Lesson 43 - Eliminate the Competition

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Differentiating your solution from the competition is key to winning deals. In this lesson, you’ll learn strategies to neutralize competitive threats and highlight your unique value. Your assignment will involve crafting competitive messaging for an active deal. 

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you'll learn how to effectively identify research and eliminate your competition. Now, competition is the last letter of med, pick the final C, and it's incredibly important that you know who you're up against, and that you're asking the right questions and laying the right foundation to eliminate them from the running. So let's talk a little bit about how you can set yourself up for success. The first thing that you need to understand is that your competitors are going to differ depending on your product, your solution, your industry, your function. So you need to find out who your competitors are first. There are several ways that you can do this. One way is to ask so go to your mentor, your manager, your new hire buddy, and ask them, Who are our top competitors. Ask your product marketing team, your product team, chances are, at your organization, you have a list somewhere of who your top competitors are. If you don't go review your past deals, look at which deals you lost, which deals you won, who were you competing against, which competitors are appearing the most in your most recent deals. You can also ask your existing customers who else they were considering when they were considering your solution, you can look at third party review sites so g2 Gartner, TrustRadius, are big ones for for the tech industry, but you should be starting to understand and kind of keep your finger on the pulse of who your competitors are. If all else fails, ask chatgpt, ask AI who are my top competitors. So for example, if I'm working for Sprout Social my top competitors are probably Hootsuite, Buffer, HubSpot, some of the other kind of social media management platforms that offer some overlapping features. Once you know who your competitors are. You need to be doing the diligence to thoroughly research them. If you think that you've done enough research on your competitors, do more you you can never know enough about your competition. You need to be able to speak to your strengths their weaknesses. And we'll talk about why. Now, some ways that you can do this one. Go review their website. How are they positioning themselves? What personas are they calling out? What are the things that they say against your solution? Check third party reviews. Look at the trust radiuses, the G twos, the gardeners. What are people saying about them? What are their pros? What are their cons? Another thing you can do is check glass door. This one seems a little maybe counter intuitive, but understanding what their employees are saying about them internally, both good and bad. What is the culture like there? Look for online demos. Look to see if there's a YouTube demo of the product. See if you can sign up for a free trial of the product. I've had people reach out to me and say that doesn't seem ethical. They are signing up for your free trial. I can promise you that. So I would definitely sign up for a free trial of their solution, if you can and get your feet wet with the product. Explore their community pages. What are they saying? What are they complaining about? What's on their wish list? What are they what are they lotting as incredible, you know, updates or efforts. And then finally, talk to your customers. Ask your customers that have switched from that competitor to you, what were their reasons for choosing you? If you had a customer that you lost, see if you can ask them why you lost, right? What did you like about the other solution that we weren't able to offer? But you need to be digging into who are your top competitors. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? Start to understand who they are and what people are saying about them. Now, when you're working your sales opportunities, it is absolutely crucial that you uncover your competitors early and often. So a lot of people shy away from this question, but the truth is you should just be asking, and here's some examples of how I can do that. If I'm a rep working for Sprout Social, I might say something like, Hey, so I can so that I can better understand your current workflows. Could you share which tools or platforms you're currently using for social media management today? So that's how I can understand their status quo, right? Ask a question to understand that the second thing I could ask is, would you be comfortable sharing with me which other platforms you're considering? If I know this, I can provide a more detailed comparison and ensure that Sprout Social aligns with your requirements. Now, the fact is, they know that you're biased. So sometimes, in my previous sales, I've just brought this up directly, I would say, Hey, I know that I'm biased. I want you to buy our solution. But at the same time, if you at least tell me who we're up against, I can give you some breakdowns of things that we offer that they can't, which can help you to make an informed decision, and that can sometimes kind of disarm the tension that comes with asking about competitors. One way to strategically position yourself against a competitor is to set what are called trap setting questions. Trap setting questions are amazing. I can't speak highly enough of them. A trap setting question is essentially a question that is designed to slowly reveal weaknesses in their current setup or in the other competitors that you're up against. So if I'm revealing you want you want them to start thinking about what's important to me. Does my current solution offer that? Do the competitors I'm looking into besides you offer that? So if I want to set traps against a current solution, some things I might say, let's you know, go for the example of Sprout Social I would say, have you found that managing your social media engagement and scheduling across multiple platforms is time consuming? How well does your current solution handle that? So notice the trap that I'm setting. I want them to think about how time consuming this gap is for their business. The second one I might ask is, how satisfied are you with the depth of analytics provided by your current platform? Are you getting the actionable insights you need to optimize your campaigns? Or I might ask, how does your current tool handle social listening and sentiment analysis? Do you feel you're fully capturing the voice of your customers? So notice what I'm doing. Not only am I asking about what their current tool can and can't do, but I'm also tying that