In the last two Tips we talked about two powerful competitive strategies - setting traps and avoiding traps that our competitors might set. Most sales professionals use the wrong strategy in competitive situations - they choose to compete head to head even if their advantage isn't significant enough to justify this approach. Conventional wisdom suggests that you shouldn't compete head to head unless you have a 2X advantage in either solution or price. Not many people have this kind of advantage but most people choose this approach anyway.

One of the best traps we can set (or that can be set against us) is to drive a head to head competition where we know we have big advantages. For instance, in this age of procurement-led buying decisions, a low cost competitor should appeal to procurement and try to drive a price-based comparison. Conversely, if you are going against a competitor with a dramatically inferior solution, you may want to drive a head to head competition based on solution capabilities with the functional department that will utilize the solution.

Using sports terminology, when we set traps, we are "playing offense" and when we avoid traps, we are often "playing defense". The next step is to create a powerful game plan, and anticipate traps from both perspectives. If we know who is making the decision (procurement, functional department, senior management), we can figure out what they care about and what the most important criteria might be. If we know who we are competing against, we can look at past experiences with them - how have they beaten us and how have we beaten them? Based on this we can try to anticipate what traps they might set for us or what traps we might want to set for them.

What can we do to best position ourselves to anticipate traps? We can do our research...

For Part 2 of this Tip, check out the IMPAX blog...