Contact us today to learn more about how sales AI can gather and process your buyer’s activity data, analyze their engagement, and provide insights about their interests. What tough questions do they “arm” your buyer with to try to stump you? Selling Against the Competition in New Markets. How To Handle Competitors That Customers Bring Up. Your competitors help … Take a look at a few accounts you lost, and pull them up. and the buyer is feeling the pain, now we introduce the difference. Losing is especially difficult when you feel like you have a better offering and should have won the deal . We analyzed over 1M recorded sales conversations with AI. Once you understand the problems, your sales process can become more consultative – meaning you can diagnose other issues and showcase how your product can make those problems a thing of the past. Explaining to a buyer how your product is different means nothing if they don’t value that difference. Furthermore, how it can intelligently recommend content, sales plays, and next steps that prove to your buyer you understand their challenges and are a proactive, trustworthy partner. The goal here is to make an appeal to something beyond the analytical brain that looks at every potential purchase as a dollars and cents proposition. Train Your Staff. When everything was said and done, he asked his rival — the salesperson he was competing against — out for a beer so he could understand why he lost. things salespeople can do during the sales process to “box out” their competition and. Here are four easy ways to set yourself apart and beat the competition in your industry. Can you send me proof? thing we can do is explain how our features are better in some way. Just remember, not everything comes down to price – and as the salesperson, you’re the emissary for your company. Playing to your strengths means placing outsized effort and energy on the areas where you’re doing so produces outsized … Offering a discount is easy, which is why sellers resort to it. 3 ways to beat your competition Posted by: Team Tony. What are the Six Battlefields? When you’re in the heat of battle, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and focus solely on making the sale. During this phase you can learn if they’re considering the competition (which is good to know), but beyond that, you can understand their needs and pain points. When a salesperson finds themselves in a competitive sales situation, all too often their go to solution is to simply lower the price. In the final approach, we can just ignore our competitors. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams. We’re the only platform that can help you understand in detail what separates your top reps from everyone else: The questions they ask, how they behave on sales calls, and what they talk about (and when).”. The target audience is sales people, product and marketing managers. Competitive selling is about improving your company’s ability to beat the competition by developing stronger, longer-term relationships with customers. If you’re still discussing your competition late in the game, you’re less likely to win the deal than if your competitors weren’t involved at all. Truth be told: If you want your salespeople to beat the competition, they need to fully understand the competitive landscape that they’re up against. It attracted young children who wanted to be perceived as adult-like. Following the advice and tips in this article will help you navigate the tricky waters of selling against competitors. But to truly gain a competitive advantage, you should also know about the other companies in your space, their products, the pros and cons of them, and so on. likely to win the deal than if your competitors weren’t involved at all. When we enter competitive situations and the buyer asks how we’re different, the worst thing we can do is explain how our features are better in some way. The point in the sales process your competitors were first discussed should dictate the sales strategy you take. Do you see the distinction between leading to your difference vs. leading with it? What does your business do? And they can always be refined and improved. How are you playing your cards differently? Learn more about our solutions or request a live demo to see it in action. Instead, you need to get creative. Our product marketing team here keeps a close eye on helping our sales team avoid the comparison trap. But when you educate the buyer on the problem your differentiator solves first, you’re not guessing. It happens all the time: You find you need to figure out how to beat the competition in sales. With time, and some practice, you’ll be winning far more often than you’re losing. 2. Win the Competitive Battle Early. Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together Sales AI and Content Management in a true Revenue Enablement Platform. And don’t be too fast to give price concessions. If you’ve only been dabbling in LinkedIn, now is the time to make a concerted effort. Your differentiator has to be “meta” rather than incremental. If they’re talking about a competitor’s product, they’re giving you insights into what they’re thinking about. The rise in the number of competitors and the increasing ease with which customers can research and compare their options means that you will have to acknowledge your rivals. Now, that’s nothing more than a ticket to play the game. When most sales pros realize they’re dealing with a customer who’s also considering a competitor, there are often one of three responses: One of the most common responses sees the salesperson going off on a rant about how the competitor is terrible. Your relationship with the competition doesn’t have to be adversarial. reading this, your action item is simple: as soon as deals become competitive so you can help your rep with deal strategy. Absolutely genius strategy, if you ask me. Whether you’re a startup owner or veteran, you need to know how to deal with competitors in business. It’s a question that you tell your buyer to ask your competitor because you know it will trip them up. You’re getting ready to move a prospect to the final stages of negotiation and they bring up your biggest competitor. Many other players have had difficulties with Beat the competition in terms of sales that is why we have decided to share not only this crossword clue but all the Daily Themed Crossword Answers every single day. This is sales 101 – but the insight here can be invaluable in a competitive selling situation. How to Beat the Competition Through Effective Sales Forecasting. The first step in differentiating yourself from the competition involves talking to your customers just like always. 3. Here you can sometimes beat the competition by helping the customer see the consequences of inaction. means nothing if they don’t value that difference. As soon as competitors are even mentioned in an intro sales meeting, you can get an alert in Gong so these competitive deals are proactively brought to you. 9 Ways to Beat The Competition in Business and Create a Winning Competitive Advantage 1. 