“Toughest competitor and the biggest competitor, the one that’s really the hardest to beat, is the decision to do nothing.” – Steve Weinberg in today’s Tip 1367
Who is your toughest and biggest competitor?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Steve Weinberg. Steve is an expert at building, guiding, and sustaining high-caliber sales teams, and creating exemplary standards in account management. He is also the author of Above Quota Performance. Here he is:
Steve Weinberg: When I ask salespeople who their biggest competitor is or their toughest competitor, I sometimes get a short list or even a long list of names of companies that they typically run into in the marketplace. And sometimes the salespeople get very emotional about this. They say, we see this darn competitor all the time and they’re very tough to beat.
But the salespeople are wrong. Toughest competitor and the biggest competitor, the one that’s really the hardest to beat, is the decision to do nothing or status quo or remain with the current solution.
There’s no inertia to change. The sale possibly has fallen into what I call the black hole on the fear of change.
And people do fear change. It’s very uncomfortable for them. It could require maybe additional training, additional resources, maybe more work on their part, and certainly more risk. And most people are very risk-averse.
In addition, there are seven reasons that I’ve determined for this to happen.
Number one is companies have reduced staff.
And a lot of times the buying team doesn’t want to take on the additional work that’s required by making a purchase or disrupting the current situation.
They don’t account for the cost of doing nothing. That’s always left out of the equation when someone decides to stay where they’re at.
Another possible reason is they may not be satisfied with any of the alternatives that were presented to them, yours as well as your competitors, the other competitors.
Or possibly the costs that were proposed to them exceeded the budget that they had envisioned for this project.
Also, there could have been a lack of an executive sponsor as well on this.
Or even possibly the salespeople really didn’t sell the value of going forward and making the change. So the result of this is a stalled sale, and those are really the toughest situation to change.
A lot of times, salespeople came to me and said to me, “Steve, can you call this person?” And I would ask them why. And they would say, “Well, they’ve been sitting on this proposal of mine for two or three months,” and that’s when I give them the bad news is it’s probably not going to change, unless you can come up with a really compelling reason why it’s in their best interest to make the change.
Scott Ingram: Check out Steve’s recently released Above Quota Performance Book. Of course, we’ve got the link for you at DailySales.Tips/1367. Go click over there and then be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!