How to Get the Competition Fired, Without Saying Anything Bad About Them

I’ve been a sales guy for 28 years. My first sales job was selling vacuum cleaners. It was very hard because to me $320 for a vacuum was a lot of money (about what I made a month back then). Secondly, it seemed like I was selling something that most people already had and didn’t really want another one.

I tried other sales jobs. I figured out quickly I needed sales training. I went to numerous courses offered to the public. I liked one course very much because it was different. Instead of selling feature/benefit, it was focused on finding pain. It taught upfront contracts with prospects, “promise me you’ll say yes if this makes sense, no if it doesn’t. Also promise me you won’t say probably, maybe or I want to think it over. Yes means yes, no means no … nothing in between.”

They taught us to stop having empathy for people wanting to procrastinate. Problem was that most of us salespeople have a lot of empathy. We want to be loved by our buyers, so it’s difficult to hold the prospect accountable. Plus it’s a little scary, you might offend someone.

A lot of the sales training relied on building a relationship and using your experience to guide you in asking great questions.

The problem was that too many of us sellers didn’t have the experience to dig in and find the prospect’s pain. Not only that, it was amazing how many prospects would grant an appointment, but when I got there and started asking questions, everything was fine. Service was fine. Coverage/product was fine. No claims issues. The only thing that concerned them too often was price. “Looking to save money where we can,” was the common buyer tactic.

Not only was this true for me, it was true for many of my clients when I began a sales consulting practice. The salespeople I worked with who were actively out prospecting ran into this often. As a sales coach, I was incredibly frustrated. Their way didn’t work predictably and my way wasn’t working any better.

Back up 30 years
As a kid, I was always asking my dad questions like, “What makes water boil? What’s the difference between gas and diesel?”

I was also industrious about getting things organized to make things easy to find. My first real job had a big fire safe with a high ceiling. As a new employee working in a large distribution warehouse, it seemed that every time I’d ask for something, they’d say go look in the safe. I finally talked my boss into letting me clean it out. I found stuff that was 30 years old that I ended up throwing away. I got that organized, then I built a display so when customers walked through the door, they could easily see samples of everything we manufactured. We wasted a lot less time looking for things and we sold a lot more products due to organization and hands-on presentation.

Putting it all together
I had developed belief that making selling easier and more productive could be figured out. I had over 3,500 hours of coaching sales people at that time and was curious and very capable of organizing things and putting structure to them, so I started using that skill in a more innovative way.

Over a period of time (three or four years), all of these elements came together as a program that was the first and only selling process that enabled sales people to “Drive a Wedge between their Prospect and the Incumbent.” In other words, we taught sales people “How to Get the Competition Fired—Without Saying Anything Bad About Them.”

It seems so obvious in hindsight, but 10 years ago when this started to take shape, the resistance was wild. Every other sales person I taught resisted the concept. The biggest reason why is fairly simple. They had been taught to build relationships, never to bust them.

Think about the gurus they learned from. Go back to the industrial age. Every sales book you put your hands on has as its primary focus, relationship building. Get the prospect to like you. Ask probing questions to find a need and then present your solution. The final step, close the deal.

The problem was fairly obvious. The prospect generally wanted to think it over. What the prospect really did was call the incumbent source, tell them that they were shopping and found a better price. The incumbent would come see their client and after a little negotiation, match the competing price and kept the business.

A few days later the competing salesperson would call the prospect and the prospect would tell them how much they appreciated the new ideas. But, there just wasn’t enough difference to justify making a change.

A whole lot of salespeople learned to live with this way of life. They would often criticize management for not having better carriers to represent with broader coverage at a cheaper price. That was their paradigm.

When my selling process came along, it was met with resistance simply because it put a lot of the responsibility back on the salesperson, and not the company. If someone told you that you were overweight, wouldn’t it be easier to blame it on genetics or your spouse, anything but yourself?

How the process works
“How to Get Your Competition Fired,” without saying anything bad about them, is a logical process. That means it can be replicated over and over again. Not just with newer sales people but also with veterans.

Let’s start from the beginning. You must have an appointment set up with a target prospect. Let’s make the assumption that your prospect has an incumbent agent and the relationship is at least comfortable.

The conceptual shift in your thinking will start with this; you must accept that the competition has to be fired for you to be hired. How do you do this?

It starts with having a discernable, articulatable differentiation. You can create, develop or uncover your differentiation with a three-step process. From there, you need to develop a style of questioning that acknowledges three rules: 1) Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. There is only room for one of you. 2) The easiest way to get someone defensive is to talk negatively about a decision they’ve made. Attack the competition and you’ll get roasted. 3) Nothing is either good or bad except by comparison. Until your prospect can clearly see the difference, you’re dead.

You must get the prospect to see that they are being underserved, abused and neglected by the incumbent resource, without saying it. When you get the prospect to understand that they are being underserved, you also get the benefit of your prospect seeing the great work you do without having to tell them.

Winners and losers
Someone has to lose for you to win.

You can’t talk bad about your competition or your prospect will get defensive.

Differentiation has to be so clear the prospect can easily understand it and compare it to their existing service.

Your prospect must feel they are getting abused, neglected or underserved and blame that on the incumbent or you run a risk of getting rolled or used.

The next big step is based on the rule that the best idea anyone every heard was the one they thought of themselves.

All too often, it’s easy for salespeople to get excited when we find a need and start telling the prospect all the great things we can do for them. Here’s the problem … it’s not the prospect’s idea. The more salespeople tell them what we can do, the more they feel like they are being “sold.” The more they feel like they are being sold, the more they shut down, withdraw and reduce free flowing communications. That’s a losing strategy.

Learn how to get the prospect talking about what they want and keep them talking. You already know the questions to ask, just learn a new way to use them, with purpose and understanding. When all is said and done, there will be only two people that know what your prospect really wants … you and them. That too is a significant competitive advantage. I can guarantee that the incumbent does not really know what their client wants and in most cases, does not really care.

The last and equally important step is to find out if your prospect can fire the competition. If not, you don’t really have a prospect.

Have you ever been to a dentist and had a cavity ground and filled? If so, the dentist probably told you what was going to happen before he did it, just so you’d be ready and wouldn’t flinch or over-react. In selling, you’ll learn how to use the same process to “rehearse” your prospect through what the incumbent is going to do when they find out they are about to lose the account. Through this process, you’ll learn if your prospect can handle the pain of telling the incumbent that it’s over. If you get this far, you just raised your closing ratio to somewhere between 50 percent and 85 percent.

Randy Schwantz is the founder and CEO of Dallas-based The Wedge Group. He has written four books, including “How to Get Your Competition Fired: Without Saying Anything Bad About Them.” www.thewedge.net