Tweet

Beating your number one competitor - the status quo

Written by: Ian Brodie

Article Overview: The biggest competitor faced by most firms is not the high quality market leader or the low-cost overseas firm. For most businesses, their biggest competitor is the status quo - the client not doing anything.

Beating your number one competitor - the status quo

If you’ve read any of Stephan Schiffman’s Sales Training books you’ll know he believes the number one competitor of any sales person to be “The Status Quo”. In other words, rather than going with you or a competitor, the customer decides to do nothing. Either not buy, or stick with who they’re currently got.

Usually, when people talk about a customer deciding to do nothing, they recommended better qualification (to classify the customer as a tyre-kicker early on and not to waste time with them) or more aggressive closing techniques to push the customer into making their mind up.

But in my experience, the biggest reason why customers decide to do nothing in large sales situations is not because they’re timewasters, or that they need to be pushed into action.

The issue is most often that they haven’t been fully convinced that the value of what you’re selling outweighs the cost for them.

It’s not that you haven’t talked about the business case for what your selling, or shown how it meets the customer needs. The problem is most often that you just haven’t spent enough time fully exploring the customers expressed needs and identifying the wider and deeper needs - and corresponding costs and impacts - that underly it.

Typically what happens in a sales situation is that the minute we hear a customer express a need that our product can solve, we jump straight into “selling mode”. We talk about the benefits of the product, how it can solve their problem, and what the business case for doign that is.

But the problem is that by jumping straight to the solution we didn’t allow the customer to fully discover how big their problem actually was.

It’s very common for customers to initially believe their problems are “annoying but not worth solving” (for example a computer system that’s difficult to use) - but then on further exploration to realise it’s causing them huge problems downstream (lost productivity, errors in customer records, bad customer service, etc.) which definitely are worth solving.

It’s up to you as a salesperson to lead that further discussion. By using your experience of similar problems you can use questioning and examples to help the customer discover form themselves just how significant their problem is. And suddenly, the solution you then offer doesn’t look so expensive after all. Suddenly its costs are far outweighed by the size of the problem it solves.

I’ve found this ability to “build up” the perception of a problem (not falsely - it’s all about helping the customer realise the true impact) is a key skill in large sales. Most sales people jump straight from hearing a need that their product can solve into selling the benefits of the product and trying to close. They don’t spend nearly enough time exploring the problem itself and its impact with the customer.

But by doing this full exploration a salesperson can turn a “Status Quo” loss into a big win.

Ian

Related Articles
  Are you an 'And' or an 'Or'?
  Do Your Due Diligence
  Learn from your competitors
  3 Steps for Leaders When the Customer is Wrong
  Legal Marketing: Use Twitter to gather competitive intelligence

Article Tags: bad customer service, business case, competitor, computer system, customer records, kicker, productivity, s sales, sales person, sales situations, stephan schiffman, training books, tyre



Related Forum Posts
Re: Time to get rich in real estate? - Foreigners living in Japan can pay in cash. Depending on their visa status they can also borrow IF they can find a bank willing to lend to them. I know of one in Hiroshima that does lend to foreigners with permanent resident status. Non-residents interested in buying individual properties in Hiroshima would be expected to pay cash.
Re: Vote on a Poll about the importance ranking in the Top 10 - I guess it's time to chat a little more about this topic. It seems that most people voted that it is still important to rank within the top 10 results. The keyword here is "rank." It's not a trick question but the element of ranking in the top 10 changed big time in back in 2008. My opinion is that it most certainly is important in SEO to be visible within the top results. But one of the things to remember about "ranking" is that these days, because of personalization of search, you really can't take what you see to be the top 10 results in a search to mean everyone else around the world is seeing identical results as you are. Indeed once a search engine sorts it's results based on it's current algorithm, there is a secondary process of shuffling the top 100 results to prioritize the finished results based on the individual's search history. Of course Google gives you the option to manually turn that function off. The trouble to most of the world, it is turned on and even those who know about it, tend to like more personalized search results. Many people assume that because they see their own Web site in number 1 position, the the rest of the world must see the same results as they do. But the truth is that search engines do not grade on an absolute scale, they grade on a relative scale. This is primarily for those using SEO as one of their marketing practices. Actually, there are no defined absolute top 10 rankings because of personalization now in effect. In fact I have seen cases where people are totally making the wrong choices when they attempt to reverse engineer what a competitor in the top spot is doing because they see that competitor as what they perceive to be in an absolute number 1 ranking, when in fact they actually may not be showing number 1 for most of the world. As a good friend of mind says, the whole concept of reverse engineering an algorithm is quite false. If someone tells you they can reverse engineer an algorithm, they simply can't do it. There are some things in life that can never be reverse engineered. Try reverse engineering a cake once it's baked. You can taste it, you can guess at some of the ingredients, but the only way you can reverse engineer or create another cake just like it is if the person who had baked it, gave you the exact recipe. Google will never give you the recipe. But the really cool thing is, that you don't need to reverse engineer the algorithm in order to gain top visibility in the search engines. Even if it were possible (which it isn't) the whole purpose of the algorithm is to keep changing. I'll share more along these lines in the future.
Re: When do you make someone a partner? - [quote="Alan Mater":g2eb5guz]Hi Kevin, Yes, being able to get along and tolerate them is very important. If you constantly fight and bicker and can't come to a conclusion when it comes to making important decisions, then the partnership will most likely not work out.[/quote:g2eb5guz] Well if you're always fighting with that employee, chances are you would have fired him/her long ago. However, people also tend to act differently when they're of a lower status as opposed to an equal. For instance, a small business owner may make a chef into a partner and love his personality... but then the change in power/status could reveal the chef's true colors (it's just like dating;)
Re: How do you stay motivated as a startup? - [quote="BuzzAroundBooks":oaw6ne0y]Hi Everyone, I was wondering if some of you could share a few tips on how you stay motivated as a new entrepreneur. For instance, what do you do when: • You lose an opportunity, sale or client • You see a competitor doing something very well • An expense costs more than you bargained for • Your hard work and efforts haven't yielded any significant results yet Thanks![/quote:oaw6ne0y] Lose an opportunity - i try to remember that there are millions of fish in the sea... i lose one.. there's still plenty of opportunity to go after more. And depending on who it is.. i feel honored to have even had the opportunity to go for it. Seeing a competitor do something well is actually a good motivator for me. It will push me to finish or upgrade one of my services or marketing campaigns. All of business is about trial and error... so if my hard work isn't seeing results, than i tweak my practices a bit until they do. Test and retest. Talk to others...see what it is that i'm doing differently.
Re: Need suggestions on domain name registration. - Have You tried to buy the domain for you? It's not nice to see your competitor every time someone searches your services.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

How To Become A Member of the Paparazzi

Why Use an Advertising Agency

Are You Too Good for Your Job?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.