to the potential negative consequences for them. Do you feel that that's leading to x, y, z, negative consequence? Now that's just for their current solution. If I'm asking them about potential competitors, I might say something like as you evaluate different solutions, how important is it that your your platform have ease of use and high user adoption for your team? Have you had a chance to see how the other tools compare in terms of training time and getting your team up to speed quickly. A second one I might ask is, when you're considering new platforms, how important is customer support and onboarding to you? Have you looked into how other solutions handle onboarding and ongoing support? A third one I might ask, Are you considering how well the solutions you're evaluating can scale as your social media needs grow. Have you explored whether their platform can easily accommodate future expansions, such as new channels or more complex workflows? Now, again, this is all you know with the same example of social media management. But what I want you to see is what I'm doing, what I'm doing is saying, as you're evaluating these other solutions, consider if they can do X, Y Z, and in a perfect world, the things I'm recommending is x, y z, are things that I know my solution can do better. Cool. So when we think about when we think about effective trap setting questions, you absolutely need to know what your top differentiators are, what are the things that make your product unique, valuable, better than the competition. And by the way, if you can't answer this question, you're not ready to sell your solution. You need to be able to state confidently why they should choose you over the competition, and if you can't, then they're not going to have confidence in that. And it's not just enough to know the areas where you excel. You need to understand why those areas matter, and you need to understand how those areas tie to crucial business outcomes, their top KPIs, their top strategic objectives. So as you research your competition, make notes what features and differentiators Do you offer that they don't and here's the important thing, don't forget to think about things that are outside of your product itself. What do I mean by that? Everyone gets laser focused on features and functionality, but I want you to think about your organization and the experience of buying your product and using your product at every angle and level. So. Think about your customer success team. Are they better than your competition? Think about your company reputation, your company stability. How long has your company been around? What about your leadership team? Do they have a good reputation? Think about security and compliance certifications that you offer that others don't. Think about data privacy and ownership policies. Think about warranties, or guarantees that you offer that your competitors can't offer. Think about pricing flexibility or pricing models, or multi year discounts that you might be able to give that your competitors can't. Think about your upcoming product roadmap. How is that roadmap going to further set you apart or set you up for success. Think about your customer community and ecosystem. Maybe your community is better than theirs. Maybe you have a stronger thought leadership, thought partnership community. Think about your speed and responsiveness of support. Your customer support team can make a huge difference in times of need. Think about the strength of your training and educational resources. How quickly can users get up to speed, your user design, your user experience. The list goes on and on. You need to be thinking about every aspect of your organization, your product, your experience, and how it excels compared to the competition. So for example, if I were describing one of sprouts key differentiators, let's say I was describing their advanced social listening capabilities, I might say, unlike many of our competitors, sprout offers robust tools for tracking brand sentiment and understanding customer conversations. This feature helps businesses to proactively manage their brand reputation and respond to customer needs faster, which can directly impact customer satisfaction and retention. Now notice in the above I didn't just describe the differentiator. I tied it to a critical business outcome, customer satisfaction and retention. Once you understand the differentiators, it may be good to document all of this by creating a competitive battle card. Battle cards are very common. Your product marketing team may have already created some for you, but competitive battle cards are designed to be a quick cheat sheet, reference guides, things that you can look at very fast, that will show you the overview of the competitor. What you need to know, strengths and weaknesses, differentiators, objections, rebuttals, key feature comparisons, trap setting, questions, customer wins and case studies, pricing and how it compares offers. Basically, it's your competitor at a glance. It should be like a one pager. And then finally, it's always good to stay up to date on competitor movement. You should be subscribing to your competitor newsletters. You should be following their product change logs, staying up to date on new features, community announcements, attending their webinars, watching their product launches. That is how you stay up to date. Cool, all right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. I want you to list your top three competitors, identify the three competitors you come up with most frequently. Once you've done that, you're going to research each competitor, you're going to review their websites, look at their positioning, check their ratings, sign up for their newsletters and take notes. You're going to identify the differentiators that you have against those competitors. You'll list three features that your solution has, that theirs does not, and why it matters and how it's tied to revenue, cost and risk. You'll create trap setting questions. So you'll write at least one trap setting question for each competitor, and then as a bonus, and I would encourage you to do this, I want you to then flip the script. I want you to then pretend that you don't work for your solution anymore. I want you to pretend that you work for your competitor, I want you to go aggressive against your own solution, and really start to understand, if you worked for their competitor, what is every single thing that you would say to bad mouth your own solution. Because once you can truly understand that you can prepare yourself to respond. Your study guide is going to walk you through all this. Make sure that you review it with your mentor, your manager, your new hire buddy, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.