5 Effective Ways to Beat Your Competition 1. This is where competitive selling comes into play. Do this a few times and your pattern recognition will kick in. Find your expertise, and then double down on... 2. One of the unstated yet recurring ideas in these points has been that you should not only be a knowledgeable salesperson – you should be a good person in general. likely to win the deal than if your competitors were absent from the deal entirely. They can “call in airstrikes” from product marketing, get in the trenches themselves, and help their reps chart their deal strategy. Customers aren’t solely driven by the best price – in a close competition, they may well go with a company they feel aligns with their own values. (Potential) customers generally already have a favourable attitude towards their current partner, so it’s all about changing mindsets. Expand your battlefield; Shoot from all angles; Reinforce the borders; Make sure competitor attacks miss their mark; The frontline of the competition; Attack your competitor’s borders; Benefits Sales conversations truly are the competitive battleground, and more than ever, it’s imperative that you dominate your competition. In its simplest terms, it means exactly what you think it means – sales is a competitive field and we have to find and utilize any tools at our disposal to gain an advantage. Despite the fact that sales best practices are constantly evolving (and lately becoming more virtual), one thing remains true: buyers want to buy from people that they trust. Set Landmines, and Know Your Competitors’. Prepare A Strategic Battle Plan Your knowledge of the business terrain and the competition is important in determining how to capture your market. Figure Out How You’re Different. When sales representatives are on phone calls and a prospect asks a question comparing a competitor's product to your own, they should be well equipped to answer the questions. Our account executives (AEs) start by educating the buyer about a problem: The performance delta between their top producers, and everyone else: Once the problem is framed, our AEs educate the buyer on why it’s a problem worthy of being solved: Overachievement from your best reps is great! You’ll pick up specific things that should be eliminated for your team to win more competitive deals. Attention, sales professionals: Office 365 and LinkedIn saved searches are your friends. Take inventory of everything you offer– product features, company strengths, support services, value-added benefits, and so on. Get your product marketing team involved and ask them to lead a customer interview campaign. Interrupt the pattern: If most salespeople are doing the same thing (which they are), then you want to do the exact... 2. Think of it this way – when a customer approaches you, you can not only highlight your own products, but you can potentially talk about all of your competitors in the space, pointing out areas where your offering is better. Sometimes the key to selling against your competition is not as simple as having the stronger product. Before your prospects get distracted by another web site, another ad, or another task, grab their interest by making... 3. You’re both trying to grow your industry, increase awareness, and so on. your buyer to ask your competitor because you know it will trip them up. If you’re a sales manager reading this, your action item is simple: Get involved in competitive deals early on. But, it’s canceled out by everyone who misses quota. Lead to Your Differentiators, Not with Them. In doing so, manufacturers have sunk reams of money into optimizing back-end production operations. In the end, if you are going to beat the completion in an undifferentiated market you must distinguish yourself by how you sell, not just by want you sell. B2B sales may not be quite as lethal as warfare, but getting beaten by the competition is always frustrating and sometimes even painful. As a sales professional, you have a full arsenal of tools at your disposal to help you convert leads to customers, and you may have to dig deep into your bag of tricks if your competition has a better or more affordable product. It occasionally feels more like a roller coaster ride than a career. Explaining to a buyer how your product is different means nothing if... 2. Sales leaders that have visibility into their team’s sales conversations have an unfair advantage. If everything you offer is the same as your competition, the differentiator will always... Look for an Underserved Group. When a salesperson finds themselves in a competitive sales situation, all too often their go to solution is to simply lower the price. Being blind to sales conversations as a sales leader is like being a platoon commander in the midst of a chaos-ridden fire-fight with no communication or enemy intelligence. Sales conversations truly are the competitive battleground, and more than ever, it’s imperative that you dominate your competition. Change Your Strategy Based on Sales Cycle Stage, 6. Once the moment is ripe and the buyer is feeling the pain, now we introduce the difference. And since they’re always learning, each new opportunity gives them more insight into how to help you achieve your goals – selling more product. If you can give them that personal touch and use your best techniques, you will often be able to overcome a competitor with a better price or slightly better product offering. The Flawed Sales Thinking – Beat the Competition in 10 Easy Steps There is a simple blindness that sometimes disables many sales functions when they think that they SHOULD exist in a competitive market place, that having competitors is a necessary evil…it’s the singular inability that the firm has to recognise that it is being viewed as just one of many by the prospect market place. 2. The corollary to this principle is to know your competitors’ landmines, and how to answer them. They no longer have the perception that we’re in the same category as the speech analytics providers they’re already familiar with. © Copyright 2021 Gong.io Inc. All rights reserved. Instead of competitors “flying under your radar,” there won’t be a single competitive discussion on your sales floor that goes unnoticed: So…  what’s your takeaway if you’re a sales rep? It’s an ongoing, never-ending project that requires continual “sharpening.”. This has been a really popular tactic in automobile sales for years – you mention you’re looking at a BMW at the Mercedes dealer and the sales guy will then spend 30 minutes explaining why the BMW is likely to blow up before you drive it off the lot. You’re selling. What was the turning point or “aha moment”? “We’re the only solution designed specifically for sales.”, “The other solutions are great, but are built for service, tech support, etc.”. © 1990-2021 Accent Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. What does the activity velocity look like? Find a niche in the market via storytelling and specialization.. Ideally, these aren’t easily answered, proven, or refuted. Understand Your Business’s Core Expertise. Xerox thought Canon’s prices were ridiculously low, based on their assumptions of the cost to create a copier. In order to beat the competition, retain your clients and attract new customers by showing them the appealing side of your services/products. 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