Too often, we position ourselves according to what we perceive our market will pay for, or what we must say to prove our concept, or our own biased belief of how our market wants to buy.

Sometimes we end up vying for customers in a price competition. Sometimes our offering seems similar to others - obvious to us, but indistinguishable to our prospective clients.

How do we develop a strategy that uses our competitors to help us get clients and differentiate ourselves according to how the buyers want to buy?

YOU AREN’T MARKETING IN A VACUUM

Let’s start by thinking about the areas of distinction between you and your competitors.

Who are you in the market?

Who do you want to be perceived as – the new ones? The young ones? The smart ones? The innovative ones? How do you want people to choose you over the competition – by price? By service? By capability? By brand?

How do your competitors do this? Do you want to be similar? Or do you want to be really, really different? What are your options for achieving this? And how/when will you know whether or not your choices were appropriate, or what you might want to change? And what is the fallout?

How do you want to be seen?

Do you want to be seen as The Experts? A lovely group of service providers to solve every problem? A collaboratory between customers and provider? A company that is always developing new capabilities?

Notice how your competition is perceived. Do you want to be different? The same only better?

Defining the market

Does your competition define the market differently than you? What demographic do they appeal to? How is this made obvious? Are there areas within the market that they aren’t addressing but are blazingly obvious to you? What modality are they using to position themselves within the market? Is it effective? What’s working? What’s not? Have you enlarged or diminished your solution to go after the corporate market or the small business market?

How similar/different do you want to be from your competitors – i.e. do you want to appeal to different market sectors or the same? What will you get from each?

Price

Is your solution is similar to your competitor but with different price points? Has your competitor priced their solution higher to go after the corporate market, or lower for the small-medium business market? Where do you fit in? How does your competition advertize on price – or not? Do you want to shriek with pop-ups, or quietly suggest a conference call?

How do you want to position your pricing in relation to your competitors? Note: I’ve always taken myself out of the price competition by pricing myself out of the market (i.e I’m more expensive). That way people buy my services based on quality. Or not.

Marketing

How are your competitors getting their name out? Ezines, blog, webinars, white papers, social media, discussion groups? Do you want to meet them head on?  Be different? How?

Websites

How can you translate who you are onto a one/two dimensional screen? How are your competitors using color, font, style, verbiage, other technology like chat avatars or contact sheets? Who are you, and how do you look/act on a site.

WHAT ARE YOUR COMPETITORS SAYING THAT YOU MUST HEED?

What do you like about your competitor’s sites? What do you not like?

Take a look at your competitors sites. Do some research on Google to find out where they are advertising, or who they are partnering with, or where they have articles placed or when they are doing webinars. In fact, sign up for a webinar of a competitor so you can get a good understanding of who they are and how they position themselves.

Use Google Alerts with key words to find out who is using the terms that are important to you. Decide if you want to use similar terms in similar ways, or re-orient the market to your way of thinking.

Go onto your competition’s site and see who their clients are. Are they the same as yours? Why? Why not? What are they doing/not doing that attracts those clients and how do you want to position yourself differently…or the same?

What is most important about how buyers perceive you or them? Do you want to change your image?

MY CHOICES, AND HOW I DEALT WITH MY COMPETITION

I have a very specific problem with my brand. I’ve developed a wholly original change management model that sits on the front end of the selling model to help buyers navigate through those internal, behind-the-scenes human/political issues they must go through to move forward. You know, that stuff they do while we wait and have little to do with our solutions.

Unfortunately, the material is in the field of ‘sales’ so my competition is the entire field of, and history of, sales. That’s right: every single sales method and sales training company is my competition.

So I have a solution no one wanted (i.e. the sales model has been ‘fine, thank you’ for centuries, regardless of the abysmal success rates) and no one wanted to change, regardless of the dramatic results my Buying Facilitation® model offers. In fact, the model itself is so different there are no points of similarity between my solution and sales. No competition, right? Wrong.

So I’ve had a multi decade problem. First, I tried to match my marketing materials to the field I was supporting (i.e. sales) and failed miserably because no one understood why I sounded so different if I were offering something so similar.

Then I decided to pit myself against my competition and spend years explaining how silly sales was. That just got me a lot of hostility.

Then I decided to align myself with the field and say that I had a complementary solution (this is true) and coined new terms that the field is now using (i.e. buying decision path, how buyers buy, etc.). In effect, I dumbed down my message.

I then began writing a blog that used my thinking to open up all of the problems with sales and position my material as as an adjunct to sales – thereby aligning with my competition fully. With syndications, webinars, podcasts, and articles in various ezines and magazines, I met my competition in all of the places it showed up (it’s SALES for goodness sakes!) and offered the counter viewpoint.

I had other, smaller decisions to make. How did I want to be seen? I decided I wanted to be accessible, since my solution was visionary and would attract other visionaries with lots of questions. I designed sites in a way buyers could find me easily, so my phone number and email address appear everywhere.

The main point is to be flexible and thoughtful. Be ready to change on a dime when something isn’t working, and know the difference between what success and failure look like.

sd

Sharon Drew is a contributor to the new Entrepreneurial Selling program by RAIN Group. Check out the free video series leading up to the program.

To learn more about Buying Facilitation®, read Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it, or hear Sharon Drew use the model with prospects.

