Most sellers come from the school of thought where they're focused on themselves and well
they can get out of their deal and their products and their services. The
focus should never deviate from the buyer. You're listening to the audible Ready Podcast,
the show that helps you and your teams sell more faster. We'll feature
sales leaders sharing their best insights on how to create a sales engine that helps
you fuel repeatable revenue growth. Presented by the team Aforce Management, a leader
in B to B sales effectiveness. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to
the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. I'm Rachel Clep Miller. I'm joined today by
Antonello O Day. Hi Antonella, Hi Rachel, Good to see you again.
Good happy to have you on to talk through this topic today. And
this topic actually comes from one of our Ascender subscribers. As Sender is our
online platform that has courses, content and a community is available to individual sellers.
Anybody can subscribe. It's also has some plans for small teams. So
if you are a small prese series A company and you don't have enablement centers,
a great solution for you. In that community, sellers are asking their
questions all the time, just challenges they're having, and people like Antonella are
responding and answering their questions, and I wanted to lift up one of the
questions was recently asked in the community because it has to do with competitors,
and I feel like some of you out there might have the same question.
So I wanted to bring Antonella on the Audible Ready Sales podcast to talk through
this topic. So Antonella, I'm just going to start. I'm going to
read the question and we can go from there. If that's good with you,
that's great, awesome, Okay, So here's what this person asks.
Says, we run into the same five to six companies over and over,
also starting to see more of these smaller startups pop up in their competitive space
or a smaller organization. So I'll send stuff over to marketing for competitor research,
but don't get the most insightful stuff back. He says. I'm newer,
so I'm not sure exactly how everyone keeps track of all the competitors.
If you're working at a smaller company, how do you organize the researcher competitors?
Do you just track their unique selling props? And maybe the main question
here is he says, is this something I should even really be worrying about?
So there's a lot to unpack their Auntsonella, Let's just start broadly.
I know we talk a lot about understanding your differentiation. Understanding your competitors is
sort of a basic foundation to determining how you align your own differentiation to your
customers. Let's start with talking just about the very basics that you need to
start learning about your competitors when you're new to selling a solution. That's a
really good starting point. So understanding your competition it's really important. It's one
of the areas that can really be helpful in qualifying your deal. There's some
things that I consider more must have or I highly recommend finding out, and
some things that are more nice to have for us to know as a seller.
One of the things that I feel like we need to get a good
handle on are things like strengths, weaknesses, and differentiators for the competition.
Not so that I can provide air time for the competitor, because I come
from that school of thought that you should never speak their name or give them
a platform when I'm meeting with a customer, but more from the perspective that
if I know that my competitor provides maybe weak customer support and we excel there
and my customer has articulated that's a great importance to them, then I'm going
to lean into that really heavily in our conversation when we talk about support.
So it leads the foundation for the areas of focus in my conversation in relation
to the needs of my customer. Second thing that I consider, something that
I would strongly like to have is who is their champion. I need to
uncover this so that I can start to determine who may have the upper hand
in that deal. I will leverage my own champion, maybe some allies,
maybe a coach, to get some insight of who they are, who maybe
brought them in, and if possible, what was the why in bringing them
into the deal. I might ask questions around who else might be leaning in
their direction, so that I can get a sense of what's my next step?
You know, how does this all play out politically within the account?
Does my champion have more cloud or does theirs? What are my next steps
and potentially getting the upper hand, And I use this as the basis for
my strategy, some of the nice to have if I can get them,
or things like target markets so that I can determine where I typically might come
up against them again in the future, and maybe pricing so that I can
really spend some time thinking about how to position our value in the eyes of
the customer, so that even if we're in a situation where we're priced hire,
we're likely to still come out on top of that. Feel great.
Top of mind things to keep in there. It's about your competitors, right,
but it's also about your buyer. It's about you and your aligning to
your buyers. You mentioned like not to get too focused to your competitors in
those conversations. Don't give them the air time if they don't deserve it.
