TMCVocabulary
How to Attack with Competitive Positioning
By Patty Burke
Tactics
We communicated the redefined Contract Management process in a ‘launch’-type program, incorporating the strategy into a number of marketing and sales tactics that we rolled-out over several quarters.
The first sales tool (see below) we developed turned out to be the most important: a summarized ‘cheat sheet’ for the sales team to use to guide discussions with prospects who had received information from the competitor attacking our product. The goal was to matter-of-factly defend ourselves against the competitive attack, as shown in the first chart, and to quickly move into an offensive position by attacking and trapping the competitor. In addition to hard facts, this gave our sales team renewed confidence in their ability to defeat the competitor and change the playing field to our advantage.
Results:
The program was considered a great success. There have been no major competitive losses since the program rolled out, versus almost 50% losses previously. The win ratio is primarily contributed to better qualifying of prospects to eliminate “authoring-focused” leads early in the sales cycle. Most importantly, the confidence of the sales team has been greatly improved, they have “fire in the belly”, and they now feel they can conquer this competitor.
