Is Your Competitive Program Delivering The Results You Expect?

Is your competitive content increasing your win rates as expected? Is it shortening your sales cycle time? Or is it not meeting the specific result you are expecting? Ask yourself, do your Go-to-Market/Sales teams know how to leverage Competitive Intelligence for maximum effectiveness? So, you may have launched your Compete Program expecting a 30%+ win rate, as many competitive intelligence tool providers report their clients' experience.?But It is now six months to a year later, and you are not experiencing these benefits. It may be time to examine how you train your Sales Reps and Account Managers on positioning against competitors and repositioning Competitors in their deals to win more often.?

How many Sales Kick-Offs (SKO) competitor trainings have you sat through and thought, so what? How do I use that? The training is great at explaining competitors’ features and functions and shows us how we win but not how to use this information in the sales process.??When the Go-to-Market team is trained in practical ways to use competitor and market intelligence, they see higher win rates, higher deal values, and reduced sales cycle times, all leading to better business results but also more effective, successful, and fulfilled team members.?

There is more to the story than just who the competitor is, what they do, and what makes us a better solution. Communicating kill points, pricing, and feature comparison is not sufficient nor wholly enabling. While important, these are just the “what” without the "how" or "when" to be used in the sales process. Does your Go-to-Market team know why they should use your competitive content and why it is effective? What about when they should use the content? Do they understand where in the sales motion it should be leveraged? Have you instructed them on how to use the content most effectively?

Experienced Go-to-Market professionals may understand how to apply the information presented if they are familiar with the competitor’s product or service. But even experienced Go-to-Market pros will be disadvantaged if faced with a new competitor or product. So, imagine how those with less experience may feel not knowing why or how to apply what you know about the competitor and their products if the more experienced team members are not sure.??

When you don’t train your teams to use this powerful competitor content properly, you may see many of the newer, less experienced reps resort to risky use of the intel collateral. Such as sending prospects internal research like the battle cards, comparison documents, or presentation decks from the Sales Kick-Off, which are not intended for external dissemination. These actions can be damaging if they end up on social media. This is a leading cause of why Go-to-Market professionals may be hesitant to use competitive intelligence collateral. It can get them in hot water if they do not know how to incorporate it into their workflows.

So, what do we do instead? The answer is straightforward--train the Go-to-Market team on the proper use of competitive intel. When your team knows why and where to use the information, how to apply it, along with when to apply it in the proper context and format to position your product against the competitor’s solution, the true power of Competitive Intelligence and a deeper Competitive Strategy can be executed with astounding results.

In a discussion with a Sales Manager about using intel to support her team’s sales efforts, she mentioned, “Many on my team are new to sales, and they have not even learned how to have a conversation with a prospect when it comes to competition. Will this help them do that?” This was a revelation to me, and I then worked with this manager and my team to align our training on how to use the different information we had, why to use it, when to use it, how to use it, and where to use it— resulting in the marked increase in win rate of 50% and deal size increase of 20% in a six month period.

One of the challenges or struggles faced by many Marketing Strategists or Competitive Intelligence Team Leaders is that your intel content is designed to be more informational and educational rather than prescriptive.?A great way to move your Competitive Intelligence content from educational to prescriptive is to utilize the tools, instructions, and methods found in?The Compete Network.?-. Their battle card process is the standard of measure for effectiveness using their Know, Say, Show methodology.?I also recommend the Strategy and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) site. They have many resources and templates to help you shape your curated content into valuable tools for an effective Competitive strategy.?Product Marketing Alliance (PMA) has a broader training set for Product Marketing with tools to incorporate Competitive Intelligence effectively. These are a few of the resources Competitive Intelligence leaders lean on to keep competitive programs at the cutting edge. While you will significantly benefit from the prescriptive methods found in the above resources, you can start training your organization to use what you have right now. Train them on the What, Why, When, Where, and How to use current content while transitioning to a more prescriptive and usable format and start making an impact now.?

The focus of your Competitive Training:?