We also said talked about using your competitors disadvantages and maybe lift those up,
but you only really want to do that if it's going to be meaningful for
your buyers. So we often frame it as understanding your differentiators as it relates
to your buyers, your advantages as it relates to your buyers. Talk about
the basics of that, understanding your differentiation as it relates to your solution and
your buyer value. I think this is an opportunity for us to really distinguish
ourselves Rachel. We need to make it all about the buyer, understanding them,
listening to them, building and strengthening our relationships with them. That potentially
sets up the basis for differentiating us in the eyes of the buyer. I
say that because most sellers come from the school of thought where they're focused on
themselves and what they can get out of their deal and their products and their
services, and the focus should never deviate from the buyer. Now, as
sellers, to best serve the buyer, we need to understand our differentiators.
We need to have a clear line of sight of the reasons why we win
and why customers would buy from us. Because buyers who engage with us typically
are looking for products or service that can resolve their problems and deliver great outcomes
for them. It's the knowledge of what we bring to the table that allows
us to connect our differentiators to the things that the customers articulated could solve their
problems. And this potentially puts us in a position of being the best choice
if we're able to tailor our message by connecting what we offer specifically to what
they require, and if we do this right, the icing on the cake
really becomes being able to back it up with tangible proof of where we solved
similar problems and delivered similar outcomes. All of this coming together is what helps
those deals get over the finish line. Yeah, and that's the ultimate goal,
right. In terms of the question asking a center that I sort of
paraphrase at the top of the podcast, how deep do you need to get
to understand the competitive landscape? It's a really good question, and I think
as sellers we need to find a balance here, and there is such a
thing as too much. I had a seller on one of my teams several
years back who was super diligent and always wanted to know everything that was going
on with a competition. Her reasoning was that if she knew her competition really
well, she would be better at selling her services. The challenge for this
seller was it became the center of all her account planning. She ran industry
report, She analyzed the competitor's websites, what was happening in the marketplace with
them, and as a result, her conversation started to ship. It wasn't
about the customer. It really revolved around the competition quite a bit because she
wanted to share her knowledge, and she wanted to share who had the advantage
and who didn't have the advantage, And she took that focus off the customer
and the whole idea of building strong relationships there and what started to happen over
time as her results started to slide. So what's my point? We need
to have an understanding of our competition, the strengths, weaknesses, differentiators,
who their champion may be in an account, but not at the expense of
being focused on them over the customer needs, building relationships, putting together great
sales strategies. Those things should always come first. Yeah, you don't want
to be penny smart in dollar dom as you're talking, I wrote paralys this
by analysis, Right, you may know everything about the competition, you still
got to sell your value aligned to the buyer. So makes some great points
there. And the next thing I want to ask the subscriber mentioned running into
the same five or six people, What about if you are frequently facing incumbents
or bigger companies that have bigger marketing budgets that can tackle the market in a
more effective way. How do you tackle that? I think The starting point
is really to focus on developing strong relationships within your accounts, going deep,
going wide. The value of a relationship is very much alive today. Getting
to know what's important to each of those stakeholders, making sure messaging is relevant
to each person that you connect with, Trust, incredibility, and the last
art of listening really goes a long way in terms of helping to strengthen relationships
within an account. The other thing I would mention regarding this is leaning into
the differenti that often comes with working with a smaller company. Just because you're
small doesn't mean you don't have a lot of advantages you bring to the table.
My experience has been that the beauty of a smaller company very often is
that they're more flexible, They were agile, They focus on things that often
bigger companies have lost sight of, like customer support and being able to evolve
quickly. So identify those things that really allow you to stand out and lean
into them as appropriate, and then add always be about the customer and delivering
customer value. And I know we say this a lot, but you can't
emphasize it enough. Most large companies depend heavily on their brand to drive the
business. Today's buyers want more than that. By focusing on customer problems,
their outcomes requirements needed to get them there, you really have an opportunity to
engage your customers in a way they want to engage with sellers. It demonstrates
that you're committed to them long term, and very often this increases the chance
of winning the deal. You mentioned earlier a repune who's really focused on the
competition, And I know, in terms of positioning our value, particularly our
differentiation, we need to understand who else the customer is talking to. So
how do you ask your buyers about the competition of what they're talking to other
people about without seeming sleazy or self promoting. What are those some ways you
can frame that question or getting that information. That's a good question. It's
probably an area where I tend to tread lightly. I would highly recommend to
be thoughtful here. And what I mean by that is I try to leverage
strong relationships here to gather my intel. If I have a champion or really
strong coach, maybe a really strong ally, I may go to those people.
