Overview:

Like us, our customers compete with other companies for profit and growth. They make decisions based on many factors, including the intensity of the competition they face, the market direction they want to follow and how to make their own company more competitive. Our customer’s competitive strategy and tactics are at the very heart of our customers planning and execution. In sales we spend a lot of time trying to understand what our customers are doing. Having insight in to their competitive position and subsequent decision making, helps us understand why they do what they do.

Learning Outcomes:

• Build unparalleled credibility in your customer’s eyes through your understanding of their business and their business planning process
• Identify new opportunities to make unsolicited proposals
• Understand how to use multiple business school models to analyze your customer’s competitive motivations and tactics
• Gain insight in to how customers gain advantage by optimizing their own business
• Be able to engage in dialog in new ways with ‘C-Suite’ executives
• By understanding your customer’s market specific strategies, be able to vary the focus and messaging for your solutions

Who this course is for:

Sales people, sales managers, business development, business consultants, marketing. Any customer-facing representative engaged with customers, needing insight in to the competitive dynamic of a company or a market segment.

Benefits to you:

When we understand the reasons for what our customers do, we can be laser focused on initiatives that are going to be of the highest priority. We are able to engage in a game changing dialog with our customers and position ourselves as a competitive advantage. When our customer carries out their periodic operating budget process, initiatives for competitive advantage will always have a high priority. Attaching to those initiatives will help us to focus on high priority opportunities.

Benefits to your organization:

When we understand the competitive positioning of one company, it will serve as a template for others in the same market. As we build insight in to multiple competitors in the same market space we will be able to identify market specific opportunities for our own business. We will be seen as leaders for that domain. Focusing our solutions on the competitive needs of a market leads to more strategic engagements with key customers. Solving customer problems is important for our sales, focusing our solution to enhance their competitiveness opens the door to the ‘C-Suite’ and allows us to propose much larger engagements.