Create competitive advantage by splitting one buying criterion into TWO criteria

Recently I was doing a deal coaching session with a global market research company, strategising around a current opportunity for them. It was a competitive situation, where they were hoping to win the customer's business in a tight field of three other agencies. We frequently work with our accounts to build strategies to help them win important deals in situations like these.

In competitive situations, it is important to understand exactly the criteria that your prospect is going to use to evaluate the options. This may sound obvious, but it requires having actual conversations with the account; don’t assume you know what they are thinking. 

In this specific case, an interesting situation arose. We were looking at one specific buying criterion that was very important to the account, but where there was little difference between the competing suppliers. No one supplier could deliver that area more effectively than the others.

However, as I probed a bit, we discovered that, while it was true that all competitors were mostly equal, there was a small part of the process where our account had a distinct advantage. This sub-process would deliver better and more reliable results from the research, but it was an issue that the customer did not think of as a separate component.

For instance (and this is a made-up example) let’s say that one key buying criterion was the ability to Source Research Participants that matched the profile of the research. The customer felt that all the suppliers could do this effectively. However, let’s say that our account has developed a proprietary step in the process of finding participants that tends to yield participants that both match the profile AND are likely to Complete all of the Steps required by the research. In terms of Sourcing, there was no advantage, but in terms of “Completion” there was. The problem was their customer didn't think of that as a separate issue, and they lumped it all into Sourcing.

So we helped out our account to create a strategy for how they would split the issue into two criteria. They would acknowledge that all players in the field were best practice on Sourcing. But then they would emphasise Completion as a critical sub-component of that process, demonstrating both how important it is and proof of their expertise. They emphasised that Completion should be considered as a separate issue, not rolled up into Sourcing. Importantly, they emphasised not just their proprietary capabilities, but the business impact that would result – in this case better and more reliable results over the long term.

By splitting the one issue into two issues, they effectively introduced a new consideration in the buying process, one that was “hidden” within something that the customer was already asking for. This yielded a significant competitive advantage, even though the capabilities of the competitors were very similar.

What should YOU do?

•  -  Coach your teams to make sure that they really understand the criteria that your customer will be using. Validate that they are not just using assumptions, past experience or gut feel, but are actually having conversations with key contacts at the account.
•     Even where there seems to be no real competitive advantage, dig deeper to see if there is some sub-issue that you can deliver better than the competition.
•     Where there is competitive parity, split criteria into two issues, graciously acknowledging the parity in one of them, but emphasising a true competitive advantage and customer benefit in the other.

Building pain, before jumping to gain, when selling

I spent last week with one of our clients (I wish I could tell you who!), a business-to-business sales organisation that relies heavily on cold-calling (or at least lukewarm calling) as the front end of their engagement strategy.  I’m not here to comment on the merits or pitfalls of cold-calling. But my time with them did remind me of some key ideas that lead to successful selling, whether over the phone or face-to-face, whether transactionally or consultatively.

Organisations in this situation, like our client, often spend a lot of time and energy trying to hone the perfect pitch. In the old days, this often meant training the team to list off benefits of your solution, and to educate accounts as to why your solution was the best. In other words, lots of telling. If your key approach rests on these issues, stop here. You’ll need to reorganise your thinking to focus on your account, not you.

More modern organisations focus on identifying a potential client’s key Pain Points (or similar terminology), and then defining a way to explain how their product or service exactly addresses those. This is a huge step in the right direction – being customer-focused – and it was the situation we found at our client.

But this refinement still misses the mark for a successful customer-centric sales methodology: it is still fundamentally telling them about us. Ideally, sales people need to get their customers talking, and thinking, about their business, their needs, how they could change or revolutionise their process, etc. Even if you’ve been told to “challenge” your accounts, you need to get them to talk, to internalise, and to challenge their assumptions. You'll get there through questioning. 

Last week we focused on Pain Questions as a big part of the missing solution.  Sales teams were already asking about Pain Points, but then they jumped right into telling the account about their solutions. Anyone who’s ever been sold to by a persistent, overly assumptive sales person can tell you that this kind of telling is rarely successful.  

Pain Questions dig into the implications of the current situation, before moving on to the Gain or reward of fixing it. This can often help to build discomfort around the current situation by uncovering – and building – the consequences of not acting. This is done by asking questions, not by telling them, in order to help amplify the current situation. Use questions like, “What are the implications of that?” “How often does that happen?” “What’s the customer experience like in those situations?” etc.

We found, almost immediately, that the impact and effectiveness of the calls improved. Instead of telling the account why their solution was better, they listened to the specific issues facing the person on the phone, they asked questions that probed and built up the situation, and then they tailored future comments to address the specific issues and pains that they had just magnified.

So the key here is to make sure that selling organisations are digging deeper to uncover the key issues and the true implications behind them. Often, the really good question is the follow-up question. For instance:

Sales: “You mentioned that invoicing is an issue, how often are you finding that there are invoicing errors?”

Client: “About 10% of the time.”

Sales: “OK. And what is the experience, from a customer perspective, when that happens?”

The first question was a good one, and revealed useful information that can be used to help sell in our solutions. But the second one can really start to build pain – in this case strategic pain - for the account.

So what should you do with your team?

• -    Listen in to their calls to see your team is asking about the implications, costs, or consequences of the current situation, as opposed to just the existence or non-existence of certain situations. Coach them to ask questions and dig more deeply before jumping to the solution.
• -   At your next team meeting, get people to think about what questions might build pain at their contacts, instead of just checking to see if it is there. If they can pause long enough to build pain, their solutions will be much more intriguing.