CHAPTER 10

Creating Demand to Displace Competitors

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

—Francis Bacon

The hallmark of a Stage IV Customer Advisor is not to just do what every other seller on the planet does—service demand. Not to discount the significance of defeating competitors while servicing demand, as it is clearly no easy task. However, Stage IV focuses on the pinnacle of sales effectiveness—the rarefied air where individuals apply unconventional thinking to the task of creating demand and actually become catalysts who generate sales opportunities. They understand very well that 95 percent of the time, the seller who forms the business wins the business.

Customer Advisors also realize that there is no more powerful approach to penetrating a competitively held account than to formulate a strategy that is based on creating demand. This attaches an extended significance to the above 95 percent rule, thereby enabling the seller to win the battle and grow in strength—in other words, create a new opportunity and leverage the resulting win to drive a wedge into the account and displace the competition.

Unlike servicing demand—where sellers can sometimes get away with counting on what they are selling versus how they are selling in order to win—creating demand works only in the “how” domain. It is all about you, the seller—not the product or service. Specifically, it requires you to discover the potential to create Unexpected Value along with a plan that enables the customer to realize that value, thereby creating market share that does not exist. This is where the simple process of sales transitions into business development. See Figure 10.1.

Figure 10.1: The Pinnacle of Value Creation

In the next section, we cover the significance in the distinction between creating and servicing demand. We then introduce a process that leverages creating demand to penetrate competitively held accounts, which will put you at the epicenter of Stage IV Customer Advisor account management.