Stop attacking your competition’s weaknesses. Their clients did not buy from them because of these weaknesses. They bought from them because of their strengths. If you are going to take market share from your competition you need a new Direct Strategy. This strategy comes from a marketing book entitled Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Reiss.

Here is how it works:

• Step 1: Determine the strength of your competitor’s position.
• Step 2: Find a weakness in the leader’s strength.
• Step 3: Reposition their strength into a weakness.
• Step 4: Launch your attack there, on a narrow a front as possible.
• Step 5: Attack major weaknesses.
• Step 6: Make major weaknesses your strength.

The strategy to attack the competitor’s strength may seem to fly in the face of business logic. First keep in mind that you won’t take a significant numbers of clients away from your competitors by always attacking their weaknesses. Why? Because clients didn’t buy from your competitor because of their weaknesses; they bought based on their strengths. Finding the “weakness in their strength” will provide you with your advantage over your competition, but it will also make you very attractive to the client.

Here are a couple of examples of how this has worked:

Example #1

A real easy way to explain this is to see how Scope used this to take market share away from Listerine. For years Listerine dominated the mouthwash market. Their strength: Listerine mouthwash kills germs. (Step 1) Scope found the weakness in the strength (Step 2), and repositioned that strength into a weakness (Step 3). Then they attacked on the narrowest front possible (Step 4). Scope attacked Listerine with an advertising campaign; “If you are tired of medicine breath, try Scope”. They repositioned Listerine’s strength into a weakness. It was a tremendous marketing success. For years competitors tried to take market share form Listerine and failed. Only when Listerine’s strength became a weakness did they lose market share.

Example #2

When F. W. Woolworth opened his first store, an established retailer across the street immediately responded to Woolworth’s grand opening by hanging a sign on his store, “Doing business in the same spot for over fifty years.” The next day Woolworth responded with a sign on his new store, “Established a week ago, no old stock.” What a great example of repositioning a competitor’s strength into a weakness.

If you want to take market share from your competition learn how to reposition their strength into a weakness. It may take some work but it will be worth it.

A sales manger can motivate and inspire salespeople in three ways. Proper compensation plans, conducting effective sales and training meetings and helping salespeople set higher goals and objectives.

Salespeople are motivated by ambition, the need for recognition and of course compensation. To prompt salespeople to higher levels of performance it is necessary to design an effective compensations plan. An effective compensation plan is one that is going to help both the sales person and the company achieve their goals.

Companies must incentivize the behavior and results they want. The comp plan should emphasize the desired company outcome. Be it new clients, retention of clients, new product sales or gross profits. Whatever the compensation plan is it needs to be easily understood by the sales person. It should be so easily understood that the sales person could figure it out in their head.

Sales meetings provide an excellent opportunity for motivating, training and inspiring salespeople. Unfortunately, most sales meeting fall short on this. Many times the sales meeting becomes a forum for the manager to rant and rave about lagging sales, lack of activity or administrative policies and details.

Because of the social nature of most sales people sales meeting should be fun, educational and inspirational. It is also a place to publicly praise the sales team for anything positive. Sales people get beat up constantly so use this time to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. The sales people should leave the sales meeting high as a kite not as low as a snake’s belly. Most managers fail miserably in this role.

Training prepares the sales person to maximize every customer encounter. A methodical selling process incorporates specific selling techniques that are custom-tailored for each buyer they interact with.

Through proper training, salespeople better understand their customer’s wants and needs. They’re also better equipped to cope with potential difficulties with the company’ products and services.

Well-trained sales people recognize genuine selling opportunities more readily than their untrained counterparts.

An effective training program brings new staff up to speed more quickly than when sales reps are forced to learn on their own, As a result frustrations are minimized and people are less inclined to go elsewhere.

The third part of motivation is goal setting. The manager’s role is to help sales people become more focused on specific, achievable personal goals that are aligned with the company’s goals. This requires spending time one-on-one with the sales people to help them enlarge the mental picture they have of themselves and what they can achieve. Some examples of goals might include: sales and gross profits for the year, obtaining more business from existing clients, acquiring new clients, retention of existing clients, etc.

High performance starts with clear unambiguous goals. They must define what success means to the individual and to the company.

If you have to ask the question, you are headed down the wrong track. If you give away your knowledge in a written proposal before the prospect has committed to give you a yes or no decision, you are setting yourself up to lose. Failure to do this will almost certainly produce an “I want to think it over” response from the prospect. At that point you have just been “rolled” and have become victim to Free Consulting. After all, when the prospect has all of your information why do they need you?

To avoid this what should you do? Only deal with prospects with which you can quickly develop a relationship of mutual trust and respect. These are people who need, want, and can afford your services and are willing to buy from you. When there is mutual trust and respect, the prospect will share information, and make commitments to do business with you if you can meet his or her conditions of satisfaction.

These conditions are agreed upon before any work is done or any analysis or proposal is generated. Before any proposal is generated the prospect must decide that you are the person they want to work with. Instead of closing at the end of the proposal process you are, in effect, closing up front. Before the prospect buys your product or service they must first buy you. As you work with the prospect to mutually decide on the solution to their problems and the costs associated with the solution, the proposal will verbally evolve by mutual agreement.

Prospects with whom you have a relationship of mutual trust and respect will be honest about this process. Prospects who refuse to be honest and try to make you jump thru hoops, like some trained animal, simply are not worth the effort. The best thing you can do when you encounter them is to disqualify them quickly and move on to prospects that will be real. This is not easy or natural. It requires a lot of courage and training to do this consistently.

According to Joseph E. LeDoux, Ph.D., a world-renowned neuroscientist at New York University, trust is a social emotion. It is the ability to put yourself in the mind of another and predict what they are thinking or what they will do. Psychologists call this the “theory of mind.”

To provoke trust, a sales person has to be able to put himself in the mind of the prospect and then perform to the expectation of the prospect. The more “predictable” a salesperson performs to the prospect’s expectation the better the prospect feels. Therefore, a sales person who doesn’t startle prospects with unexpected behaviors will do better and sell more.

How good are you at reading prospects and responding to what they need and expect?