The New Power Base Selling: Master The Politics, Create Unexpected Value and Higher Margins, and Outsmart the Competition

What Is Compete Strategy?

A Compete Strategy has one major job: to clearly and succinctly define what you are counting on to win a deal. It is a central organizing statement that enables you to make directionally correct decisions about what you will do in a sales campaign. Every tactic—everything you physically do—must directly or indirectly advance your Compete Strategy. The result is to create a nontraditional source of relative superiority—because most people are not strategic by nature. They cannot see it, which prevents them from formulating it.

For instance, spectators who did not know a lot about hockey and watched the underdog United States hockey team defeat the dominant Russians in the 1980 Olympics saw tactics: players skating around in circles with the puck and seemingly not taking a lot of shots at the goal. However, spectators with an advanced understanding of the game saw the US coach’s brilliant and unexpected strategy of keeping the puck away from the Russians, which shifted the advantage to the smaller and better-conditioned US players and away from the larger and stronger Russian players.

Because most sellers don’t possess this ability to see strategy, they remain uninformed spectators who aren’t able to formulate strategy on their own. For this reason, they seldom deploy effective strategy even during the most competitive of sales situations. We observe this during deal reviews, when the majority of sellers answer our question “What is your strategy to win?” ...