Effectively Communicate Your Company’s Differentiation
At some point at your sales process, you will need to explain why the buyer should buy from you rather than others. This is an utterly important question because nowadays buyers can freely do their own research and are almost guaranteed to find your competitors by a quick Google search.
Differentiation is the heart of strategy and is the reason why many companies can co-exist in the same industry. There are no two identical companies in the world. Period.
When two companies offer similar products, the differentiator normally falls on to the price. Pricing is one of the most powerful differentiators. However, not all companies can win by offering the lowest price. Theoretically, only one company can offer the lowest price of all.
For that reason, you are statistically more likely to work for a company that is not the cost-leader in the industry, so it’s very important to understand how you can most effectively communicate your product’s differentiation to convince the buyer and justify a premium you should reasonably charge.
The challenge that many salespeople have with communicating how they are different from others is that their differentiators all sound the same. For example, I used to work in the industry of using artificial intelligence to design medicines. At this moment of writing, there are probably more than 500 companies in that industry and growing. The vast majority of these companies will claim that they have developed a proprietary AI platform that is proven to design molecules with a higher success rate than their competitors. You know that all of them cannot be true at the same time.
So what can you do to differentiate yourself from competitors? There are three steps to deliver your differentiation:
Use discovery questions to understand customer’s pain points and goals;
With their goals in mind, decide if your unique values are relevant to their goals;
If yes, communicate with confidence that these unique values are exclusive to your company and cannot be found anywhere else.
It’s very important to first understand your buyer's needs. We have written a few blog posts on how to ask good discovery questions. You should not pitch your unique values directly without understanding what your customer’s problems are, because:
it will make you sound like a peddler rather than a consultant that can be trusted;
if those values are truly unique, you will run out of them very soon.
You should come to a sales call with a lot of research but little assumption about your buyer. I cannot emphasize it more that you should understand your customer needs first before pitching. Assuming that we know our customer’s needs is a mistake we all have made in sales. We all overestimate how much we know about our customers.
Once you now understand your buyer’s needs and also know that some of your company’s unique offerings can help them achieve their goals. Then, you can start to apply sales tactics to moving the deal forward. For example, we talked about how one can ask powerful comparable questions between past problems and future success. By painting a picture of what the client's future could look like if he chose to work with you, comparing the past and future states increases the likelihood that he will choose to do so. By using comparable questions, you can also put your unique solution and a generic solution from a competitor side by side to let your buyer reach their own buying conclusion, which hopefully is to buy from you.
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