I talked through a recent deal with a buddy where he faced a tough competitor – actually a stronger company and product. The details do not matter too much – he basically found out during the sales process that the other guy had a distinct advantage. The trick here was that there was not one easy feature to focus on – the competitor looked better.
So, what do you do in this case? Well, you better be cheaper for one. I’m sure everyone reading this knows how to discount…..
You certainly can outsell the other guy – a lot of the positive solution selling techniques will work here.
Even with all these techniques, you still might lose. That should worry you – you probably are going to lose any deals like this in the future. You’ve got a serious issue here.
At this point, you might need to do a little product management here. The product needs some improvement.
Salespeople are well aware of these issues – I bet each one of you has a good idea of the fixes you need. I bet you also went to the product people in your company and told them what to do.
My experience is that a lot of product managers don’t like hearing a salesperson come in and tell them they lost a deal based on the product. A lot of them ask me what needs to be changed – these conversations always seem to not help for me – they turn out bad. Maybe you can suggest how I can do better in the comments!
One idea that works for me is to actually not tell the product manager what to do – I let the customer tell them.
Let’s say you have a similar deal coming up – you might even lose it. In this deal, you need to go right at your competitor and directly address the product issue. You do need a reason why your product works this way. Getting the product manager in this call is even helpful.
You then somehow need to get the customer to tell you why they need the new feature. You need a specific story only about them – this is not some general advice about “the product.”. Some use cases would be helpful – you just need a simple story that describes why the product does not work.
This is the story you take to the product manager. You just sit there, tell the product manager, and let them figure it out. None of this is really sales’ job – but we all get pulled into this as the products get more and more complex. Use the power of your customer.
