Bill Gager

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In today’s marketplace, developing and maintaining an objective advantage over the competition can seem challenging. Why?– Customers tend to perceive competitive products and services as basically the same. Unless you have a product or feature that is obviously and significantly better than your competition, the customer will view you just like everyone else in your industry. Add to this the fact that a prospective customer can find a tremendous amount of information about you and your competition on the Internet. This allows the prospect to develop an opinion before ever speaking with a salesperson. In the majority of cases, the human mind categorizes competitive products/services in terms of their similarity and familiarity. It often sounds like this: “Oh yeah, this is just like that.”

Unless you have a distinct advantage customers are aware of and care about, you may wish to consider creating a competitive advantage that goes beyond your product or service – a value added advantage. Demonstrating your value added competitive advantage during the sales process can be difficult. Traditionally, the emphasis of competitive advantage has been excellent service. The only way for a prospect to experience your service is to actually become a customer. To get a prospect to become a customer, you have to be able to positively differentiate your company’s service from the competition during the sales process. Therefore, to maximize your sales, your revenue, and your profit potential, consider turning your sales process into your competitive advantage. In other words, the way you sell can be executed in such a way that the prospect believes you are positively different from the competition.

Companies who have turned their sales process into a competitive advantage leverage every point of contact opportunity with prospects and customers. Point of contact opportunities occur any time a representative of your company comes in contact with a prospect or customer. The way in which the representative interacts with the prospect or customer is going to form the strongest opinion of you and your organization. To paraphrase Maya Angelou: Prospects may not remember what you say. Prospects may not remember what you do. Prospects always remember how you make them feel. Essentially, it all comes down to how the prospect or customer feels after an interaction with you or a representative of your company. If your sales process leaves your prospect or customer feeling better with you than anyone else, you will have a meaningful advantage. To accomplish this, consider the following:

1. Make the Prospect/Customer Feel You Understand Their Critical Issues. 

At every point of contact, you must make your prospect or customer feel listened to and understood. But, all organizations strive for that. Therefor, the usual techniques have lost their impact. Almost every sales person has been taught to ask open-ended questions and use active listening techniques, such as summarizing the customer’s question or concern. As a result, when you talk to a salesperson, you can usually hear him or her using the techniques on you. But, when everyone is doing it, there’s no competitive advantage.

Consider going beyond the usual techniques to effectively rise above the competition. Rather than asking the same old surface questions and parroting back answers, ask questions to awaken a new perspective in the mind of your prospect or customer. Helping your prospects and customers see their issues in new ways makes you stand out. When your customers and prospects feel you truly understand their issues and challenges, they will see more value in your products and services.

2. Identify Their Unseen Problems

Beyond dealing with the obvious needs, help customers and prospects identify potential problems they didn’t even realize they had. You will put yourself light-years ahead of the competition. Most companies approach their prospects and customers with a fly-by assessment of their current needs. They miss the underlying problems that the prospect doesn’t know how to solve or doesn’t realize exist. Only about one in ten prospects in any industry, at any given time, has a felt need for your product or service. The key to maximizing your results is to leverage the other 90%! You can do this by identifying hidden opportunities.

The key to identifying your customers’ and prospects’ unseen issues is to do more development work. Take your point of contact opportunities to the next level and look for symptoms your prospects and customers experience, but can’t find the cause. If you can engage your prospects and customers at that level, you jump ahead of the competition. The key is to ask the right questions to gain deeper insights into the hidden issues. Help the customer or prospect to realize how those issues impact their business and life.

3. Demonstrate Your Added Value

Every time someone from your organization interacts with a prospect or customer, you want the prospect or customer to believe they received some value from the experience. Consider doing whatever you can to establish yourself as a thought leader. Demonstrate a deeper understanding of your prospects’ and customers’ critical issues. Bring new ideas and information that specifically pertain to those issues.

For example, if you’re a salesperson, make sure that every time you meet with a customer or prospect, bring some information your prospect or customer will find helpful. Strive to demonstrate your value added by helping your prospects and customers gain new insights into the issues that challenge them in their business.

