I help founders who sell, but aren't "sales"people. Are you open to one hyper actionable sales tip per week, useful for your very next sales meeting and consumable in 4 minutes or less?
121: Competitors
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Hey, 👋 Scott from The Sales Mastermind here. Today’s edition only takes 2 minutes. Most sellers barely consider a fraction of their true competition. Most buyers think about nothing else but your competition. Today we’ll cover:
Storytime One of my clients generates almost all their leads from review websites. They have amazing reviews on platforms such as Google Business, Capterra, and more. It's so ingrained into their business that customer-facing teams have KPIs to collect a certain number of reviews each week. This means they consider their competitors to be other companies with a similar approach to marketing-led lead generation. And the sales team is poorly informed about competitors who fill the pipeline by cold outreach, events, or partners. And that is before we get into their true competition. Your True Competition Every buyer you speak to is already, roughly, solving the problem you solve. It's almost certainly not the best solution. But if they don't buy from you today, their business will still be here tomorrow. Which is why between 40-60% of deals end in "No decision." Meaning the true competition in every deal is the Status Quo; the buyer doing nothing about the pain point. Once you learn to overcome your number one competitor, then we can start talking about other competition. Other Competitors After Status Quo, the next layers of competition are.
Build vs Buy A perennial question in the buying journey is whether to purchase from a vendor or build it in-house. There are strong arguments on both sides. Most products and industries go through cycles in which it is better to source externally, then it becomes a competitive advantage to build internally, and the cycle goes on. See how NVIDIA's chips were ubiquitous with AI only a few years ago. Now Claude and Gemini are built on proprietary chips designed by and exclusive to Anthropic and Google, respectively. On the seller side, we overvalue our product's uniqueness and how hard it would be to replicate. On the buyer side, they undervalue the cost and effort required to not only build your product in-house, but also to maintain it. Therefore, you need a great answer to why they should buy from you, instead of developing the product internally. Named Competitors This competition is the one you're thinking of, it's:
Each named competitor will have strengths and weaknesses. You beat named competitors by shaping the conversation so that your solution is the only possible option. For example, I have seen it when a supplier of building materials was competing for the biggest deal in the company's history. They won because they were able to get a requirement added as "Deal Breaker" status that only they could fulfil. Because they owned the patent. Prioritisation Lastly, you're competing with literally every alternative possible. What I mean is that money, time, and effort could be invested in your product or service. It could also be used to get the whole company together for an offsite, to plough into R&D, to buy a new private jet for the exec team, or to fund cybersecurity training, and on and on the options go. Prioritisation is the final hurdle: you've proven they have to change, you've proven they should buy the solution externally, and you've proven they should buy from you. Now you have to prove, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that they have to solve this pain now as opposed to allocating resources to anything else. Ultimately, your competition is so much more than other businesses that sell something similar, and a seller's job is to overcome all obstacles. Until next week, PS Did someone forward you this email, and it seems like something you want more of: Link to subscribe​ PPS You can find the back catalogue here, all 120+ newsletters: https://thesalesmastermind.kit.com/​ |
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I help founders who sell, but aren't "sales"people. Are you open to one hyper actionable sales tip per week, useful for your very next sales meeting and consumable in 4 minutes or less?
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