Outlined below are the key areas of focus for Competitive Training. While not comprehensive, these practices will lead to your ability to scale your intel coverage by lessening the learning curve.

Impactful competitor training will consist of spotting the competitor and demonstrating how to ask and identify the competitor early in the sales cycle. This will drive how you position your solution. In any competitor training, it must be understood how to spot them. From my experience at three different companies, I have learned that if the competitor is identified during the qualification and discovery stage of the sales cycle, the chance of a win is almost double as opposed to the competitor not being identified at this stage. Train your teams on how to do this, why it is crucial, and the importance of knowing early.

When a competitor is known, teaching how to talk about the competitor without creating contention is essential. This is referred to as “Boxing The Competitor In.” When training your team on how to box the competitor in, it is necessary to teach them to call out what the competitor does well and why the prospect is considering or using the competitor's solution. Train the team to ask the prospect what the competitor does well and why they are using or considering them. Follow up with the best questions that allow the prospect to identify gaps in the competitor’s product/service and how the prospect would solve or has solved issues. This can then lead to the conversation on how our solution can solve what competitors do and don’t do well, hence boxing them in.?Demonstrating how to use your content to accomplish “Boxing in the Competitor” will increase your content's usage and effectiveness.

Teaching how to perform Competitive Discovery will be the one thing that will have the most significant impact on the Go-To-Market professional. Suppose we have a great analysis of the competitors' capabilities and strategies. In that case, you are in a prime position to teach and prescribe questions that can be used to discover what a prospect likes or dislikes about a competitor. Through the discovery process, you can plant landmines by seeding fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). When you uncover the latent needs of the current solution or contemplated solution, exposing them and making them as painful as possible with impact questions...like, how much has it cost you in sales or in retention or in operational inefficiencies of not having this service/function in place? Etc. If taught effectively how to use these questioning techniques to reposition the competitor, it will lead the sales team how to have an effective and deep-meaning conversation with a prospect. The other benefit here is that it will become clear what the primary capabilities the prospect cares about and if we are or are not the best solution leading to a quicker qualification or disqualification so that time is not wasted moving on if we are not the best solution for the prospect. If you uncover that you are the best solution for the prospect, you can leverage these points through the rest of the sales cycle. Sales teams always claim this training to be one of the most impactful to their success.?

This leads to training on handling Where We Win and Where We Lose—the dreaded Strength Weakness discussion.?Teaching the Go-to-Market team the purpose of this analysis for qualification and how to best handle where we lose, is essential here. Teach them this is a tool to help walk them through the conversation when it is required to address how to leverage our strengths and how to approach where we may lose. As an example, if your solution does not provide something the competitor’s solutions contain, the sales rep should be able to ask the questions as to why this feature is important and whether it is more important than the other features our solution offers that are superior to the competitors.?Teaching the Go-to-Market team how to walk through this and where we win is a powerful tool, enabling the team to re-position the competitor.??

Much like the Strength and Weakness training, Objection Handling is imperative to teach. The Go-to-Market team should know precisely how to handle objections and how we empathize with and discuss the objection. Discuss the best questions to use to get the prospect to see the objection from another angle and self-discovery and then have the right conversation around the objection. Train the Go-to-Market team on the proper approach of using your content to navigate objections in a non-combative way leading to a rich conversation to create a solid relationship with the prospect or customer.

Feature Functionality Comparison is another Competitive Analysis that it is hard for the Go-to-Market organization to understand the best use of this robust analysis. Instructing how this is utilized to answer questions and provide talking points to use with prospects is not a laundry list to show we are better. We know every company and product can create a comparison showing them as the best solution, and that is how the Go-to-Market team may try to use it if not trained on how to leverage the data and focus on the differentiators or why certain functions or features are not as essential for the prospect.?While any in the Go-to-Market team will benefit from knowing how to use a feature functionality comparison, your Sales Engineers and like-kind roles are relied on to know the capabilities of your own solutions but also the solutions of the competitor. It is essential to train these technical specialists as they are responsible for addressing many of the technical differentiation and establishing technical fit.??

