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

To Know Your Competition Is to Know Yourself

Throughout this book, we have endeavored to equip you with an understanding of customer politics and value. However, as we dive into Competitive Differentiation, we must cover an issue that is totally in your hands.

You must know how your solution and company are differentiated from those of the competition in order to formulate a strategy, and strategy has but one purpose: to advance you to relative superiority in order to win. To do this, you need to not only possess a need to win but also must have a compelling need to compete. Stage III and IV sellers have both, whereas the 80 percent seller population in Stages I and II seek only to win.

The need to win without the will to compete is like a hungry person who is not willing to try something new.

This will to compete is a personal attribute of those sellers who are naturally inclined to want to do better than their adversaries. However, many sellers would prefer to win without the need to compete. These are sellers who are often referred to as “farmers,” a familiar term that describes individuals who look after installed accounts. However, we think that all sellers in today’s marketplace should possess more of a “hunter” mentality, since every account is subject to competitive displacement and every deal carries the risk of being outsold. Still, many sellers lack the will to compete, causing competition to become a blind spot in their selling efforts.

Since competitive ignorance has ...