Who Is Your Real Competition

Building upon last week’s blog, if we are selling CHANGE, then who is your REAL COMPETITION? Although we all have worthy and formidable competitors, in this new world, our primary competitor is our CUSTOMER or PROSPECT. If you have 100 deals in your sales funnel, more than half of them will get closed as NO DECISIONS. You are losing more deals to the Status Quo than any competitor.

CEB research on this topic is both overwhelming and extremely compelling to understand why this is happening. The understanding of these facts will have a material impact on how you go-to-market, your Sales Strategy and ultimately your strategy at an individual deal level.

Your Customers world has changed or how they Buy and correspondingly, your Sales Strategy needs to adjust. Your customer’s world has gotten more complex and for most, they are being asked to DO MORE WITH LESS. Your Customers have become more Risk Averse. Stakes are higher both at a Corporate and Individual level. The net impact is peoples comfort with the Status Quo or as I call it, “The Theory of Good Enough”, has gone up. They view the Status Quo as the safest place to be.

The Risk and Disruption of Change creates an interesting set of processes and behaviors. What we see are more people involved in decisions, more detailed process governing decisions, 3rd party Consultant involvement, more detailed business case requirements and other internal influences that slow things down. Not only does it take longer, but if there are 6 or more people involved in the decision process, the chance they will actually make a decision drops to 31%. There are many reasons for this fact, but think of group dynamics and trying to get to consensus. The one thing they can agree to do in a more complex world is to DO NOTHING.

The impact on us as sellers is material. Increased Cost of Sale, Declining Win Rates, reduced Predictability, and needing to be far more prescriptive about the types of deals we choose to compete in and the strategy we choose in those deals we do pursue. We built INK Sales Strategy Software for these exact purposes.

As our Customers world gets more complex, our world gets more complex at the same time. We need Corporate Strategies and Deal level strategies to be able compete and meet our growth targets. This begins with us being able to think differently about what we sell and who we compete against. Our ability to THINK DIFFERENT is critical to being able to build commercial strategies to get our customers to think different about their STATUS QUO.