Where is your team selling on The Competitive Pyramid and is it working?

What gives your sales team their greatest competitive edge today? And what are you doing as their coach and leader to help them advance to a higher level on the “Competitive Pyramid?” Join me as I discuss the six levels of the competitive pyramid…and what you can do to help your team advance to a higher competitive selling level with their customers…so you can sell even more!

Transcript

So, what are your salespeople focus on when a customer says, "Why, based on all the competitive options available to me, do I want to buy from you?" There's a selling pyramid you might want to consider evaluating where your sales people are. And if moving to a higher level on the pyramid can actually increase your sales.

Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And the reality of this selling pyramid is the higher up on this pyramid we can go in the communications we have with a customer, the more likely you are to communicate more uniqueness and value of why they want to buy from us. See, the first level of any competitive pyramid of your starting to sell, is the only thing you have to sell is you brag about your location. Hey, the reason you want to buy from us is because we're closest or we're local.

Now it used to be a big deal. But the problem today is we have such efficiency of distribution that has occurred because of Amazon and other companies, that a lot of customers don't feel that you have to be in their backyard to truly be a low risk option. The second level is that the customer doesn't see much difference in your location. So the sales rep then tend to talk about their products and how unique their product line that they sell is.

The reality of this also is that most competitors have caught up. So in most industries, the customer sees relatively low difference between you and the top competitors in your market, because you all have good stuff today. Everybody has quality. So if a customer don't really see a difference in you because of your location or because of your products, the next level up is when you talk about the uniqueness of your service. But frankly, service levels are even easier to copy than our product lines.

So there's a good chance that you have matching service levels that you're not really doing that much different than your competition. Now, if you are, that's fantastic. But for most businesses, the customers just don't see the uniqueness enough to make sure that's the reason, that are the dominant reasons, why they buy from you. So if the customer doesn't see much difference in your location, in your products or in your service, the next level up is, then we just promote our brand.

You can trust our name. We've been around forever. How many years you've been in business and how wide or large an organization you are. Now, if a customer doesn't see much difference between your location, your products, your service or your brands, then the next level up is we go to the Amazon model. And we talk about how you can offer more speed, simplicity, and ease of use in your competition.

Now, if a customer's not seeing any difference in any of these, the next level up, and I believe the top level of competitive uniqueness in the edge in selling, is when you can talk about your customer connectivity. How you're going to stay connected with the customer, how easy it is to order from you, how easy it is to get problems solved and how connected and communicating you are with them on a regular basis.

Now, all these levels in the pyramid are important, but the reality is, the higher up on the pyramid you go, the more uniqueness you actually have that tends to be recognized by the customer. What can you do to move to a higher level so you're not just selling and promoting the idea of, "Hey, you can buy from us because of our locations, our products and our service?"

The reality today is it's a hyper competitive market and we have to do more to differentiate ourselves. Getting higher in the pyramid could help you achieve that.