Kill sheet

What is a kill sheet?

A kill sheet is an internal, frank analysis of why your company loses deals to a specific competitor. Unlike a battle card — which is optimized for customer-facing conversations — a kill sheet is built for internal consumption: the sales team, the product team, the pricing team, and leadership. It documents competitor strengths honestly, identifies the prospect profiles where you're most likely to lose, quantifies the loss rate, and makes specific recommendations to improve win rate against that vendor.

The term is darkly practical: the kill sheet is the playbook for how to kill the competitive threat. It's the aggregated intelligence from every deal that's been lost to this competitor — what the prospect said, what the competitor did, what your team missed, and what would need to change to reverse the pattern.

For a VP of Sales or Head of Competitive Intelligence, kill sheets are the honest version of competitive analysis. Battle cards tell reps what to say; kill sheets tell leadership what to fix. A company that only produces battle cards is optimizing the conversation while ignoring the structural reasons they're losing.

What a kill sheet covers

A complete kill sheet for a named competitor includes six sections.

• Loss rate and pattern — what percentage of deals that include this competitor are lost, and what deal size, segment, and stakeholder profile is most associated with losses.
• Competitor strengths — an honest, specific account of what the competitor does well. Not marketing-softened. If they have a better product in a specific use case, say it. Sales leaders who know where they're actually at a disadvantage can plan around it.
• Why prospects choose the competitor — the exact language prospects use when they explain the decision. Verbatim quotes from deal debrief interviews. These often reveal positioning gaps that no product analysis would surface.
• Deal recovery plays — specific actions that have successfully reversed a competitive loss in the evaluation stage. Not generic — documented from actual recovered deals.
• Traps and landmines — prospect questions or evaluation criteria that favor the competitor. Knowing these allows reps to address them proactively rather than reactively.
• Internal recommendations — what needs to change in product, pricing, or messaging to improve win rate. The kill sheet is the primary field intelligence input to the product roadmap and pricing strategy.

How to build a kill sheet

1. Run a structured loss analysis. Interview AEs who lost deals to this competitor in the last 6 months. Go beyond 'we lost on price' or 'they had a better product.' Get specifics: what feature? What price delta? What stakeholder was the deciding voice?

2. Interview lost prospects if possible. A 15-minute post-loss call with the prospect can yield more intelligence than 10 AE debriefs. 'I'm not trying to re-sell you — I'm trying to understand where we fell short so we can improve.' Most prospects will be honest.

3. Aggregate rep intelligence from competitive deals. Build a structured Salesforce field or Slack channel where reps submit competitive intel from every deal — not just losses. Pattern detection requires volume.

4. Make the strengths section honest. A kill sheet where the competitor strengths section says 'they have good marketing but our product is better in every way' is not a kill sheet. It's marketing. The useful version says 'their [specific feature] is genuinely better for [specific use case] and that's where we're losing.'

5. Assign an owner and a quarterly review. Kill sheets go stale faster than battle cards because competitors move. The loss pattern from Q1 may not match Q3.

Common mistakes with kill sheets

1. Confusing them with battle cards. Battle cards are for prospect-facing conversations. Kill sheets are for internal strategy. The same document can't serve both — one requires diplomatic framing, the other requires blunt honesty.

2. Not sharing them with product and pricing teams. Kill sheets are the most actionable competitive intelligence the company has. If they're locked in the sales folder and never read by the product manager, the losses they document keep repeating.

3. Only building them after a loss pattern emerges. By the time the pattern is visible, you've already lost 10–15 deals. Build kill sheet intelligence from the first competitive deal you encounter.

How Gangly surfaces kill sheet intelligence

Gangly's Live Call Coach captures every competitor mention during calls — the name, the context, the prospect's framing, and the rep's response. That data aggregates into a competitive intelligence feed that identifies which competitors are appearing most frequently, in which deal profiles, and what the prospect is saying about them.

This feed is the raw material for kill sheets. Instead of running quarterly debrief sessions to collect competitive intel, the data is captured continuously from every call. Enablement and product teams can query it by competitor, by segment, or by deal outcome.

See how Live Call Coach works →

Frequently asked questions