Sell like a paratrooper - outflank the competition

Selling like a paratrooper

The primary job of a paratrooper in warfare is to flank the enemy. For thousands of years of history, and probably ten thousand years of pre-history, warriors have been trying to get behind the enemy, to flank him, and this usually involved cavalry riding in a wide circle or trying to punch a hole in the line. With the introduction of cargo planes in the middle of the twentieth century, airborne flanking became possible and challenged the ability of the defender to set the stage for their advantage. Paratroopers could outflank and set the stage for the battle to their advantage.

Think about how often in the sales process you are head to head with a competitor, with the same decision maker evaluating two products based on similar value propositions and similar benefits. Can you sell like a paratrooper? Can you outflank you competitor to set the stage to your advantage?

I encountered the concept of outflanking years ago, and it had been a great tool for me.

I have always sold capital products to institutions, sometimes in the private sector and sometimes in the public sector, but always, complex sales to multiple decision making units. Which means that somebody is usually the key “prospect”, and he or she has a problem that I can help solve with the benefits of my solution. Sometimes that is enough – my solution to the buyers problem is clear cut and unchallenged by competition, and I can go head to head with the competitor and get the PO.

Sometimes, however, it isn’t so simple. Let’s say I have 3 benefits, and the primary decision maker that I have engaged with is really only interested in one of them… the other two do not solve problems that he has or are within his scope of responsibility. My competitor, when we focus on that particular problem, has just as solid a value proposition. Now we are competing head to head with nobody having a clear advantage, and we might end up competing on nothing more than price. This is the bloody, hand to hand trench combat on the sales world, and somebody might win, but the winner may come off just as bloody as the loser.

How do I “flank”??- can I solve a different problem that the customer organization has with a different benefit that my product has? This might be with the same key prospect or it might involve engaging a different potential buyer within the customer organization who has a different need that I solve and was looking to solve the problem with a different product.

Let me give you an example – I used to sell hospital communications system. The key reason that hospitals would engage with us was that they are required to have a basic system by law for safety issues. At the beginning of many discussions, the customer was looking for the most basic, cheapest product that would meet their legal requirements. All of our competitors offered this, and they were all cheaper than we were.

However, we offered additional benefits. One of those was to improve patient experience through improved communication. There were people in the hospital who were tasked with, and had budget for, improving the patient experience. If we pulled them into the conversation and discussed a problem that they weren’t thinking of solving through improved communication, we now were not head to head with our competition, we had a much superior offering.?

Our narrative also showed our superior reliability and robustness. The maintenance of the system would be a problem of somebody else in the hospital, not necessarily, the primary decision maker. If we roped this person into the conversation, this was another benefit that we offered over our competition that added additional value.

How does this look like, in the practical sense? let’s say that we are meeting with the IT manager to discuss a specific benefit; we can look on linked in to find the patient experience manager (who may be interested in a separate benefit). We reach out to that second manager and say “I am in discussions with Bob about our solution that can help solve a problem that Bob has, but many of our customers are patient experience managers that buy our solution to solve a different problem, that you may have. Would you have half an hour to discuss this?” then, once you have presented to the second prospect and gotten some interest, you bring them together to a joint meeting.

In the end, even though the conversation started with a focus on one of our benefits, with careful flanking work we could be facing our competitors on the field of comparison that we chose and set, and have a clear-cut advantage. Selling like paratroopers, my team was able to see 4 digit growth and help drive the value of the company up by hundreds of millions of dollars.

While this might not be applicable in many simple sales, think about the classic simple sale – selling a car to a family. One spouse wants one set of benefits and seems to be driving the purchasing process. A seasoned sales person ropes the second spouse in with additional benefits that drive up the value proposition. I would suggest that in many sales processes this is a tactic that can be used successfully.

In many militaries, the red beret of the paratrooper signifies the elite. Adding flanking to your toolbox can make your team more elite performers.