What do you do when you learn that you and your competitor(s) are competing for the same account?
For starters, you can leave landmines!
A landmine is something you leave behind that educates the prospect and forces your competitors to play a more defensive game.
Its also something that forces your competitor to expose their weaknesses.
Before we continue, I need to make something really clear. This is NOT badmouthing. Not even close. Nor is it some pretty packaging of a sleazy tactic. It’s simply educating your prospect on the proper way to buy your product.
When a buyer is faced with more than one choice, do you think the choices can look the same and even confuse the buyer?
Do you think that buyer’s always use the proper criteria when evaluating those choices?
That’s where you come in . . .with a landmine!
To lay the landmine properly you’ll want to acknowledge something that your prospect wants and that’s a clear cut, indisputable difference that makes one choice rise to the top.
Step one is to say what they feel by saying something like “On the surface, many widget companies look the same so here are a few things you need to insist on to ensure you make the right choice”
Time Out: In this moment, you just ascended to the level of expert because school is about to be in session and you’re the teacher baby!
Step two (and I’m assuming you’ve asked who the other players are) is to take a few areas where you know your competitor can’t keep up with you, and then make those areas part of the selection criteria.
For example, I worked with a commercial cleaning company that carried 30 million in insurance which was unheard of at the time. The closest one of their competitors came to this was 15 million.
I trained the sales reps to say the following as they showed the prospect the certificate of insurance as evidence;
“One thing you need to insist on is at least 20 million in insurance. Why? Because I could hurt your feelings today and you could sue me for 10 million dollars. What would happen if God forbid, someone slips on a wet floor and the cleaning company doesn’t have enough insurance to cover it. Who do you think is going to have to write that check? Also, you need to insist that anyone looking to do business with you includes a recent copy of their certificate of insurance in with the proposal. And you’re going to want to check this spot, right here (as they highlighted the date on the certificate) to make sure it’s current. When things get tight for the smaller cleaning companies, we often see that they let their insurance expire. If that insurance expires and there’s an incident, who do you think foots that bill?”
So what we’ve done here is . . .
1) Refocused their thinking AWAY from some low bidder nonsense and TOWARDS an area where we can provide VALUE (and have a viable competitive edge)
2) Set the stage for the prospect to see our competitor to see our competitor as an inferior choice, WITHOUT badmouthing!
3) Forced our competitor to play more of a defensive game
4) Positioned ourselves as an authority
5) Created and or rewritten the rules of engagement
I advise my coaching clients to offer at least 2-3 of these landmines to really solidify the point.
Assignment: Create at least 2-3 landmines of your own and then, for the gold star, smiley face and note home to your parents;
Get your sales team together and talk about this topic in your next sales meeting.
Meanwhile, please forward this blog post to your team.
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