Differentiate Yourself

Differentiating yourself to meet the needs and motivations of your prospects is critical to your increased success but it is difficult for customers to differentiate between you and your competition.

What I do in every sales situation is get to the Key Buying Influencers as quickly as possible. Then I work to find their business and personal needs. Meeting with all the influencers is important and will give you an edge over your competition.

Help the Customer Understand Their Needs
Sometimes, customers are so inundated with their own daily issues that their real needs are often shortsighted. Some timese they lose sight of what they really need. The salesperson who can shine the light on this will stand out.

Don’t Forget the Personal Win
Find out what the decision makers want to gain personally as well as professionally, and highlight how your solution will achieve them.

When buyers are evaluating several proposals, it is often impossible to differentiate one proposal from the next. The effectiveness of the salesperson, not the proposal, is what buyers remember most.

Set goals...in the customers interest!
Goals should define specific ends that relate to your business, your customer’s business, and your relationships. Examples of qualitative long-term Goals stated from the account’s point of view:
1. Be known as the firm that helped this account break into a competitive market.
2. Be seen as providing the best follow-up service of any company in our industry.
3. Have the account recognize your expertise as the provider of unique solutions to his problems.
4. Be seen as delivering more than you promise.

Your Goals should help the customer reduce costs, boost sales revenue, improve productivity, or raise profit. A Goal that doesn’t do one of these things -- either directly or indirectly -- is probably not a Goal worth pursuing.

Competition? What competition?
Be aware of the competition; never obsess about it.

If you think of yourself as focusing on the goal, training hard (through strategic analysis), and running the best race you know how to, you’ll have a good idea of what we believe competition is about. The point is to look straight ahead and offer the customer your best performance, not to be distracted by what’s going on in the next lane. As any competitive runner will tell you, one sure way to stumble is to look to your side.