Competitive Selling Skills are now a “must have” for Irish Businesses

Merriam-Webster defines competition in business as

"The effort of two or more parties acting independently to secure the business of a third party by offering the most favourable terms"

If competition is the driving force in a free market, stimulating innovation, efficiencies and value for money, then competitive selling is the battle for the mind of the customer and the current economic downturn will act to intensify this battle to a level not experienced for many years.

Competitive selling is a topic that is both divisive and misunderstood, to the point that many businesses simply choose to ignore it altogether, providing their salespeople with little by way of support and training as to how best to deal with the issues. Trainers are equally culpable in that a standard type of sales training approach is to guide salespeople to simply promote their own product while being careful not to bad mouth the competitor.

Know the Competition 

A reality check is clearly needed here. In a competitive market, winning salespeople demonstrate time and again, that ethical strategic competitive selling is key to a successful outcome. Far from being something that salespeople should shy from, it is actually a required skill. Research backs this and shows that when a customer is considering two similar solutions, the ability of the salesperson to differentiate is the key skill in determining whether the sale is won or lost.

Competitive selling is an advanced selling skill, in that it requires a sophisticated know-how, skill level and knowledge bank. An ill equipped salesperson that attempts it, flirts with been perceived by the customer to be partaking in a desperate effort to win the sale, often coming across as merely slagging off the competition.

In this regard at least, competitive selling skills are no different to many other misunderstood sales skills such as cold-calling; in that it is bad coaching, renegade salespeople and misguided sales activity that has led to a bad press and in turn created a collective nervousness around the topic. 

The Head in the Sand Approach

Competitive selling is seen in some quarters as having too much attached risk with many businesses, training departments and external sales trainers choosing in effect a non-strategy, Unfortunately this "head in the sand approach" and choosing to play it safe offers the sales team little by way of real guidance around sound selling strategy and technique. The reality often being that the salesperson while still expected to deliver target is left to their devices when it comes to this crucial and complicated skill, perhaps its little wonder then that bad habits are formed and mistakes are made. 

This problem is by no means unique to Ireland and alarmingly even assistance in this area is very difficult to find; based on international research only a few sales training companies worldwide have any expertise in this area at all.

3 Step Approach

Research indicates that the knowledge of a salesperson often simply mirrors that of their selling abilities. The main difficulty in terms of teaching competitive selling skills is that a hi-level base knowledge is first required by the individual salesperson. When evaluating whether a salesperson is ready to learn competitive selling skills, a simple three level approach can be easily applied

Level One: Knowledge of the salesperson’s products

Level Two: Knowledge of products and customers

Level Three: Knowledge of products, customers and competitors

Effective competitive selling skill requires level three knowledge as its starting point. The responsibility for acquiring this knowledge rests with both the company and the salesperson.

Information needs to be freely available, updated and constantly shared. What is required is relevant, accurate, comprehensive, and actionable intelligence about the competition, this information can be sub-divided under the following headings.

·         The Competitor Company

Examples: Information on revenues, financial position, number of employees, office locations, history, mission statements, goals, objectives and important customers

·         The Competitor’s Products/Service

Examples: Strengths & weaknesses, market share, brochures, routes to market, pricing, T&Cs, guarantees, history of discounting, supports and service.

·         The Competitor’s Sales Approach

This is generally more difficult and time consuming to obtain but is the most useful in creating competitive counter strategies

Examples: Strategies and tactics employed by them against us, strategies employed by us against them, pay plans (salary vs. commission), resources available during the sale, sales objections they’ll raise about us and the best responses for managing those objections, why we’ve won and why we’ve lost against them.

Use Knowledge Effectively

Once the knowledge has been compiled and learnt by the salesperson, the next step is to teach the salesperson how to effectively use this knowledge to gain leverage during communications with customers.

For sceptics, it’s important to point out that the salesperson continues to spend the majority of any communication promoting their own company's products and solutions; this remains their lead in pitch. The difference being that the salesperson now has enough knowledge to critique the competitors offering in terms of its relevance to the prospect's needs and as a value proposition.

