Onsite Programs - Sales and Business Development
Creating a Sales Competitive Advantage

Description:
In most competitive situations, the distance between first and second place is often very small. There are many factors that can sway a prospect’s decision. Consider the possibilities if you were able to gain significant insight into the real reasons why an opportunity was won or lost and act accordingly.

We offer three services to best understand why you are winning or losing and then customize a solution to help you create a sales competitive advantage.

Why you are winning or losing?

1. Strategic Account Analysis offers both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of customer perceptions. This is accomplished by conducting in-depth interviews with multiple prospects or partners to determine their perceptions about the people from your organization that they interact with, the competition, your solution, your messaging and ultimately, the pros and cons of doing business with you. Strategic Account Analysis provides concrete, objective feedback in terms that removes the emotional aspect often present in understanding why mindshare is won or lost.
    
2. Win/Loss Analysis helps shed new light on priorities for partners or prospects and regarding what impacts their decision to do business with you or your competition. As a result of a win/loss analysis, we can pinpoint perceived competitive strengths and weaknesses while also uncovering underlying rationales, prejudices and perceptions as they relate to technological issues, product functionality, your team’s performance and the impression of your overall company.
    
3. Competitive Techniques is used in situations where choosing to do business with you involves a committee, project team or other group within the partner or prospect organization.  To win you have to gain mindshare and preference from a wider variety of individuals, each with personal and organizational agendas that must be addressed.  Your competitive advantage is the result of many different behaviors and activities. As a member of an integrated team, it’s important to understand how buyers and partners perceive your professionals. They are looking for organizations and experienced individuals that can help them be successful.

Competitive Sales Strategy, Plan, and Approach

1. Creating a Competitive Strategy. Your competitive strategy is your overall approach to encouraging preference for your solution. Your organization may already have a general, market-wide competitive strategy, but you should still reassess that strategy for each sales opportunity and each partner engagement. You might compete against the same alternatives over and over again, but the dynamics will never be the same from one opportunity to the next. In each new opportunity, the dynamics that make up competitive preference will vary.
    
2. Selecting Sales Strategies.  How do you decide which strategy to use and when? First, you need to know not only your position but also the position of your competitors. You will need to learn how to think like the prospect or potential partner, because their perspective matters the most. In doing so, you will need to understand the people, their business pains and the competition.
    
3. Constructing Competitive Traps. Traps are messages that let the prospect or partner come to their own conclusion about your superiority over the competition. They’re called traps because you set them during conversations but they don’t spring until you’re gone. Competitive traps are set early and often when trying to win preference and mindshare.
    
4. Defining Competitive Positioning.  Competitive positioning develops as you go through the discovery process and learn more about the needs of your prospect or partner. By using competitive positioning statements, you are able to differentiate yourself from the competition. They explain why you are better. While similar to traps, they have different calls to action that don’t necessarily involve springing an objection on a competitor. Positioning statements also come later in the process. By the time you’re ready to deliver them, you’ll have a good idea of the picture you’d like to paint of your organization and your solution. Because they come later, positioning statements are more defined than traps, and they’re more integrated with your fully-developed strategy.
    
5. Handling Objections. You need to keep in mind that the competition is going to be setting their own traps for you. In addition, you will be introducing ideas to the prospect or partner that they may or may not agree with. Regardless, they will challenge your ideas, and it’s important that you’re prepared to respond to their questions and challenges. If you anticipate your traps, you can prepare a confident and convincing response.

Winning preference and developing long-term, productive business relationships requires assessment, planning and well-aligned execution. No one is going to win preference for you, so it is up to your team to be able to clearly differentiate your organization, your team, and your solutions.

Target Audience:
Sales professionals looking to differentiate themselves from the competition.