Another essential item to train on is the Pricing and Packaging Strategy. If the Go-to-Market team is focused on price rather than on how to position pricing, it becomes a race to the bottom and becomes price dependent instead of value dependent. Train the team on Value and how to use what we know about the competitor’s pricing and pricing strategy to better position our solution with Total Cost of Ownership discussions or Return on Investment Analysis you have painstakingly put together.

Depending on what industry or whether you are a service or a product, there are other items you may want to consider training on when evaluating a competitor, such as what to demo, trial, etc. It is essential to focus the training on the competitor and the methods to use based on what you have curated to compete against them.?

Methods and Avenues for Competitive Training:

Let’s jump to methods for performing the training. Earlier, we mentioned Sales Kick-Off, and while that is a great platform to train about competitors, it should not be the only training. Ensure that you are working with your Sales Enablement organization and set up regular training, onboarding, and ad-hoc training for the Go-to-Market team. It would be best if you also worked with the Product Management Team on the Product Launches to incorporate your Competitive Intelligence training into the Product Launch process. Work with Product Marketing to include training that aligns with Marketing campaigns. The sales teams and Account Management should be competitively enabled if an extensive marketing campaign to drive demand is implemented.?

Some effective methods include short webinars that are recorded and posted to intranet sites for Go-to-Market. These should be no more than Ten minutes (the shorter, the better) and can focus on a single competitor’s content and how to use it. Doing this with a Sales Manager or Solutions Engineer is very effective.?

Another recommended method is to analyze where you are losing and winning. For instance, if you see a drop in your win rate, you could use that as an opportunity to do extended training with more in-depth competitor positioning techniques. It can be helpful to use reps that have successfully won against the competitor to show how they did it and how they used your content to enable themselves to do so.?

In one instance, a very accomplished Competitive Intelligence Manager on my team presented against an emerging competitor in the market. During her research, she identified some intelligence that put our product in the best position to win. Working with a top Solutions Engineer and Product Marketing Manager, they led a short training with the Go-to-Market team. The training was focused on the prescription of why these points matter, how to use the competitive points in the sales process, what points should be incorporated, and when they should be incorporated into the sales cycle. Within three months, we saw a decline in lost opportunities. Many of the points from the research were known for a while, but it was not until the training on why, what, when, where, and how the sales team should use the content that we were able to essentially push the competitor out of most of our competitive deals.?

Another example: A Competitive Intelligence Manager led a training against a competitor we had a declining win rate against. He started with a short training with a solutions engineer on positioning our product against this aggressive competitor by identifying what kill points were effective, when to use them, and where in the sales cycle they should be leveraged, and further questions the teams could use to seed doubt and plant landmines. Working with Sales Enablement, this short training was pushed to the sales team. Then, we followed up with a longer, more in-depth training with examples of repositioning the competitor and what features and support put our product in the best position against the competitive product. We leveraged top Sales Reps with experience winning against this competitor and Solutions Engineers and Product Marketing to increase the effectiveness of the training event. After these two training initiatives, we saw a ten-point increase in win rates by the end of the next quarter.??

I have found that when the organization is trained to use competitive content in the method it was designed to operate, competitive intelligence is highly effective at increasing win rates, shortening the sales cycle, increasing the size of the deal, and decreasing the new Sales Reps' time to profitability. Competitive intelligence must be prescriptive in how it is used, targeted to what the business is facing today, and anticipate what the business may be encountering in the following weeks and months ahead.?

Conclusion:

By ensuring your teams know how to use the competitive intelligence they have, they will be enabled to have a deeper and more enriching experience with their prospects. The connection and understanding of the customer will be deeper and lead to creating a strong relationship. Understanding the competitive environment and how you navigate it enables your Go-to-Market team to address the requirements and needs of customers better. When your team can show they can solve your customer’s needs better than the competition, your win rates increase, your sales cycle shortens, and your deals increase in size. Time to empower your Go-to-Market Team with prescriptive competitive intelligence training and crush the competition.

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