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How Your Salespeople Can Eliminate the Competition

Guest post by: Dave Kurlan

Article Overview: If your company is like most, you have lots of competition and some of them will do anything to get the business. How would you like to eliminate your competition? I don't mean putting them out of business (some of you wouldn't mind that at all) but I do mean getting them out of the way... There are three ways to eliminate increasing competition for a declining number of opportunities:

How Your Salespeople Can Eliminate the Competition

If your company is like most, you have lots of competition and some of them will do anything to get the business. How would you like to eliminate your competition? I don't mean putting them out of business (some of you wouldn't mind that at all) but I do mean getting them out of the way... There are three ways to eliminate increasing competition for a declining number of opportunities:

1. Stop Trolling for Projects and Opportunities. Many companies call known customers and prospects and ask if they have "Anything going on". This is what creates competition! Rather than trolling for projects, your salespeople should be looking for problems that prospects haven't yet turned into projects and as a result, haven't invited anyone in to present and propose. Warning: This requires excellent hunting and consultative selling skills. If your salespeople haven't developed them, don't bother trying this at home.

2. Show Up Late. You can be as late as "We just made the decision to go with ABC" and still get the business. For all intents and purposes, the competition has stopped and a few well-placed questions can get decision makers to question their decision. Try these two: "Who are you buying from?" and "Did you go with them because they understood your problem and had an ideal long term solution with an immediate impact and favorable ROI, or did they distract you from that important stuff with their price?"

3. Neutralize the Competition. You know what you can do that your competition can't. The key then is for your prospects to want that which only you can do. Your salespeople must ask enough questions to identify a prospect's compelling reasons to buy from you so that your salespeople can identify a unique solution to their problem. When your salespeople ask their prospects why they are interested in doing business with you, their prospects will say it's because you can "Do that thing" they were told about. Then your salespeople simply ask, "can't XYZ do that?"

If you don't care about profits, you can elminate your competition by pricing your offering so low that you are the clear cut winner on price. Of course, that doesn't guarantee the business either!

Certainly, the three bullets above aren't the only things your salespeople can do to eliminate competition. The bigger point is that they probably aren't doing any of the things on the list. They probably arrive at an opportunity the same was that their competitors do; by getting invited in when the prospect is so far along in their buying process that they are expecting a presentation and proposal from 5 companies. Unfortunately, that ain't selling - unless - the salesperson is able to regain control of that process and take the opportunity all the way back to 1st base (Baseline Selling) to discover the compelling reasons to buy. Can your salespeople do that?

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Article Tags: abc, consultative selling skills, decision makers, doing business, hunting, intents and purposes, long term solution, prospects, salespeople, three ways, unique solution



Related Forum Posts
Re: The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity - Eliminate... automate... delegate... Good stuff. Another video for my blog!
Re: Congratultations to GT! - Hi GT, Competition is great and i know I wouldn't be here without it, but it is not the main reason for posting and participating. But I admit, it is the trigger I need to get some work done. If there is none, i create one for myself and try to make it. First prize is ice cream.
Re: The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity - Hi Evan, Thanks for a great article and video on 'The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity'. I think that no matter whether you are self employed like myself or a CEO with staff, it is so important to manage your time so as to maximize the benefit to your business. Your expression Eliminate; Automate; Delegate is easy to remember and will certainly stick in my mind. There are many good business ideas out there but they will ultimately run into difficulty without proper planning and execution so these tips will certainly help. I have also left this comment on the article and will place a link to it on my blog. regards, Mal.
Re: Review My: e-product sales letter - Hi Evan, I just came across your forum and your request for a review. I'm don't write copy full time, but I have written copy for Tom Antion and Bill Brooks. After skimming your letter, here are a few things you might want to consider (overall, a good job) 1) Eliminate the "buy now" message and button at the top: a very small percentage of visitors will be ready to buy at that point. I think it risks coming across to the majority of the visitors as a salesman way too eager to close a deal. 2) The testimonials on top of page without names are meaningless. You have great testimonials, use one of them starting out, maybe the one by Laplanche. 3) Bonus 1 & 4: My first reaction was "why would I want to see a business plan from another era? Give a reason as to why they are still relevant in todays marketplace. 4) I LOVE your guarantee, I've never seen it before: "This better work..." I only had five minutes to read the sales letter and then get my reaction to you, just didn't have more time for now. Alan
Re: Is Google Search getting better or worse? - Competition and that too stiff is something I have always loved and being a true web user I hate spammers the same way and so I am very happy with the recent changes that Google has made and so I must say that it is getting better. I am happy because now we could be able to get and read fresh and unique content instead of the repetitive ones. Now the value of actual SEO will be seen as results now will be completely depend on the hard work SEO and strategies an internet marketing company will apply to get on top of search giant's ranking. surfing the web daily as addiction I have seen most of the webmasters asking several questions related to real time search and how they should commence now to get better and faster results, found lots of useful information and learned new strategies too.


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