Getting Beyond Goliath

by Graham Denton

What's the giant that you're facing now? The biggest threat to your sales survival? Your meanest competitor?

If you put questions like these to salespeople 100 years ago, chances are that, whatever their industries, they would name some ancient behemoth with a 90 percent market share - some dragon of the Gilded Age which, through muscle and guile, had come to dominate its industry. U. S. Steel, Standard Oil, or one of the big railroad companies. A century ago, these were the prototypes of the Goliath competitor. They controlled every step of the value chain from the first extraction of a natural resource to the final distribution of a finished product, becoming virtually unassailable due to vertical integration.

Going against competitors like these was a phenomenally difficult proposition, as the many casualties of the robber baron era quickly discovered. It wasn't only that the first movers into the great industrial fields - the Rockefellers and Carnegies - had closed off competitive openings with that strategy of verticality. They also had a competitive philosophy that allowed for no quarter. "I don't meet competition," J. P. Morgan is supposed to have said, "I crush it." That might sound like boasting, but it wasn't. As they say in Texas, "If you done it, it ain't bragging."

What's the relevance of this scenario to today's competition? Just this: In spite of everything that's changed in the past 100 years, this image of the monster monopolist is still the picture that many salespeople summon up when you say "The Competition." In their minds' eyes they spell it that way: capital T, capital C. And this creates a problem that is as serious as it is unnecessary. It encourages us to think of what we do as valiant dragon-slaying rather than what it actually is, which is the building of alliances.

I don't mean alliances merely between ourselves and our customers. That's important, sure, but it's only one element of an alliance-oriented attitude to selling that often involves linkages as well between suppliers and distributors and even our erstwhile competitors. As Business Week writer Neil Gross pointed out in his article "Leapfrogging a Few Links" (June 22, 1998), we are moving away from supply chains and toward supply webs, in which a company that is your competitor for one deal may be your VAR on another. Large firms may aim for total supply chain control, but today they seldom achieve it. Ad hoc and multiple alliances are now the norm, and this means that the model for integration is not vertical but nomadic.

This is not to downplay the importance of competing head to head, or to suggest, Pollyanna-style, that competition is dying. It's to point out that giant-fighting, the product of a vertically integrated economy, is no longer the appropriate metaphor for a nomadically integrated one. In a world of nomadic integration, it's the schmoozer, as much as the bruiser, who can deal with the giant.

In a nomadically integrated economy, head-to-head combat is only one strategy among many through which you can satisfy customer needs and thus ensure your own success. If you suppose that beating The Competition is the name of the game, you'll get lost in the flurry of the web and come out a loser. Fighting Goliath for a plum market may be a part of the picture. But in the long run it is the nimble negotiator - the person who can forge appropriate alliances, even with Goliath - who will come out ahead.