A Different Take on Sales Enablement

What if we told you that the best way to beat your competition was to use their words against them?

Now, what if we told you that you absolutely should use the exact language your competition points out as your weaknesses, against them?

When your prospects or customers bring up your competition, the single best way to handle those objections and questions is to include your competition in your response.

Now you might think this is intuitive, but it’s not. It’s actually hard and training your team to do this at scale. And even more so nearly impossible without a real-time call coaching software solution. This will make the sales enablement in competitive situations effortless.

We want to throw in a caveat, in order for this tactic to work you absolutely must know a couple of things:

1. When your company’s name comes up on a call, how do your competitors talk about your company?
2. From a product perspective, what areas are yours lacking in? Part two to this, how are you flipping the script and turning that weakness into a positive? What’s your story about why it’s built that way?
   *Bonus points if you can throw in some Challenger Sale methodology and make this seem like an intentional product decision based on market knowledge

Trick #1

This knowledge might not be easy to come by so your organization needs to be a bit creative in how to gather this. Start by maybe diving into a recent competitive win you just had against a certain competitor.

Is your newly won customer willing to share with you how your competition talked about your company in the sales process?

Are they willing to share with you what features they called out as superior to yours?

Be sure to have your conversational intelligence software set up to record these responses. They will be gold later down the road.

Trick #2

A second trick you can use is to dive into things like G2 reviews, Forrester reports, Gartner reports, or product feature pages.

What you are looking for here are things specifically you know your product doesn’t have, but your competitors do. Chances are, these will be the things your competition touts as superior aspects of their company. It may seem counter-intuitive but as part of your sales enablement efforts do a SWOT analysis on the market. Understanding your competitors is something you will never regret doing.

I have the sales intel, now what?

The good news is because your company is deploying (or considering deploying) real-time call coaching software, the framework for building out these competitive battlecards is already in place. If not, then maybe these need to be built in Google Docs. Or maybe whatever Sales Enablement solution your team has chosen to categorize your battlecards. Now, start putting the pieces together.

I am going to use an example we use here at Abstrakt anytime one of those reactive conversational intelligence solutions comes up in a conversation.

Let’s see how this plays out for us:

Prospect: “How would you say you compete against Gong or Chorus?”

Abstrakt Sales Rep: “That’s a great question, have you asked them the same question about us?”

Prospect: “Yep, sure have” (doesn’t really matter if they say yes, or no)

Abstrakt Sales Rep: “Perfect! When you asked them how they compete against Abstrakt they probably said something like ‘they are still very new, their technology is unproven.’ Or ‘reps really aren’t going to like real-time prompts on their screen.’ Or maybe something like ‘Our insights and analytics are far superior, we can provide insights into your deals that they cannot.’ Do any of those sound familiar to you?

Prospect: “Actually, you took the first two points directly from their mouth.”

Abstrakt Sales Rep: “We have heard that before, and candidly they are not wrong. We are still new to the market, Gong has been in business for eight years. Their sales training technology has had time to mature. What that means though is that we are able to be agile with our product development, implementing customer feedback in days or weeks. Would you rather work with a vendor who takes months to drive change or can make a product change overnight?”

Prospect: “Well, obviously with a vendor that can fix things or make improvements quickly. We don’t have time to wait for improvements.”

Abstrakt Sales Rep (*purposefully ignoring the previous response from the prospect): “I don’t want to forget about the second point, prompts on reps screens. Do you think your team would rather be helped in the moment or wait until after they lose an opportunity to receive help?”

Prospect: “Obviously they don’t want to lose any opportunity so the more help the better. I can’t be on every call.”

Abstrakt Sales Rep: “If you recall, sales representatives were hesitant to adopt call recording and conversational intelligence solutions eight years ago, and now they are mainstream. Everyone fears change until they realize that sometimes change results in more change in their pocket.”

Breaking It Down

Let’s take a moment and dissect all the small things that add up here in this dialogue.

What was accomplished by taking this approach to talking about competitors?

1. Trust was established in two specific ways. The sales rep had knowledge about their competition and did not once speak poorly about the competition.
2. The sales rep validated the language used by the competition, which caused a pattern interrupt.
3. The questions used were specifically tailored to elicit a pro-Abstrakt response and validation that the competitor’s viewpoint was incorrect using the prospect’s words.
4. The sales rep never once got happy ears, because they weren’t worried about taking notes. They were able to address multiple points of perceived concern.

Ultimately it does not matter if your company is in its early stage and competing against established players with far superior features, more money, and more brand recognition.

It is your responsibility to use your perceived strengths against them.

Flip the script, build out the appropriate recommended responses in your real-time call coaching software and let it rip!