4. Be Consistent in Your Customer and Prospect Contact

When you don’t establish consistent positive contact with your customers and prospects, you lose opportunities to create and maintain your competitive advantage. Many salespeople do everything right to sign a new customer. They follow-up regularly, address concerns, and answer all the questions. But, once the sale is made, they don’t maintain contact and virtually drop off the planet. This inconsistency is a common occurrence, both on the prospecting and customer service sides of sales. If you maintain consistent, value-added contact, that in itself creates a competitive advantage. You’re doing something few others do.

In the prospecting phase, the value-added might come from a different spin on your approach. For example, instead of calling a prospect and saying, “I’d like to talk with you about the services I offer,” you can say, “I’d like to talk to you about the ways we’ve solved the issues businesses like yours face.” Then be as specific as possible with the issues they are likely facing.

In the customer service phase, a way to add value is to meet with customers on a regular basis to check in and explore new challenges you may be able to help with or send an article you saw on trends in their industry, or by recommending a book they may find useful. By using a consistent value-added approach, you establish yourself as being positively different.

5. Make All Of Your Resources Available To The Customer

Once you’ve done all the development work and you’ve brought someone in as a customer, consider continuing to offer added value. Many times companies focus solely on the prospecting phase and lose repeat business as a result. But after you make the initial sale, the more you can make available the full resources of your organization to the customer as a solution to their critical issues, the more valuable you are to the customer. Introduce customers to your full line of solutions and make additional information readily available. By presenting your full line of resources to your customers, they will continue to see the added value in your company.

To maintain a meaningful competitive advantage, you must create a value-added perception by leveraging your points of contact. Remember, you have to do what your competition isn’t doing. People will only see you as positively different if they believe they get something they want from you that they can’t get anywhere else.

The steps above are important in selling to prospects, and equally important when you’re trying to expand your relationship with them. When you use these techniques to demonstrate your value added, you won’t have to lower your price to maintain your competitive advantage. Customers and prospects will be willing to pay more for your products and services because they’ll know you’re more valuable than everyone else in the market.

To see if Bill can help you to take more control over the future of your sales by turning your sales process into your competitive advantage click here.

Watch this short video to see how you may be able to be more in control of your future sales and profits:

About the Author

Bill Gager is a consultant, speaker, and coach. Bill works with some of the world’s top corporations to leverage the power of their potential to maximize their sales and profits.

For the first time, Bill is making his Sales Acceleration Solutions available to the small and medium sized business segment as well as Fortune 500 Corporations. Click here to contact Bill.

I was fifteen minutes early for my appointment. While sitting in the cavernous waiting area, I noticed two men, one older and one younger, emerge from the elevators. As they walked by, I heard the younger of the two say: “Well, you can lead a horse to water, but, you can’t make him drink.” To this, the older man replied: “Your job is not to make them drink; it’s to make them thirsty.” This is an old line; it’s also a good reminder.

Until I learned how our minds deal with change, I followed the commonly tread path of attempting to convince myself, and others, to change by focusing on the benefits of a change. I tried convincing people to drink whether or not they felt thirsty. While this can work, I find it works far less often— and, with a great deal more effort than necessary.

Years ago, I graduated college into one of the most dismal job markets in recent history. I worked for over two years as a bartender. I worked five nights a week until the wee hours of the morning. During the day, I lay on the couch, eating junk food. I gained a good deal of weight. I fell badly out of shape. One day, I was invited to play racquetball. I had an epiphany fifteen minutes into the first game. I was clutching the wall, gasping for breath, when it hit me— “I have to loose weight!” Before leaving the club that day, I bought a one-year membership. I was well on my way to health and fitness! Or… so I thought.

I spent the next year in a mental battle. At the time, I didn’t know the identity of my unseen foe. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was involved in a cold war with my subconscious. Foolish me, I thought we were on the same team! Each day, I’d wake up, determined to work out and eat right. I am by nurture a willful; some may say stubborn, person. I was determined to lose weight and get into shape. Yet, despite my willfulness, I went to bed most nights frustrated with myself for not working out— nor eating right. While my conscious self was determined to change, my subconscious was determined to keep me right where I was— in my comfort zone.

