The Red Cell Exercise

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Red Cell is a term that was created in 1984 by Richard Marcinko, US Navy commander of the elite counterterrorist unit SEAL Team Six. His mission was to test US naval bases’ security by launching mock attacks and simulating terrorists to discover whether any vulnerability existed. Although this is clearly quite different from a sales environment, it can be both revealing and productive to put yourself in the “enemy’s,” or the competition’s, shoes. However, this is solely the domain of those Stage III and IV sellers who possess the kind of offensive mind-set we presented earlier.

You can conduct a Red Cell exercise by introducing people who are new to the sales situation to the opportunity that you’re pursuing. It is helpful if they know the account, but if they don’t, you can compensate to some degree with your briefing, which is where you begin the exercise.

1. Brief the team on the customer. You provide the participants or team with a customer intel package that familiarizes them with the customer’s industry, market position, and business in terms of structure, historical performance, vision, direction, priorities, competition, and any other relevant information. You share with them the insight gained from your research, observations, and questions.
2. Present your Compete Plan to win. You educate participants on the sales opportunity, account, competition, and your Compete Strategy. This Compete Plan consists of a few short pages composed of information on:
  • Political Advantage: your Support Base Map, the Situational Power Base, the Situational Fox (and his or her Personal Motivator), and competitive contacts
  • Unexpected Value: where you reside on the Sales Value Chain, along with your associated Value Statement and Value Proposition
  • Competitive Differentiation: your Competitive Differentiation Analysis
  • Strategy: your Strategy Statement
3. Simulate your competitor. You then assume the role of the competitor with one of the participants leading the role-play by thinking and acting like the competitor. The more that person knows about the specific competitor, the better. This is why it’s best to gather competitive intel before the exercise begins.
The team simulates the competition by determining how they will defeat you. Specifically, they begin with a Competitive Differentiation Analysis and focus heavily on the Attack and Defend boxes. The team takes about an hour to construct a competitive counteroffensive, which they’ll express as a version of one of the four strategy classes. They will also identify their sales objective, along with the Prime Objective, identifying how and when they expect to achieve relative superiority. Again, all of this is from your competitor’s point of view.
4. Catalog areas of vulnerability. When you’ve completed the exercise, everyone reverts to a role on your team to catalog areas of vulnerability and reconstruct a Competitive Differentiation Analysis that reflects what has been learned.
From there, you formulate a new or enhanced Compete Strategy. However, you’ve now tested it and therefore you have greatly enhanced insight into the sales situation. This insight will enable you to prepare for the implementation of a Containment strategy should you need it. We recommend completing a Red Cell exercise for all sales campaigns that are highly competitive and important. Figure 16.1 summarizes this process.

Figure 16.1: The Red Cell Exercise

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Now, let’s look at examples wherein deploying a Containment strategy naturally transitions to an Indirect approach at the 11th hour.

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