In sales ops, you often need to equip your sales team with the tools and information that can help them win against your competitors. You know… The lists of strengths and weaknesses so they’re not caught off-guard… The side-by-side feature comparisons that they can keep in their back pocket… The bulleted sell sheets that they should try to get memorized…
All of those are often very important—and the right tools can give your sales team the upper hand that they need. But when it comes to researching your competitors and collecting that information, it’s incredibly easy to look at your competitors from the wrong perspective… We tend to focus on our competitors’ products and offerings and compare them to our own—we focus on the “what”. But this one-sided perspective often means we miss the “why” behind what they do. Worse yet, it can cause us to not see “how” they might act in the future.
To truly understand your competitors, you need to start looking at them differently. A video tutorial in the SellingBrew Playbook, Competitive Insights for More Strategic Selling, provides some helpful guidance on gaining a deeper understanding of them. One of the many things this tutorial points out are the 3 things to know about your competitors that can help you gain these new perspectives:
- Their PrioritiesIs this competitor willing to fight for this segment/business?
- Their ResourcesIs this competitor able to fight for this segment/business?
- Their PerformanceHow is this competitor currently doing in the fight for this segment/business?
In the Playbook, there’s even an audit guide that includes dozens of strategic questions across these three areas. By answering those questions, you’ll have a document for each of your competitors that gives you a much better understanding of their “whys” and “hows”.
Gaining these new perspectives will help your team keep the upper hand. Hopefully your competitors won’t learn the same trick…