Learn Buying Facilitation® | Implement Buying Facilitation® | License Buying Facilitation®

How to use competition to win business is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

I’ve got the answers for you. eCompetitors is this amazing site that has me gobsmacked (did i spell that right?). It does all of the research  you could ever wish for, on 11,445 global industries and companies at the line-of-business level. That means that it checks out everything – e v e r y t h i n g – about a company that you could ever, ever need to know, and then some.

Here is some of what I gleaned from playing with the site with co-owner Alan Michaels – and please forgive me here for going on and on. I was truly amazed.

When you look up an industry, you get to choose whichever company names you want to include – Microsoft, Oracle, HP, Dell, etc. and even some you didn’t know about - and compare them in categories such as: product segments (many you didn’t even know about), competitors, customer segments, demographics, technology trends. There are reports on competitors, industry profiles and trends, channels. Interesting to me is the factors that go into the decisions buyers make to choose them over competitors, and even who the target decision makers are - in a phrase, all of the competitive intelligence you need to do research and analysis that explains industry analysis at the line-of-business level.

And the technology is simple to use, easy to read, laid out logically. It’s mind-boggling. It’s exciting. It will make every public company – and some not public yet – an open book and easily accessible for sales folks to get what they need to position their solution in the right way for the right people for the right time in the market.

So before you go into a company to do a pitch, you can know everything – which job titles will be involved in purchasing decisions (once eCompetitors factors in Buying Facilitation™ they will know who makes which decisions and the system that underlies the decision making process), who your competition will most likely be. There is so much data there that you’ll be able to figure out how much up-line business you might expect in the future once you make them your client.

They are a brand new company. But I’d use them as soon as possible, because once your competition uses them, you’ll be at a disadvantage.

When you call Alan, call him Michael – he’ll know who sent you. www.ecompetitors.com

sd

And don’t forget: just a few more days to get your freebies with your purchases of my new book Dirty Little Secrets. I’m getting quite amazing reviews on my new book, and sales folks from all over the world, in every industry imaginable, are thanking me for opening their eyes to how to help influence buying decisions. I’m going to be starting learning groups shortly for those interested in learning some of the ‘hows.’ Stay tuned.

eCompetitors Gives Sales Folks What They Need. Exactly. is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

You know those times when buyers show up and, barely before you can ask them what they need, buy? That’s because they’ve already done what they need to do BEFORE they contact you and they are ready. Unfortunately, the majority of buyers don’t realize what they have to do until AFTER they’ve started discussions, leaving us to think they are in a position to buy. They aren’t.

Before I tell you what it is they must do before buying, I’d like to say that I’ve asked hundreds of people where their prospects go when they say “I’ll call you back?” Here are the responses I always get, and have gotten (the same ones) for decades. And in this order:

1. they are going to find a cheaper price; 2. they are checking out the competition; 3. they are checking us out.

My response: “Really? How do you know?”

The answer, after a few beats of silence: “I don’t. It’s just a guess. I guess the answer is ‘I don’t know.’

Lots of guesses.

Here’s the deal. Sales focuses on product/solution placement/need. All of our activities are (net, net) focused on understanding need and making nice so we can place product. We think we do such a great job we could almost convince ourselves of the quality of our hard work and effort – and brains and professionalism, of course. But it’s pretty hard to reach around to pat ourselves on the back with a lower-than-ten-percent close rate.

So we blame the buyer and the product and the environment. And we all look at each other with grave understanding when the buyer never comes back. But no one, no one, is blaming the sales model.

How do you go about deciding?

I have a question. When you seek to purchase or rent a new home, what percentage of time do you spend understanding your choice of the residence, vs. the time you spend in discussion with your spouse, finding schools and choosing school districts, talking to neighbors and friends, traveling around neighborhoods to make choices, talking to banks, filling out paperwork, finding a buyer for your current home and cleaning closets and painting garages, and the most dreaded of all – moving. Moving out and moving in and packing and unpacking.

All of us know that before we make a purchasing decision, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that needs to get done to make sure nothing falls apart along the way. And for sure, when we start down the path, we kinda know what needs to happen but we sure as hell don’t know all of what will happen. Will the bank lose the paperwork? Will the roof of your current home spring a leak – the day before the new buyers sign the bank papers – and you’re out $5,000 because the house still is yours?

Can the real estate agent manage that stuff for you – even if she understands what you need to do? Well, not using the ‘sales’ model. But before you can move in to your new house, you’ve got to do all of that. Before any change takes place, and purchasing a solution will effect a change in the buyer’s environment, all of the internal, hidden issues that surround the ‘need’ must buy in to the change and somehow be addressed. You would never put a down payment on the house first, and then figure out the schools and the financing and the sale of your own house. First you resolve the internal, private, ‘systems’ issues and THEN you are ready to make a purchase.

And so with your clients. They have stuff to do in their teams, their corporations, their families. And understanding needs, or knowing what solution would be best, doesn’t help them navigate through the mysteries.

Sales is a product placement tool. So blame the sales model for not knowing where your buyers go. And if you ever want to add a new skill set to your sales model and facilitate the buyer’s internal decision issues – separate from their need or your solution – have a look at Buying Facilitation™. Then you can use your terrific sales skills.

sd

If you’d like me to write a White Paper for you on understanding the decision issues your buyers face, please email me at sharondrew@newsalesparadigm.com.

Or have a look at my book Buying Facilitation:the new way to sell that influences and expands decisions. Click here for two free chapters. It will teach you how to understand and manage the route through the internal decision process. Will it help you make a sale? Maybe. Maybe not. But it sure will help you make a client.

What Are Buyers Doing While We Wait? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com