Sales Training Article: Establishing Differentiators
By John Holland, Co-founder & Co-author of CustomerCentric Selling®
CustomerCentric Selling® helps sellers focus on usage rather than product features and offer only the parts of their offering that relate to the buyer's needs. This approach is especially effective when trying to establish differentiators or when responding to buyer questions about competitive features your offering may lack.
One of the advantages of initiating opportunities with Key Players is that "feature wars" are a rare occurrence at high levels. If and when you are delegated to lower levels so an organization can more thoroughly evaluate your offerings, conversations become much more feature-centric. Even if you initiated the buying cycle, anticipate that other vendors will be invited to compete to allow buyers to compare and make a more informed decision. Buying organizations like to play salespeople against one another to negotiate a better price with their vendor of choice.
As competitive sellers and you attempt to establish differentiators you will have the ability to be proactive by having initiated the opportunity, but be prepared to react if your competitors have features that your offering lacks. I'd like to offer suggestions on handling both of these situations.
When initiating opportunities, you have the ability to establish differentiators that will make it more difficult for competitors if and when they appear. Our hope is that you will establish them by leading with questions to first determine if the buyer has a need for a differentiator and then pose a question in event, question, player and action format. For example if your CRM software can track close rates for add-on business with existing customers (a higher probability) as well as new accounts (lower probability), rather than merely refer to the feature name (Dual Close Rates), your capability question could be:
Event: When forecasting,
Question: could accuracy be improved if
Player: the system
Action: applied each salesperson's historical close
rates for add-on and new account business to each pipeline milestone and projected revenue?
If your buyer agrees this would be a helpful feature, your competitors may be asked if they support Dual Close Rates. A fairly good response if they don't would be to ask: "How would your organization use that feature?" Your buyer would be empowered to answer by providing the event, player and action. If asked what benefit Dual Close Rates would provide, the answer could be a more accurate forecast, the CFO's primary reason for considering buying software. If the competitor doesn't have a comparable feature they would be at a distinct disadvantage.
Competitors have potential differentiators. Let's assume a mid level buyer asks about a feature you don't have: "Do you have the XYZ feature?" Rather than get defensive, you can ask: "How would your organization use that feature?" If you get a reasonable response you could then ask: "What benefit would that feature provide?" While some buyers will be able to answer both questions, many won't, which allows you to minimize the value of the differentiator.
Focusing on feature usage rather than feature puts you in a better competitive position whether you are establishing differentiators proactively or reacting to unique features a competitor has to minimize their relevance or importance.
