Understanding Your Sales Competitors is Crucial!

It's great if you know your products. But it's equally, if not MORE important for you to understand your competitors. If you don't understand your strengths and weaknesses, how can you ever know what questions to ask and where to focus?

For example, if you know that your competitor has a feature that's superior to to yours, such as the ability to monitor triplets, while you can only do twins, you don't want your first question to be, "Would you ever need to monitor triplets?"

Sure, it might come up eventually, and you'll have to deal with it then, but the customer might not even care about that, and chances are, you have some other feature that's a big advantage, and you can start asking questions in that direction instead.

So, a GREAT sales meeting would look like this:

1. Sales rep would disarm the customer and get them talking.
2. Sales rep would find out what customer is currently using (or looking at) and make a mental note of that competitors strengths and weaknesses.
3. Sales rep would ask questions about workflow to identify pain points and understand what the customer cares about ALL THE WHILE TAILORING THE DISCUSSION ACCORDING TO THEIR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES IN COMPARISON TO THE CORRECT COMPETITOR.

Not every discussion should be created equally. A skilled sales rep can easily pivot and understand where to focus. The first step in this is to make yourself a spreadsheet, listing YOUR features, alongside every single one of your competitors. Most of this information is likely available on the company's website.

Once you do this, and understand and memorize it, you can begin crafting your questions, which lead to meaningful, deep discussions, showing you to where your presentation needs to go.

Am I right?