The Containment Strategy Statement

The key elements in a Containment strategy statement include:

• The class of strategy
• Your approach to delaying the decision and making certain that the customer perceives value in doing so. A clever but worthless delaying tactic will serve only to annoy the customer and damage your credibility. You have to contribute to the evaluation process in real terms. And remember, you can take only a short time, such as a few days or a week. This might not be long; however, its impact on competitors is, again, disproportionate to the amount of time.
• Which compete issues you will address during the delay
• How you will move up the Sales Value Chain and improve your political alignment
• How you will smoothly bridge from the Containment approach to the Indirect strategy—complete with a face-saver. Stay on the offensive, which reflects driving ambition tempered by humility. Remember, your mission is not to delay the decision, but to win the business.

Combining these elements provides you with both a strategy statement and specific direction to turning around a competitive sales situation. As with the other strategies, you can then judge all activities and new developments against this mission.

An example of such a Containment strategy statement is the following:

Our Containment strategy is to delay the decision by bringing in our VP of R&D to confidentially brief the Situational Fox on our new capabilities in order to address their perception that our product does not integrate with their installed base. We will do this while moving up the Sales Value Chain, by accelerating the customer’s new cost reduction initiatives and improving our political alignment by advancing the Fox’s Personal Motivator of balanced lifestyle, thus changing the ground rules from the existing criteria to providing unexpected cost savings.

Figure 16.2 shows the template for a Containment strategy statement.

Figure 16.2: Containment Strategy Statement Template