By Gary Walker, EVP of Channel Sales & Operations, CustomerCentric Selling® – The Sales Training Company
Image courtesy of Boykung at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
When your buyer is contemplating which vendor best meets their needs, do you want to be lumped together with all of the other vendors that are competing for their business? Or would you like to be viewed as a provider of unique capabilities that they must have in order to: achieve a goal, solve a problem, and/or satisfy a need?
If you haven’t already done so:
- Make a list of those features/functions that are unique to your offering. What are those things that your offering alone can provide?
- Determine in advance how you will introduce them into your sales conversation (by using plausible emergency questions).
- During your conversations determine how your buyer operates today without your unique capability(ies) and determine what the value would be to them, the organization, if they were in possession of that capability today.
Buyers are taught to position every product as a commodity; something they can obtain from any comparable vendor as a tactic to get a lower price. If you can leverage your unique capabilities, you can begin to:
- differentiate your offering from your competitor’s
- eliminate potential competition
- prevent yourself from being treated like a commodity, and
- arm yourself with a legitimate business reason not to agree to a request for a discount.
