To Know Your Competition Is to Know Yourself
,Throughout this book, we have endeavored to equip you with an understanding of customer politics and value. However, as we dive into Competitive Differentiation, we must cover an issue that is totally in your hands.
You must know how your solution and company are differentiated from those of the competition in order to formulate a strategy, and strategy has but one purpose: to advance you to relative superiority in order to win. To do this, you need to not only possess a need to win but also must have a compelling need to compete. Stage III and IV sellers have both, whereas the 80 percent seller population in Stages I and II seek only to win.
The need to win without the will to compete is like a hungry person who is not willing to try something new.
This will to compete is a personal attribute of those sellers who are naturally inclined to want to do better than their adversaries. However, many sellers would prefer to win without the need to compete. These are sellers who are often referred to as “farmers,” a familiar term that describes individuals who look after installed accounts. However, we think that all sellers in today’s marketplace should possess more of a “hunter” mentality, since every account is subject to competitive displacement and every deal carries the risk of being outsold. Still, many sellers lack the will to compete, causing competition to become a blind spot in their selling efforts.
Since competitive ignorance has serious consequences, it is worth understanding. We have identified two contributing factors to this condition:
For these sellers, the solution that they are proposing is in competition with alternative solutions provided by other suppliers or the customer itself. They don’t view themselves as competing with other sellers because they cannot see the nontraditional sources of relative superiority, such as politics, unexpected customer value, and strategy, that they control.
Having worked with so many sellers over the last 30-plus years, we believe that sellers in both cases innately know that competition exists and that they should address it directly. But not everyone is wired to confront opposition in this way; most people don’t take pleasure in benefiting directly at someone else’s expense. At the same time, they are committed to their customers and, therefore, indirectly compete by outcaring and outservicing the competition. This is the archetype of the farmer.
We wish we could say that there is a place for such sellers—that if an account is large enough, it is wise to have both hunters and farmers on the account. But the truth is that these farmers are becoming less relevant in customers’ eyes.
Customers Benefit Directly from Sellers Who Compete
It may be counterintuitive to some, but your will to compete will directly benefit your customer, because:
To compete is to move up the Sales Value Chain—and that produces significantly more value for your customer.
What does a seller’s will to compete have to do with increasing customer value? It’s hard work to move up the Sales Value Chain within an account; it takes time and effort that can come at the direct expense of other sales and sales support activities. It also requires executive-level expertise, as is seen with Stage IV Customer Advisors, which requires a developmental commitment on the part of most sellers.
What drives sellers who are not naturally competitive to make this investment when making quota is getting tougher and tougher each year? It is the competition! It’s knowing that if they don’t move north within an account, their risk of losing is significant. They’re either more likely to be conventionally outsold or the competition will go north, thereby defeating them—often without their knowledge. Mastering the intangibles provides you with significant nontraditional sources of relative superiority and also makes it difficult for the competition to see what you are doing. If they can’t see the intangibles, they likely cannot see you managing them.
Nothing produces more Competitive Differentiation than moving north up the Sales Value Chain and providing customers with the Unexpected Value that is the ultimate expression of outcaring the competition. As you do this, other suppliers who want to be competitive will ultimately have but one response: to do likewise. That means that:
Customers will see a growing amount of value from suppliers over time, because the suppliers are demonstrating the will to compete! For this reason, it is paradoxical that sellers don’t compete because they are focused on their customer and not their competitor. Yet, if they did compete, they would provide significantly more value to their customers. Such is the problem with the traditional thinking of the past.
Knowing Yourself
Almost all sellers will claim to compete; and in their minds, they truly do. But they often do not recognize that something else—something of which they aren’t consciously aware—is taking place. At its core, the will to compete has the same quality that drives sellers to master the intangibles:
An offensive mind-set, which is defined as driving ambition tempered by humility
This attitude or orientation compels sellers to knock the ball out of the park when it comes to providing customers with Unexpected Value, while also taking advantage of a competitor’s weaknesses without ever mentioning them.
The problem is that it is easy to labor under a defensive mind-set without knowing it, and this is what compels sellers to think that they’re competing when they truly aren’t. They rarely produce unexpected customer value because they believe that their job is to give the customer what he or she wants, which to them simply means being responsive. Even if the customer is wrong, they are hesitant to point this out for fear of damaging the relationship. Carry this defensive attitude a step further and we see that it spills over onto competitors. For example, if a customer individual is a Competitor Supporter, the defensive seller will tend not to call on him or her. The same goes for customer Opponents; Compete Strategy is a foreign language to these farmer-type sellers.
On the other hand, Stage III and IV sellers are assertive, innovative, and respectful but never arrogant toward customers. And they are equally assertive and innovative—but also professional—in the face of competition. They do not allow themselves to become overconfident in either situation. These sellers don’t want to hurt their competition; they simply seek to defeat their competitor’s sales strategy. For them, Compete Strategy is the intellectual sword of a sales campaign. It is an offensive mind-set that truly prepares you to take on the competition.