How to Attack with Competitive Positioning
By Patty Burke
Strategy
As a first step, marketing and sales reviewed competitive win/loss data to pinpoint opportunities where we had a ‘surprise’ in the sales process. We identified three types of ‘surprises’ that might be due to attacks by the competitor: we were eliminated early in the sales cycle, we suddenly lost a prospect that we had assigned a high close probability to, or we experienced a longer than expected sales cycle with multiple meetings and demos required.
Marketing then conducted in-depth competitive research, both on-line and telephone discussions with lost prospects, current prospects and customers. This research revealed further information about the pros and cons of the competitor’s product feature that was superior to ours, including potential integration, compatibility and roadmap issues. We also learned more about the aggressive sales tactics they were employing.
The marketing team realized that we had not been communicating effectively about our product advantages and had let the competitor define the evaluation process for the product category. So instead of continuing to let the competitor put us on the defensive by responding to their definition of the Contract Management process, we took this as our opportunity to redefine the process in a way that revealed how much more important, and strategic, our product advantages were. The chart below shows the Contract Management process and our advantages in the critical, and ongoing, ‘Management’ phases of the process, in contrast to the competitor’s advantages in the tactical, one-time-per-contract, ‘Authoring’ phases of the process.
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