4 Ways to Improve Competitive Sales and Win Rates

With the ever-increasing rise of competitors facing companies today, every sales deal is a competitive sales engagement. 

Key takeouts:

• Prepare your sales teams for any competitive engagement by makng the information they need to stand out readily available and consistent.
• Make it easy for your team by ensuring that the process of collecting, sharing and utilizing competitive intelligence is standardized and that any data or documents that are prepared as a result of intelligence gathered can be used are easily customizable for each unique sales deal.

It’s tempting to think that a customer is only considering your product or service, but with the availability of information online, every customer is researching not just your company, but also your competitors. You and your sales team have to face competition, one way or another, in every single.

So why do many companies make this fact difficult to overcome? If it’s known that sales reps are walking into a competitive minefield, why aren’t they better equipped and backup up by a competitive intelligence process? Empowering a sales team sounds like a no-brainer, yet a lot of the time they have to hunt this information down on their own or build it from scratch.

If this sounds familiar in your company, here are four ways you can alleviate the stress of competitive sales.

1. Centralize your competitive intelligence

One major challenge that sales and marketing people face is that they don’t know where to go to for the competitive information they need. Many companies have islands of competitive data—each business unit might have its own internal website or Sharepoint site or data might be stored in different people’s email boxes or in a folder on their computer. If people don’t know where to find competitive information, they also don’t know where to report new intelligence that they discover, and critical information can be quickly lost.

By providing a centralized database of intelligence, you can make it easier to track, find, and process information about competitors and competitive market events.

2. Standardize competitive content

Salesperson Jim goes to the centralized CI website and downloads a competitive sales guide for his Widget product. He finds that it has information about the competitors’ pricing and features. The next day, Jim needs to know features of a competitor’s Button product, so he downloads a competitive sales guide for his Button product. However, instead of finding pricing and features, the Button “competitive sales guide” has an overview of the competitor’s financials and their marketing messages. It’s not what he was expecting or needed. Now Jim doesn’t know what to expect the next time he downloads a competitive sales guide, and his job has become more frustrating and time-consuming.

Make it easy for your salespeople to know what to expect by using standard templates and definitions for your competitive sales content. If a salesperson knows what kinds of documents are available and exactly what to expect from the content, it will be much easier to prepare for a competitive sales deal.

3. Provide guidance that can be easily customized

Every salesperson has experienced this problem: she needs to make a presentation to a customer tomorrow. What does she do? She clicks to the marketing team’s website and gets the latest product presentation. But once she has it, she finds she has to modify it to be tailored to her specific deal.

Different competitors in a deal and different customer needs will change how a product or service has to be positioned in a sale. Using Powerpoint, Excel, and other tools are good for communicating information, but they do not easily adjust to different selling scenarios. Make sure your sales teams have a way to get information that can be easily modified to fit different scenarios.

CompeteIQ’s competitive intelligence platform is an example of a system that allows salespeople to get information tailored to their specific deal without having to request help from the content owners.

4. Make communication easy

Salespeople can be a great source of competitive intelligence. They hear first-hand what customers are saying; why customers are or are not buying products, what product marketing messages do or don’t work, rumors about the competitor’s products and companies. The problem in many companies, however, is that there is no effective way for salespeople to report this information back to someone who can actually do something with it.

Make sure your salespeople have the right tools and access to report competitive intelligence not only to their immediate sales groups, but also to the people who can make the necessary changes to products, marketing material, and strategy. In turn, once that information is processed, make sure it gets back to sales teams so they can update their sales strategies.