Why You Must Eat Their Lunch

Anthony Iannarino is dead right in saying "sales in a zero sum game" when it comes to the competition. If we win, our competitors lose. The sale that creates revenue for our company, results in financial loss and personal brand damage at the competition. Although a win creates employment and prosperity for the victor, it can cause stress and unemployment for the loser. Make no mistake; sales is brutal.

Anthony's new book, Eat Their Lunch, is essential reading for anyone in sales or sales leadership. It’s a book about competitive displacement, or as Anthony puts it, “stealing your dream clients from your competition.” 

Eat Their Lunch is about living, thriving, and surviving where there is fierce competition, where clients want to commoditize what you sell, and where the way the salesperson engages is an essential part of the value proposition and differentiation. There aren’t too many things more difficult than taking a dream client away from your competitor when that potential customer does not not think they have a compelling reason to change.

You must help them believe that they need to change and do things differently

You can’t wait for dream clients to issue an RFP because you will be treated as a commodity. If you act like a commodity, your dream client will treat you accordingly. You must be proactive and find a way to break into the c-suite to reframe thinking, set the agenda and embed yourself within a compelling business case for change. Watch this truly epic video... more than once!

Here is a transcript of Anthony's conversation.

We win by creating best value for the buyer and elevating the conversation as high as possible. Anthony explains exactly how do that. If you read just one book a year, this is it ... Eat Their Lunch. Here is a transcript of Anthony's wisdom.

I want to talk to you a little bit more about what I call Red Ocean Strategy. It is essentially the premise of my next book, which is called Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition. I’ve got some notes here I’m working from, because I don’t want to forget anything.

Let’s talk about what a Red Ocean Strategy is. A Blue Ocean Strategy means that you found a way to have no competition, and you probably innovated your way there. You’re Netflix, you’re Uber, you’re Lift, you’re Airbnb, you’re somewhere that there’s no competition, because you sort of made the market yourself. That is a wonderful place to be, but if you’re watching this, my guess is you don’t live in the blue part of the ocean. You live in the red part where it’s bloody because you’ve been commoditised, there’s so much competition, your customers have bought what you sell before, they’re sort of sophisticated and they know things, which means you need a different game. 

I want to talk about competition for just a minute, because sometimes it gets a bad rap. But here’s what you have to know about sales, it is in fact a zero-sum game: somebody wins, somebody loses; somebody’s the primary provider, somebody else gets to go home and try to find another client. And if you’re watching this, the truth of the matter is you’re trying to take your competitor’s clients away from them, while they’re trying to take your clients away from you, that’s what happens. So no matter what you think or feel about competitor, know for a fact you are a competitor, you are playing a zero-sum game, and you get paid for winning. You don’t get paid for just working and punching the clock; you get paid for going out and doing the work, where you create opportunities and win those new opportunities. 

I want to make just a couple of other comments on competition very quickly. I know that your competitors undercut your pricing, and I know how easy it is to say, “We would have won that, except they undercut our pricing with this irrational pricing structure that isn’t really going to work or produce results.” Okay, you might be right, but the fact of the matter is you lost because you didn’t create greater value than your competitor. And maybe you say, “Well, they lied, they can’t even do the things that they said they can do!” Okay, the lie isn’t how they beat you; they beat you because you didn’t create greater value, in such a way that it would pause your client to just discount them completely. Competition is something that you win when you play the game better than someone else, not the way that they play their game, and I’ve checked on this. You can go to your competitors and say, “Please stop lying about what you do and please stop undercutting my pricing,” and they’re not going to care at all, they’re going to continue on doing what they’ve always done, so you have no influence and no control over that.

So, where do you have to go? You have to go to the place where you have control and where you can do something different and let’s talk about this, because it starts with understanding value creation. Most salespeople sell at level one value, which means they want to talk about their company, they want to talk about their products and services, and the problem is as you walk in and say, “We are a great company, we’ve been in business for a hundred years, we do all these great things, look at the big companies we work with and look at these products and services,” and you’re greeted with mostly a yawn. Because your client is already buying something that looks and sounds like what you do, they’re working with a company that they think is good enough, and you haven’t created a compelling reason for them to change. So you become a commodity when you behave like a commodity, and entering the conversation from the left is how you look like a commodity. This is why people say no to a meeting, and this is why even though you show them your product and service and you give them a proposal, they don’t buy anything.

From there you can move up to level two. Level two means you have a great experience, you have great support and great service. But you know this to be true: some of the clients that you work with need service and support, and some of the companies that your competitor works with needs service and support, and everybody can give you service and support. What we do creates problems for the client, we help them solve those problems; not, again, a compelling reason for anyone to change and do anything different, and certainly not the foundation of a competitive displacement.

For the last 30+ years, since we’ve been going solution selling, we’ve all been commoditised at level three, and level three means “I can get you results, I can show you a tangible ROI. I even have a spreadsheet to show you the math.” Well, you can do that, you have a spreadsheet, and I have a spreadsheet, so now we both hand over our spreadsheets, and the client’s purchasing department looks at it and says, “Okay, so everything is equal here. I’ll go to price,” and that’s how you become a commodity. We call this entering from the left, because if I had this on a slide deck, you’d be coming in from product into experience into solution, and that’s the way that value has progressed over time. 

But right now you have to start at the far right, which means you need level four value creation or strategic. This means instead of coming in and saying, “Let me introduce you to myself and my company, and let me ask you what’s keeping you up at night,” you come in and say, “Let me tell you what’s keeping you up at night. I want to talk to you about the four trends that are going to have the biggest impact on your business over the next 18-24 months, some of the questions you’re going to want to ask your management team, and some of the decisions you’re going to make over the next 18-24 months so that you can produce the best results for your company. Now, what do you look like for a 20-minute executive briefing? I’m going to leave you with a slide deck.” 

This is a different conversation that we’re having. And I’m not trying to build to level four; I’m starting at level four. This is the heart and soul of competition today. If you’re going to be a competitor and if you’re going to win new business, and especially if you’re going to go take business away from your competition, you’re going to have to create greater value than they do. You’re going to have to create compelling, differentiated value that people can see, feel and understand that there’s a difference, and you’re going to have to be the person who has the advice and who gives them good council and who shows up as consultative.

Let me just say one last thing about being consultative. Your product is not advice, your service is not advice, the results you produce are not advice. Advice is advice, and advice starts at level four. So you have to be able to talk about what’s real, why change, why change now, how you should change now, how you should think about your competitive space, what you should be doing different, and the questions that you need to answer to be able to move your business forward. I’m Anthony Iannarino, the new book is called Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition, and that starts with level four value.