Competitor-Free Competition

by Graham Denton

Most of us have an adversarial view of competition. Our chief competitors, we suppose, are other salespeople-specifically, those who sell for other firms in our industry. For the Chevy salesman, the competition is Ford; for the MCI rep, it's AT&T. We spend much of our competitive energy trying to ace out these opposite numbers, believing that their success is, ipso facto, our failure.

That's shortsighted. Not because your opposite numbers can't be serious threats to your success. Of course they can be. But they are only the most visible examples of your competition, and if you focus chiefly on them, you are probably going to overlook a type of "competitor-free" competition that can be just as hazardous to your selling health.

What do I mean by "competitor-free competition"? Stephen Heiman, Diane Sanchez, and Tad Tuleja answer that question in The New Strategic Selling by pragmatically expanding the definition of competition. What you should see as your competition, they say, isn't just the guy who's trying to sell more widgets than you do to a common prospect, but any alternative to the solutions you can offer that prospect. The other widget guy is one such alternative, sure, but only one. If you doubt that, consider the following scenarios.

(a) The prospect decides to adopt an internal solution rather than hiring one out - it decides, in other words, to make its own widgets.

(b) The prospect decides to spend the budget you hoped would be allocated to your widgets on something else entirely. "We don't need widgets now; we need a new phone system."

(c) The prospect cuts back on the budget entirely, deciding that, at this point, it's best to do nothing.

In none of these scenarios is the other widget guy even a consideration, much less a competitor. But in each case isn't the probability of your success still being threatened? You bet it is. Even without a direct competitor, you could still lose the sale to (a) internal widgets, (b) a phone installation, or (c) a "Let's sit tight" attitude.

The issue here is budget, and what the customer does with it. Every time you ask someone to make a purchase, you're asking him to commit negotiable funds. You're saying, in effect, "I believe that the proposal I'm offering you is a better use of your discretionary income than any other use to which you may be considering putting it." If you don't think that this is what you're saying, just remember how much fun it is to sell when budgets are tight. Even the best of us sometimes forget this essential fact, and thus overlook relatively invisible - but immensely powerful - sources of competition.

Competitor-free competition kills "sure things" every day. That's why, when you're sizing up "the competition," you must be sure that you've considered all the alternatives-and have convinced the customer that yours is the best of the lot. If you don't do that, you can find yourself outflanked by your own inattention.