also use custom instructions to reinforce your messaging, define tone, or restrict certain topics until your content is ready. Slack answer using category battlecard with no named asset Use the Tool Access Control settings to toggle which capabilities are active. If your deal data isn’t fully verified yet, you can disable deal search and rely on assets and intel until you’re confident in the coverage. See the Slack Assistant guide for full configuration details.

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Putting It Together

The setup above gives you a competitive program that scales without proportional maintenance cost:
  • Top competitors get named battlecards, kept current by automated workflows
  • Long-tail competitors are covered by category strategies with scoped live research filling the gaps
  • Reps get fast, sourced answers in Slack — with or without a named battlecard for the competitor they’re facing
The key lever is the category layer. Once it’s in place, every new competitor you add gets meaningful coverage immediately — not when someone finds time to write a battlecard.
Related: Library Setup | Creating Competitive Content | Competitor Monitoring | Slack Assistant