I rarely write about politics. In fact, I rid myself of anything partisan after my mentor in law school provided me with some One-Up advice: Instead of worrying about politics and presidents, invest your energy into building the life you want for your family. As it pertains to parties, I am a man without a country. For good or for ill, I have been ungovernable since turning 13 years old, the age at which I decided I would govern myself.

In 1992, then-governor Bill Clinton ran against George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot for the U.S. presidency. Some people suggested that Clinton intended this as a dry run for the highest office in the land, so any accusations about his dalliances with women would be old news for his real run in 1996. Instead, Clinton hired an advisor named Dick Morris to help him win the election, something they accomplished through a little-known framework Morris proposed: triangulation strategy. Shuffle a few letters and you get strangulation tragedy, which is how it must have felt to Clinton's opponents. The idea was to position Clinton in a very specific way, one that would make it very difficult for his competition to beat him. Clinton was a lifelong Democrat and ran on their ticket. However, he distanced himself from the Democrats on certain issues, like crime. He was not a Republican, so he also distanced himself from the opposing party, but he gave them credit for ideas popular with women with children. Morris helped Clinton triangulate both parties.

Imagine it this way: Clinton was sitting at the top point of the triangle, looking down at the Democrats in one corner and the Republicans in the other. By moving his position above the playing field, he sought to occupy the moral high ground, positioning himself as the person who could be trusted to do what was right, regardless of party. This strategy helped him win what the media called “soccer moms,” a group of swing voters concerned about crime and the safety of their children. The rest, as they say, is history.

Don't worry, that's the end of political talk for the rest of this chapter. But as a One-Up salesperson, you too can occupy a place above the playing field, counseling your client on how they should plan and decide, including the decision of whom to choose as a partner. The strategy is quite powerful because it allows you to triangulate your competition, showing your superiority without alienating your client or looking weak. It also allows you to wipe all of your competitors off the playing field at the very same time, without even naming names.

Sometimes you just bump into an approach that works. I don't recall when I first used this strategy, but I do recall why. I was selling staffing services in a highly commoditized market. Like any reasonably large city, mine had hundreds of competitors. Some were small, including bottom feeders who competed on price alone. Some of these price-oriented companies were dishonest with their clients, omitting information that their clients might have considered deal-breakers. But many were much larger than my company, something that seemed to give them the advantage. At one point, I was competing with two of the largest staffing firms on Earth, so I tried to remove both from my client's consideration. Having worked for one of the companies, I had enough ammunition to take them on directly. While I could have trashed them personally, I knew that it would look like sour grapes to my client. Instead, I trashed their model.

Because I knew the client, and had competed against both firms before, I started by explaining our high-touch, high-caring, high-value approach, suggesting that our medium size allowed us to build a program specific to the client's needs. Next, I reminded them that because we were only a few miles away, any decisions about that program would be made locally, not in another state or even another country. I also shared that large firms required a lot of real estate that did nothing to benefit the client, but their costs were baked into their pricing, along with marketing costs. To take out the bargain basement competitors, I showed how their low prices did not allow them to make the necessary investments in marketing and recruitment to identify and hire a quality workforce.

The whole time, I mentioned no company names. I said nothing negative about their people, and accused no one of anything more than choosing a model that, while excellent for some clients' needs, was inadequate for the client I was talking to. Later, I even said nice things about my competitors, including that I had friends at other firms and that they worked hard, our only disagreements being around the delivery model.

While it will never serve you to speak poorly about an individual competitor, you should explain the different models, the different choices they require, who benefits most from those choices, and who those same choices harm. Attacking a competitor will torpedo your own credibility, but you can easily attack the different models they operate and score points for your understanding and advice.

The Value Continuum

Imagine a value continuum, with a transactional model on the far left and a strategic model that creates much greater value on the far right. To make this easy to understand, let's look at the decision to go out for dinner. On the far left of our value continuum, you find a fast-food restaurant. You would expect it to be cheap, but you would not expect an especially high-quality meal or experience. While you might visit a fast-food place if you just want a quick bite, you can expect to be served with divorce papers if it's your choice for a romantic date night. Moving up one step, you find a fast-casual dining restaurant, the kind with a bar, random sports memorabilia on the walls, and a lot of televisions. While the entrees are better than fast food, they're still nothing special. The fast-casual experience removes the need to cook, and adding televisions is appreciated by people who want to watch sports or news while they eat. Again, probably not the best place for your date-night dinner. The third category is high-end chains, like some steakhouses you find in every major city. They are much more expensive than their alternatives, and the quality is much greater. You might find televisions at the bar, but you won't see them in the dining room. The fourth and final category is high-end independent restaurants with the highest-quality dining experience and high prices, the places already booked solid by the time you try to get a reservation for your anniversary dinner. Back to the steakhouse with you!

