Are you Differentiated?

Key to selling in the B2B space is being truly differentiated, and sellers being able to clearly know and communicate what their differentiators are to prospective buyers. If a company has a very mature competitive intelligence function, it should be able to educate all their sellers to pivot their messaging around the key differentiators against the specific competitors short-listed against them on deals. Hands down, this is the best way for competitive intelligence to deliver value; improving sales effectiveness and win rates.

The Fallacy of Being Differentiated

Too often, companies mistake their marketing value propositions as their differentiators. 

Many companies think they are differentiated when they may or may not be. It is ironic that while the goal of most sales teams is to close deals and grow revenue and improve win rates, when you talk to many companies you can often find that executives, sales leaders and product managers cannot clearly articulate the company’s true differentiators; let alone their differentiators against specific competitors. They often state their mission statement, goal aspirations or marketing value propositions.

One cloud technology company I previously worked for listed security, compliance, performance and low-cost consumption as part of their core value. When their capabilities in these areas were really looked at relative to their competitors, these attributes were really more table stakes that most all other competitors delivered in different ways than anything this company uniquely provided. Yet, most of this company’s sales team would mirror these value propositions in their sales process; thinking of them as their differentiators when they were not.

As a sales team, you cannot successfully state your differentiation if you can speak in detail to what and how you do things differently than your competitors. This means knowing your competitors' capabilities in doing the things you claim to be differentiated on.

Why Are Differentiators?

True differentiators are the 4-5 unique attributes of your solution, company, processes or people that position you best against specific competitors. 

Differentiators need to be true, provable, specific to a given competitor and most importantly, relevant to the buyer.

Differentiators can be product features and functions. In the technology space, it tends to be what sellers first think about. What your software does? How easy it is to use? How well it integrated with other solutions? What unique mobile capabilities it has? However, differentiators can also be others attributes equally as important to buyers.

• Reputation of your company, brand, leadership, strategic direction.
• Accuracy and speed of migration and\or deployment.
• Type of customer support provided; personal versus self-service, dedicated team versus pooled supported, availability of multi-channel.
• Quality and relevance of customer references.
• Attributes of the sales process itself; compatibility of sales rep and buyer, how relationship was development, timeliness of response to questions, level of knowledge of buyer’s company and industry, ease of legal process and contracting, etc.

As a sales team, you cannot successfully state your differentiation if you can speak in detail to what and how you do things differently than your competitors. This means knowing your competitors' capabilities in doing the things you claim to be differentiated on.

How to discover your differentiators?

You learn competitive intelligence from three sources; the market, sales team, and prospective buyers.

1.   Publicly available market information is the least effective source for identifying differentiators. It won’t necessarily be in a competitor’s marketing materials. Often time you actually don’t want to list your differentiators publicly but rather use them in sales conversations only. You can sometimes discover differentiators from analysis work done by industry analysts. It’s a good place to start but does require deep vetting as well.

2.   Your sales team will know better than anyone what has worked against specific competitors and what has not. They will also hear things in the field from prospects on what competitors are offering or saying that resonates with them or not. The knowledge across your sales organization from top performers to new hires however will not be equal. It should be the role of competitive intelligence or sales enablement to cull out those insights and best practices and institutionalize them across your entire sales and pre-sales teams.

Prospective buyers are always the singular best source of truth!

They know why they picked a competitor over your solution, and why they picked you. Once you understand recurring trends across buyers, you will know exactly what buyers think of you across solution, services, company, sales process and pricing.

It is paramount for any company looking to up its sales game to have an ongoing structured program for collecting insights from prospective buyers post deal-close, and analyze, discover and report on the recurring trends. Eventually with a mature sales insights program everyone in the company should know and be able to articulate the specific differentiators you have over each of your core competitors.

 Let us know your thoughts…

Do you think your company can articulate its true differentiators well?

Does your company have a structured program for both culling out insights from your sales team and as well buyers post-deal close?

Free Differentiator Discovery

Try our Sales Insights Program with a free two deal trial. We’ll show you the basics of what a structured sales insights program can provide, and how you can use it to hone your sales messaging against specific competitors. Contact us at [email protected] for more information.

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