An important part of the sales operation is choosing the right competitive strategyaccording to your situation in the account. This slide shows an example of four different competitive strategies
Let us start with an important question: “Is there a compelling reason for the customer to act ?” examples of compelling reasons are :
- A committed date communicated to senior management.
- A compliance date that cannot be negotiated.
- A date after which revenue loss will happen.
- End of life of a certain product, after which your customer cannot use it.
- Competition has announced a killer product and your customer MUST announce an equivalent by a certain date.
If the answer is NO then you need to do some effort to qualify the opportunity further.
Second question is “Can we compete?” or in other words:
Do we have the product that answers the specific need?
- Is our solution a high end and very expensive and other will cut us off in price OR is our solution a low end one that lacks features and capabilities?
- Is the size of our operation a good match to our customer?
- Do we have branches in the cities/countries that need to be covered with our product/service?
- Are we financially comfortable to handle this opportunity ( Bank guarantees, upfront payment to subcontractors, etc..).
If the answer is NO then , again, you need to do some effort to qualify the opportunity further.
Finally if the answer to those two questions is Yes and you have a competitive situation, you will have to choose the best competitive strategy for this account.
This will be the subject of the next post…. so stay tuned!