Choosing where to go for dinner requires you to look at the context of the decision and the outcomes you need. There is nothing inherently wrong with the value models that different restaurants choose, but the right choice for one occasion is wrong for another. Your company operates on a very similar continuum, where different companies compete by making different choices about how to deliver value in a specific way. Executing the One-Up strategies and tactics you find in this book will help differentiate you as a consultative salesperson, while a triangulation strategy will help position your company as the right partner for your clients by helping them make a more informed and One-Up decision. Every delivery model serves a certain customer with a certain type of need, based on the context of the decision they are making. Sometimes, that means you have to walk away from a potential client, especially the ones trying to achieve better results without making the investments they need. Leave them to your competitors who provide the lowest price, and who often avoid any conversation that might disclose the concessions the client must unknowingly agree to.

I'm sure you'd agree there is no reason to compete for a client who wants high-value results for a no-value investment. But occasionally, a company whose target results require a greater investment mistakenly buys from a company with a pricing model that simply doesn't allow them to produce the results they need. After reading this chapter, you can proactively defend your potential clients from that outcome, massively reducing your odds of losing deals to a low-price competitor.

Singing Their Praises and Confessing Their Sins

In a triangulation strategy, you will sing the praises of each of the competing models, explaining who gains the most value from the model and how it is perfect in a certain context. If you have 20 minutes for lunch between two sales calls, for example, your dining decision will skew toward fast food. You will also confess each model's sins, ensuring your client knows what concessions they are making and how each will harm them. Plowing through McLunch is quick and easy, but the supersized carbs and calories may put you off your game on your second sales call. Every delivery model has an upside and a downside.

Start with the model's positives, explaining why someone would choose that model, but naming no specific competitor. The fact that you will acknowledge the value of the model makes you credible and creates a level of trust, one you would forfeit if you just trashed your competitors, even if everything you said about them was true. You need this trust to confess the model's sins, of which there may be many. You can do this by explaining the concessions the client must make and how the model is wrong when the context of the decision and the desired result don't allow for those concessions. You are an honest broker, sitting next to your client, looking down at the playing field below, and explaining the game to improve your client's understanding of their decisions.

Four Models of Value

To explain how to execute a triangulation model, we have to start by conceptualizing several models, so you can tease apart the differences and teach them to your clients. Our example will use four models, even though you may cover more or fewer in your own conversations. We'll distinguish these models based on the level of value each provides the client, then we'll explore their attributes.

• Level One: Commodities—a true commodity, effectively interchangeable with any similar product
• Level Two:Scalable Commodities—also a commodity, but scalable because it provides a better overall experience
• Level Three: Solutions—can solve a specific problem by providing a solution and tangible business results
• Level Four: Strategic Partners—creates a strategic level of value beyond tangible business results

Fighting on Two Fronts

The lowest-price model competes primarily with the model to its right (scalable commodity) while the highest-price delivery model mainly competes with its neighbor to the left (solutions), since there's no competition to the right. The two models in the middle, the scalable commodity and the solution, both fight on two fronts, with a threat on each side: One has attractively lower prices and the other creates greater value. It's important to recognize the distinction between price and cost, and it's even more critical that you use the right words to describe the different models. A model with the lowest prices isn't the one with the lowest cost: your client would pay for every concession their supplier requires of them, whether they know it or not. The highest price almost always creates lower overall costs over time, due to eliminating any concessions.

No matter the delivery model, there is always a way to position your competitor to the left as being inadequate due to the concessions it demands. You can also attack your competitor to the right by explaining why the greater value they create isn't worth paying extra for when good enough is good enough. Being in one of the two middle delivery models means executing the Goldilocks strategy of being just right, dismissing your adjacent competitors as too hot or too cold.

