Dealing with your competition

When it comes to dealing with your competition, you cannot and will not profit from speaking negatively about them. However, it is clear that in order to set yourself apart, you must present deficiencies in your competition and show how you, your company and products or services are better. 

There are three simple steps to dealing with your competition and ensuring that your prospective client chooses your company over the competition.

1. Uncover and present the shortcomings of your competitors early on in your sales interaction.
2. Show how your company has risen above similar problems and at the same added value to your products or services.
3. Defend your competitor, even complementing them and at the same time defending your industry.

MTD Sales Training example

The prospect in our example is in the market for widgets and in the past has purchased some widgets from your competition, XYZ Ltd and in the past has heard horror stories of substandard widgets on the market.

However, like most prospects, he does not inform the sales person of this. 

So the sales person does a rip-roaring presentation and begins closing when the prospect says, "Well, it all sounds good, but I know that some widgets are really a bad investment. I bought some widgets from XYZ Ltd a few years ago and they failed quickly-it cost me a tonne of money."

So the sales person then responds with the normal, average, untrained response, and begins to side with the buyer, bashing and blaming the competition and defending his own company: "I understand that Mr. Prospect, but we are not XYZ Ltd. In fact, XYZ Ltd is way behind us in development and they have a product that is not as good as ours. That is why we are the leaders in the industry."

Now while this response may seem to make sense, the prospect eventually comes back with, "I'm sorry, but I'll have to think about it."  

At this point our sales person then launches into a bunch of rehearsed answers to the objections they receive, but it gets them nowhere.

Yes...you will have to separate yourself from your competition-but not in that way. 

In this situation the problem is that the prospect has distrust of not only XYZ Ltd, but of widgets sellers in general and there you are telling him that XYZ has a sub standard product and that yours in the best. But guess what? The sales person from XYZ Ltd told him the exact same thing before he bought their widgets. So the prospect trusted the XYZ sales person and took a chance and lost out in the process. 

Why on earth would this prospect trust the new sales person, especially when he just confirmed that he's correct - there are some bad widgets sellers out there and that he'll have to take a chance?

You see, you have to deal the competition by not criticising them.

Let's look at the steps again before we go through an example of what to say:

1. Remember that you must uncover and present the shortcomings of your competitors early on in your sales interaction.
2. You should show how your company has risen above those problems and at the same time added value to your products or services.
3. You should defend the competitor, even complementing them as well as defending your industry.

Now let's look at this same example again, but this time the sales person brings up the shortcomings of XYZ Ltd early on in their presentation.

"Also, Mr. Prospect, many companies still use the old gear system in the middle of the widget. The problem is that the gears tend to dry out and when that happens, the widgets fail. However, we use a silicon based gel and have removed all moving parts, so there is no gear to dry out."

So then the prospect says, "Well, you know I bought some widgets from XYZ Ltd and they failed quickly, I lost a tonne of money."   

Now the sales person can respond with step two, showing how his company rose above the problem and added value to their widgets: "Yes. Many companies like XYZ still use the gear system and not long ago, it was the state of the art. To upgrade to the more advanced silicon based system like we have requires widget companies to completely re-tool their entire factory. It's an enormous expense."

The sales person then finishes with step three, defending the competitor and the entire industry: "XYZ is a good company. I mean they are doing the best they can with the technology they have. We made the decision to make the investment to completely upgrade to the latest technology, knowing what it costs and that it would make our widgets a little more expensive, but we felt it made more sense to explain a slightly higher price one time, then to make excuses for failing widgets forever. Do you think we made the right choice?"

The competition is history!  And the value of his widgets just hit the roof...not to mention that this sales person just became an authority within the industry! 

And let's not forget that this happens, not at the close, but early on in the sales interaction too.

This article was written by Sean McPheat, who is regarded as The UK's #1 Authority On Modern Day Selling. Click here to find out more about Sean and to get hold of some more sales tips.