One of the key functions of our subconscious mind is to act as an Autopilot. The Autopilot’s mission is to keep us in our comfort zones. It accomplishes this by keeping our hearts beating, our lungs breathing, and controlling all of the automatic functions of our bodies. One of the most challenging of these automatic functions is our collection of habits. Our habits are made up of all the things we think, feel, and do throughout our day— without giving them a second thought. Are habits are an integral part of our comfort zone. There is research that indicates we spend upwards of 90% of our day operating on Autopilot.

In my case, my Autopilot was working diligently to keep me in my comfort zone— eating bad food, and lying on the couch. My Autopilot responded to my conscious intention of working out, and eating right as a threat to my comfort zone—a zone it is sworn to protect! My Autopilot waged war against this threat as if it was a microbe invading my blood stream. Our Autopilot perceives change as a threat. The more the perceived change impacts the comfort zone, the bigger the threat perceived by the Autopilot.

My Conscious Will and Subconscious Autopilot waged battle with each other— until one fateful day. It was a beautiful, late spring, afternoon. My Dad and I were working on my VW Bug. All of a sudden, my Dad threw down his wrench and stormed into the house without a word. I knew something was wrong; he never acted in this manner. A few minutes later, my Mother called me into the house. I walked into the bathroom. I found my Dad sitting on the edge of the tub clutching his chest while running a bath. He insisted he would be fine. After much convincing, I took him to the emergency room.

I was anxiously sitting in the emergency room waiting area when I got the news. My Dad— 58 years old, always in great shape, and never overweight, had a heart attack. In that moment my life changed. Prior to that moment, my desire to get into shape was a conscious concept—a mental thought. Sure, I had moments of feeling my poor condition at a deeper level—but, I wasn’t thirsty for the change. Now, I was dying of thirst!

From that day on, I began to make the changes necessary to truly get myself into shape. These changes have lasted 30 years. Sure, I may not be able to fit into a size 32 inch waist, nor run 10 miles like I could at my peak; but I have maintained a healthy weight and level of conditioning. In two weeks, I turn fifty-five. Fifty-five is an age that I never thought I’d reach as I sat in that waiting area all those years ago. It all came down to my becoming thirsty to make a change.

I’ve spent the last 15 years helping my clients influence change in others and themselves. In that time, I’ve come to believe in one inescapable truth: True change won’t occur until someone is truly thirsty for that change. Fortunately, change doesn’t need a heart attack to occur. I’ve found the following steps to be the key to awakening thirst:

Identify The Comfort Zone

Our comfort zone is the way things are now. It includes what we think, feel, and do on a regular basis. It includes our state of being, and the environment in which find ourselves. In my case, my comfort zone included eating too much junk food and lying on the couch all day.

Establish a Strong Emotional Connection to the Desire Zone

Our Desire Zone is the way we wish things would be. In my case, my Desire Zone was to be in good shape and to be at a comfortable weight. It was only when I formed a powerful emotional connection to my Desire Zone, by realizing the potential for a fatal heart attack, that I had the emotional connection necessary to truly change.

Position the Proposed Change as the Path to the Desire Zone

A few days after that moment in the hospital, I was at the gym. One of the personal trainers approached me and said: “I can help you get in shape faster.” That’s all I needed to hear. I hired him on the spot.

Establish How Not Making the Change Will Threaten the Comfort Zone

The most powerful realization I had that day in the hospital occurred when the Doctor told me: “Your Dad came through the attack remarkably well. If he had not been in such good physical condition, his heart attack could have been fatal.” In that moment, my Autopilot realized that getting into shape was no longer a threat to my comfort zone; it was crucial to my being able to stay in my comfort zone—Living!

Shrink the Change

There’s an old saying: “How do you eat an Elephant?—One bite at a time.” What is true for Elephants, is true for change. Rather than presenting, or thinking about the entire change, break the change into the smallest steps that make sense for that change.

One of my early goals was to be able to run a 5K race. When I started, I could barely run a half-mile without gasping for breath. I went from my half-mile to 5K, and ultimately 10 miles, by increasing my runs by small, incremental, distances. If the point at which I would turn around for home was a particular driveway, I’d increase my run to include the distance of the hedge that ran from that drive to the next yard. You’d be amazed at how quickly consistent small changes add up.

After making many mistakes throughout my life and career, I learned the best way to influence change in myself and others is to put my energy into helping all of us to realize that we are thirsty. A thirsty horse willingly drinks.