A Choice of Two Concessions

Your clients are always forced to choose between higher prices and lower value. When they choose a specific model, they take all the problems and challenges they will experience once they work with their new partner or supplier. As we've seen, lower prices don't mean lower costs. But no salesperson would say, “We have the lowest price, but our deliveries will be routinely late, some of what we send you won't be right, and your customers will return more of what you sell them. You are going to spend a lot on rework, and you may need to hire a couple more people in customer service.” Conversely, the problem for those who have a high-price model is that there is no way to hide their pricing. For a lot of companies with this model, the higher price they charge is the only real concession they are asking the client to make. They charge more so they have the profit margin to deliver the better results their clients need.

The best time to discuss these concessions is before the client decides. Yet most salespeople provide a proposal and their pricing without ever positioning their offering. This is a great opportunity to play our favorite game, “I know something you don't know. May I share it with you?” With a single question in a discovery call, you can create an opening for this conversation: “Have you decided what delivery model will provide the best results for you?” Said another way, “What different approaches are you considering?” By exposing that the client is unaware of the different models in your industry, and eventually by teaching them how those models work, you close the gap and create an information parity that enables your client to choose wisely, because you have exposed them to information unavailable to them.

Buyer's Remorse

By triangulating your competition, you are enabling your client to recognize two things. First, they really can differentiate between their options based on how they work. Second, they can't escape the choices each model imposes on them. When your client mistakenly chooses a model with a low price and undisclosed concessions, their buyer's remorse comes from not understanding the importance of choosing the right delivery model. When your client realizes that they are paying too much and cannot capture the value of a higher price, their remorse comes from a lack of information. Information disparity—not problems with price or quality—is the real source of buyer's remorse.

When you have seller's remorse, there is more than a good chance you sold your client something that was the wrong delivery model for both of you. The limits of your model can cause you to fail your clients. Whenever you experience an unhappy client who wants better results than they will pay for, you have a mismatch of investment and outcomes. When you use the highest-price, greatest-value model, not delivering on your promise results in the same mismatch. While I am wary of qualifying, there is a tremendous value to recognizing that the way you deliver value is a mismatch and bowing out of the competition. It is the easiest of all decisions to walk away from a client with expectations larger than their checkbook.

Teaching the Models and One-Up Positioning

From your newly triangulated position, not only are you One-Up when compared to your client, but you are also One-Up over your competition. Most important, you are an expert in your industry, and an expert in helping your clients improve their results, an outcome you create by helping them understand and carefully consider their decisions. This approach facilitates sense-making, enabling the client to recognize and weight the factors they will need to consider with your help. The central tenet running through this work is that the only real differentiation you can create is the sales conversation. As part of that conversation, a triangulation strategy gives you the ability to differentiate your model from your competition's model. Two companies with similar offerings can produce wildly different results, due to the nature of the value they create, how they deliver it, and how they compete in their space.

To summarize, in a conversation with your client, you can start by explaining that there are several primary delivery models in your industry, each with different advantages and disadvantages. Positioning yourself at the top of the triangle, you sing the praises of each model (advantages) before confessing their sins (concessions), and spelling out the challenges the client will experience from each model. A question that will do you a lot better than “What's keeping you up at night?” is “Have you decided which of the four delivery models makes the most sense for the outcomes you need now?” There is little chance that your client has ever heard this question, so it exposes an area where they are almost certain to be One-Down and allows them to become One-Up, by learning how to understand the value of each model and their limitations (yours included).

Your industry might have more or fewer models. To execute this strategy, use as many models as necessary but as few as possible. Four models work for most industries, providing enough differentiation without having too many similar models. The key to succeeding with this strategy requires that you recognize and understand the different models, so you can explain each one's pros and cons. You will not be considered an honest broker if you are unwilling to include the value of a competing model or the concessions of your own model.

The point of triangulation is not just to prove that your model is the best fit, but to transcend the competition among models. You become far more valuable to your potential client when you can give them an objective assessment of their choices and explain the rules of the game to them, making you not just a player but a commentator and referee rolled into one. A client who is uncertain gains a lot of certainty this way, not just about their decision but about your suitability to help them make sense of their world. The person who provides the client with an education on the different models, their advantages, their challenges, and the concessions they are agreeing to is the person who is best positioned to win the client's business. By being One-Up, you become the third force in the debate.