During client conversations, the salesperson impresses upon the prospect their expert industry knowledge, ensuring that tone is non-emotional and information factual precise with third party evidence been used to effectively back up statements. The objective with the prospect now becomes twofold, the salesperson attempts to increase the perceived value of their own product while at the same time decreasing the perceived value of the competitor’s product.

8 Winning Competitive Selling Skills

ES Research Group provides assessments of sales performance improvement providers and has researched the area of competitive selling in detail; the following are some of the advanced competitive selling skills that ESR have discovered winning sales people clearly demonstrate.

·         The ability to effectively raise competitors' weaknesses indirectly, through customer allies or trap-setting.

·         The ability to effectively and consistently devalue a competitor's strengths in the eyes of a customer.

·         Understanding not only the competitors' products and services, but more importantly, how their individual salespeople sell in live opportunities.

·         Having enough of an understanding of a competitor's likely selling strategy that an effective counterstrategy can be employed.

·         The ability to predict and trap unprofessional behaviour (lying on RFPs, for example), resulting in competitors being eliminated from consideration.

·         The ability to deflect competitive attack on one's own products' deficiencies and weaknesses through immunization.

·         To be able to consistently predict competitive tactics (such as last-minute price cutting) and negate their impact.

·         The ability to leverage relationships with politically influential people in a customer's organization to dilute the impact of a competitor's value proposition.

At the core of competitive selling skills is the development of a deep understanding and intelligence about your competitors and their products, how they approach and win customers and why people choose and choose not to do business with them. This should be a top-down real time mechanism with management needing to create the facilities where competitor information can be gathered, shared and learnt by the entire sales team. There needs to be plentiful opportunity for internal dialogue, with successes and failures been collectively analysed by the team.

From time to time, I come across businesses that are spending vast sums of money on external market intelligence reporting, but strangely this same information is often only being used for high-level decision-making. These businesses have never thought it important to create a facility where this information is communicated to staff in customer facing roles such as sales.

The Role Play Test

It is increasingly easy for salespeople to lull themselves into a false sense of security when it comes to their level of competitor knowledge. A very simple but effective tool, which I have often used to access a salesperson depth of understanding around competitors, is to ask them to role-play selling the competitor’s product. Over the years, this device has proved to me that knowledge of their competitors is an area where the vast majority of salespeople are weak to extremely weak. What is probably more alarming is that these same salespeople seem to be genuinely surprised when this is brought to their attention.

However, if you carry out the very same exercise with top five percent sellers, the outcome is usually entirely different but few companies seem to have copped on this fact, choosing instead to believe that other less tangible aspects are involved.

The Tiger Has Left the Building

In my opinion, the Celtic Tiger economy we have enjoyed has previously acted to cloak many bad selling practices, with mediocre sales approaches continuing to be rewarded because of lack of competition and eager buyers. Already we are starting to see that this current selling environment will continue to be somewhat different. While buyers will obviously continue to buy, their decision-making will become more complex and value will be a foremost consideration.

In terms of salespeople, this may drive the cream to the top with many leaving professional selling altogether with only those salespeople that can continue to deliver remaining within the profession. This in itself is likely to create further opportunities for the very top sales professionals, as their expertise and skills will be highly sought after by companies attempting to increase and protect revenues in this new highly competitive environment.

The next few years will create pressures in which unfortunately companies and people will fall but I remain entirely confident that those businesses and sales teams that embrace the need for competitive selling strategies and competitive selling skills will continue to do business and ultimately prosper.

I expect that as a sales trainer, where I may first begin to notice this change is in the classroom, perhaps when I ask salespeople to role-play selling a competitor’s product, I will start to be pleasantly surprised by what I hear and see.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu said, "If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you'll also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will lose every battle."

About the Author:

Niall Devitt is a sales training consultant and business mentor with Beyond the Boardroom, a leading Irish business development consultancy. His blog on sales and business know-how, which can be found at www.btbtraining.com/blog is widely read and his articles have featured on many National and International business resources.

Contact Details

P: 062 82500 W: www.btbtraining.com E:nialldevitt@btbtraining.com

Top of Page