I won't just ask for info from anyone because it could reflect poorly on
me and my professionalism, and I'm very thoughtful of the questions that I ask.
I don't ask questions that I can uncover in an Internet search. If
I'm striving to get intel, I'm going to ask some questions that matter.
For example, I may ask my champion something to the effect of, I
know the organization is looking at other options, what do we bring that you
feel gives us an advantage? Followed by what does the competition bring that you
feel puts us at a disadvantage. The responses to these questions are powerful because
they can impact my strategy going forward, as well as prepare me for what
I might come up against in the future with that competitor. I never talk
poorly about the competition when I'm seeking info. I don't think you should ever
speak poorly, but definitely not when you're seeking to get some additional information.
I approach it as more of a curiosity that I'm looking to satisfy. That's
a good way to think about it, curiosity that you're looking to satisfy.
I know you sold for a long time and snella and now you help people
sell all over the world. I know you just got back from Europe.
What are the tips that you have on developing competitive intel. Developing competitive intel,
I think is a team sport. If you have a person or team
dedicated to this, great leverage them. If you don't, and you work
for a smaller company as a sales team developing yourself, just establish parameters on
what type of intel is most valuable to gather, and determine a centralized location
where your contributions could be made. I like the idea of doing a swat
analysis strength week instans, opportunities, threats for competitors, especially if the sales
team is building it themselves. It's easy, it's repeatable, it's scalable.
But where can you get this intel? Obviously, the Internet has a ton
of information, whether it's website, social media, blogs, business news,
they're all great starting points to potentially pull some intel. The other place,
obviously we just talked about it is your customers. You're going to hear things
inevitably that you deem might be valuable to know. I think they're also a
great source for info, especially after the deal is done. You've signed them,
they're on board that you've won, and now you can kind of go
back and get some of that information. The one thing that I caution here
and want to emphasize is you have to validate with other sources before you deem
the information you're getting as valid. I've seen people take hearsay is truth and
it comes back to bite them. Industry events are also another great place because
what's happening in the industry is top of mind and inevitably there's going to be
competitive names being thrown around. Having really good questions prepared for such opportunities so
that you can come across as professional while gathering that intel is great. Once
again, just make sure you validate what you're hearing out there. That's true
because rumors spread fast for a number of areas. This has been a great
conversation, Antoniny. You've given a lot of actionable takeaways. I hope that
those of listening have found value in this conversation. As always like to wrap
up with a little bottom line or one did two takeaways? What do you
want to make sure the people listening to this episode takeaway from this conversation.
Competition is a constant right, It's going to continue to be and as seller,
I would highly recommend that your strategy doesn't change based on what your competition
is doing or how they're interacting with the customer, try to uncover what you
may need, but always stay professional. Never lose sight of the power of
being customer focused in everything that you do. If you keep the customer at
the forefront of every conversation, you always have advantage over the competition who may
not put them at the center of every conversation. Yep, there's as much
differentiation as how you sell as there is in what you sell. Just remember
the customer. Thank you so much, Antonella, Thanks so much, Rachel.
All right, thank you to all of you for listening to the Audible
Already Sales podcast out ascender my dot asunder dot com. At Force Management,
we're focused on transforming sales organizations into elite teams. Are proven methodologies, deliver
programs that build company alignment and fuel repeatable revenue growth. Give your teams the
ability to execute the growth strategy at the point of sale. Our strength is
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