The brutal truth is: Your biggest competitor isn’t your direct market rival, but the fact that you are racing against a hundred other ideas for the customer’s wallet. As a sales leader, I’ve seen this hundreds of times. Salespeople waste time obsessively tracking competitors’ features, while their deals die because they can’t prove they are solving an absolutely top-priority problem.
Let’s look at how the MEDDICC methodology and the letter “C” (Competition) will help you increase conversion at every stage of the sales process and drastically raise your revenue.
What is Real Competition in Sales?
Competition is any person, vendor, or initiative fighting for the same funds and resources as you. In Enterprise B2B, you shouldn’t just think about companies offering similar software. Your competition falls into several types:
- Direct Rival Solutions: Your natural competition.
- Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Decision: The fight over whether the customer builds the soft themselves or buys it.
- Other Projects and Priorities: Fighting against a hundred other initiatives for the same limited budget.
- Status Quo (Inertia): A situation where the customer decides to do absolutely nothing about your problem.
Status Quo: The Truth About Why You Lose
Let’s debunk a myth: “status quo” doesn’t mean the customer is lazy, blocked, and doesn’t want to change absolutely anything in their company. The truth is much more painful for your ego.
The CFO or CEO has one budget, and in that very same second, 100 other projects are fighting for it – from a new HR system, through a fleet vehicle replacement, to a gigantic marketing campaign. When your deal loses and ends in “no decision” (status quo), it simply means you failed to build and prove a value large enough to defeat those 99 other projects on the priority list. The Pain you solve turned out to be insufficiently strong on an organization-wide scale.
Strategy: How to Win Against B2B Sales Competition
The first and absolutely most important rule in professional sales: never badmouth the competition to your customer. It is simply unprofessional action that makes you look weak.
Instead of attacking others, start using the Trap Setting technique. Focus on your unique differentiators and make sure they are officially added to your customer’s Decision Criteria. Trap-Setting Questions brilliantly highlight your aces in the hole while simultaneously exposing gaps in the competitor’s offer.
Plan for Defeating Competition (and Other Projects) in Process Stages
To manage the B2B funnel effectively, you must maintain perfect control at every step:
- Early Stage: Identify if other competition is already in play and determine exactly who they are. Focus on hard Metrics and the implication of the Pain to prove your project deserves budget more than the IT department’s server replacement.
- Mid Stage: Make sure you know how you stack up against other players – including other departments fighting for the same resources. Your Champion inside the customer’s company should give you hard feedback on your strengths and weaknesses. Implement your competitive strategy and enjoy watching others fall into your traps.
- Late Stage: At this stage, you should have clear signals that your software is perceived as the best. Your business case must shine – it must prove that the ROI from your solution knocks the ROI from competing internal projects out of the park.
Your Champion vs. The Rest of the World
Remember this lesson: at the end of the day, the strongest Champion inside the organization always wins, not necessarily the vendor with the best and newest technology.
Your Champion will have to fight not only “Counter Champions” (people supporting your market rivals) but also Champions promoting entirely different internal initiatives. You must equip your Champion with hard arguments to deflect attacks and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). If your ambassador doesn’t have strong data supported by Metrics, they will lose the budget battle to the Head of Marketing or the Chief Operating Officer.
Ready for Your Projects to Always Land at the Top of the CEO’s Priority List? Does your sales team notoriously lose to “no budget”? Or does it frustrate you to lose profitable deals to the client’s internal projects?
Use my knowledge! Get a free MEDDICC consultation worth 200 EUR. We will analyze your funnel, and I will show you how to position Value to win against a hundred other initiatives and close the biggest B2B contracts. Book your spot now!
