Value-Added Selling, Fourth Edition: How to Sell More Profitably, Confidently, and Professionally by Competing on Value—Not Price, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 12

Differentiating

Your fifth Value-Added Selling strategy answers this question: “Have I differentiated our status as a value-added supplier?”

In 1934, a Russian biologist named G. F. Gause published a book titled The Struggle for Existence. He wrote about the competitive exclusion principle, “Two species competing for the same resources cannot stably exist.” One will always have a slight advantage and outcompete the other. The second species will have two choices: go extinct or change the way it competes so as to not directly compete for limited resources. Though Gause was studying bacteria growing on yeast cultures, he could have been describing the state of business today.

There is a pandemic identity crisis today in business. Merger ...