Separate Yourself From the Competition

by Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja

Buying is an exercise in decision–making. Some buying decisions are made impulsively and almost unconsciously; others are made after long and careful consideration of all the variables. But all decisions to buy—that is, all logical decisions—are ultimately the end result of a mental selection process by which the buyer converges on a "best" option. Buyers can perform that selection process in one of two ways. They can make the selection at random—by throwing dice, drawing straws or just guessing. Or they can make the selection by differentiating—by acting on a perceived distinction between one option and all the others.

Of these two ways of deciding, differentiating is by far the more "natural" one because the ability to sort and select is one of the things that makes us rational. Nobody makes a decision—especially a potentially costly buying decision—by random choice unless he can see no difference in the available options. Whenever possible, people decide by differentiating.

Think back to the last major purchase you made yourself—your car, an insurance policy, a messaging system. Think about how you came to buy that particular car or policy or messaging system from the particular seller at that particular time. Chances are you didn't throw darts at the Yellow Pages. If you're like most informed buyers, you did some comparison shopping first. You checked out a few car dealers, you sounded out friends and business associates about their experiences with different insurance companies, you asked for information from several telecommunications providers—all of this as a way of seeking out a distinctive feature or capability so that you could make a wise decision. That's typical of intelligent buying. And it's precisely the kind of decision–making you want to help your customers perform; the fundamental purpose of giving your customers information should always be to help them see a distinction.

The reason it's critical to provide this kind of help is that if you don't help your customers see a distinction, they will create one of their own—one that may not work in your favor.

Let's suppose you're in the carpeting business, and you've been given an opportunity to bid on a subcontract for a new office building. You're one of three carpet vendors being considered for the job—not the biggest or most prestigious of the three, but still one of the chief contenders. Let's suppose further that because you've already done the necessary groundwork in determining what the customer is looking for, you're confident your company can do the job: the carpet your company can install will meet the design specifications. It's time now to link the customer's expectations to your particular product line by giving him product and service information that he must have in order to make a decision. There are three basic ways you could go about this.

First, you could lay out your product specs and service capabilities exclusively on their own merits and assume that their excellence will automatically incline the customer in your favor. In other words, you could simply ignore the competition, tell your story as fully as possible, and let the buyer decide. This is what we call "letting the buyer do the sorting," or "buyer differentiation." It's a common, and deadly, approach.

Second, you could size up the capabilities of the competition and try to convince the customer that you can do everything they can do—that your carpet installation is as good as anyone else's in the business. This is what we call the "me too" or "We're just as good as Microsoft" approach. Like the approach that ignores the competition, it asks the buyer to do his or her own sorting. Faced with three "identical" vendors in this kind of scenario, which one is the buyer going to select? Unless he loves to spend money, it's going to be the cheapest. That works in your favor only if you're consistently the low bidder.

Third, you could help the buyer with the sorting, by emphasizing something that is different about you—and that connects directly to his or her expectations. Not what's "good" or "just as good" as somebody else, but what is in fact unique to your company and its capabilities. Maybe it's a quarterly cleaning program that nobody else can match, or a recently–developed stain resistant formula, or the widest available color selection. Whatever it is, the thing that's significantly different about you is what we call a possible Unique Strength. As we'll explain in a separate column, a differentiator is only really a strength when the customer considers it to be of importance. For now, we'll just say that in giving your customers information, it's only by emphasizing the Unique Strengths of your proposed solution that you can make differentiation work in your favor.

We realize that, strictly speaking, unique means "one of a kind." But we use the word more flexibly than Webster does. In selling, there can be, and often is, such a thing as "relative uniqueness," where a company is able to offer a product or service or package that is different to a significant degree from what everybody else is offering. It's reasonable to speak of such a degree of difference as a Unique Strength, too.

To sum up, buying is an exercise in decision–making, and people make decisions, whenever possible, by differentiating. In order to do that intelligently, they need to perceive a distinction. If they don't, they will create one of their own and it might not work in your favor. Your fundamental task in giving information is to highlight those areas where you are different—your Unique Strengths.

Adapted from The New Conceptual Selling Stephen E. Heiman, Diane Sanchez with Tad Tuleja © 1999 by Miller Heiman, Inc., All rights reserved with permission of Warner Books. Inc.