Defend or Attack? Approaches to Competitive Positioning
In this article, I’m introducing the concept of positivity selling, outside of value frameworks or sales processes - simply the act of looking at and selling the positive.
Negative Selling Consequences
When I purchase software I take keen observation of the vendor’s sales process, in part to be a better buying partner but also learn of different sales methodologies. When I come across negative sellers I feel the same aversion I have to reality TV where drama and gossip, not the quality of content, drive viewership. Here’s how I feel when a seller goes on an unprovoked attack of their competition or simply talks about ‘them’ more than his own product or company:
1) Attacking reveals weakness
If you start calling out your competitors and calling negative light to their product, team, or company I’m immediately thinking “Why are you being so defensive?” Since you’re going on the attack it may seem counterintuitive to be labeled defensive but why wouldn’t you focus on the benefits of your product, team, or company if you were the superior? Seems like you have something to prove, or hide?
2) The Apocryphal Twain
“Don’t argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” (ref) I don’t want mud-slingers in my office shitting over everyone else and then justifying a business case for the shiniest turd. I want the best solution to a problem or a means to execute my strategy. The person who starts a negative campaign won’t have a seat at the final table.
3) The first to speak loses
In negotiations, the first to speak is often at a disadvantage because now they must defend their position. When you prematurely throw FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) against a competitor it gives them a chance to respond, often with defensible facts and stronger counter-claims. They establish credibility, building their own champion base, and can move the conversation towards their strengths and away from yours. Imagine you want to highlight a competitor’s buggy v12 release but your own company has a significant customer turnover problem, and how you’d handle this retort:
“Yes, you’re correct that our version 12 product had some bugs. We worked with engineering to push out an overnight sprint, fixing all but one P3 ticket to everyone’s satisfaction! Our NPS score reflects this focus on continued improvement and customer support. Shall we talk about the investments we’ve made to have the lowest customer turnover in the industry and why companies continue to invest in us?”
And if you better be damn sure your FUD is accurate, timely, and relevant because you will instantly lose all credibility if it’s wrong.
“I’m not sure where you heard that but you can clearly see in our documentation we support v1.8 of XYZ. In fact this demo system is built on v1.8. Is your source reliable?”
4) Glass cannon
You’ve been so busy throwing FUD and landmines that you’ve forgotten to establish your own beachhead. Sales 101 is to establish value, build champions, establish your own credibility, and grow the relationship. Without that, you’re a glass cannon. Your champion has no defense. You shot your shot, it bounced back, and now you’re done.
Positive Selling Tactics
You’ve seen several examples in this article of spinning an attack into a positive selling opportunity. The tactics of positive selling are just that — you know your own strengths, you know your own weaknesses, you know your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, and you know where to play to win. Sun Tzu much?
“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill”
1) Lead with your strengths
Same as with people development, lead with your product or company’s strengths. Do you have a renowned engineering team that's the envy of Silicon Valley? Do you have a sales process that is focused on proving the highest ROI rather than estimating it in some calculation? Does your post-sales team continue to exhibit the highest adoption rates and customer satisfaction among newly onboarded software purchases? Highlight them! Present the rationale that your company took to take this hill. Back it up with facts and anecdotes (reference-able names if possible!) and take pride that customers have found value in a clearly superior feature or function.
“We are the only solution to baseline every metric — to count, measure, and score every transaction. This is important because we automatically profile and detect anomalies minutes or hours before an incident could occur, potentially saving millions of dollars in lost revenue. We’ve eliminated the need to have sub-second resolution in graphs and alerts because even with that resolution it still doesn’t prevent the outage, it just saves a few minutes from incident to detection.”*
*At the time, AppDynamics was the only vendor to highlight the importance of proactive detection and avoidance, a shift from legacy systems focusing on time-to-detect. While our competitors fought the concept of baselining for years, they soon adopted some level of baselining. AppDynamics had educated the market that baselining was here to stay.
List your strengths, assign a criticality to them for engineering to continually invest in, and calculate business ROI for each. This will help contextualize why your strengths (your differentiators, competitive advantage, value-oriented features) are worth more than those of your competition.
2) Bare-knuckle boxing (strength-for-strength)
Know how your strengths, independent of your competitors, but now compare them with your competition. Don’t bare-knuckle box against an opponent’s hardened zones. But if you hit it in the right way it’ll do damage. If they have a roughly equal NPS score, are they making the same investments in customer satisfaction as your company? Or if they have only just achieved a 96 from an average of 80 while you’ve been sitting in the 92–95 range for the last eight years… that’s something to show for consistency. Or maybe you have similar product offerings but you’ve been able to develop parity in less than two years while they’ve not released a new feature over the last five. Some people can’t sell parity… parity/time, parity/margins, parity + vision is a combination they most certainly can.
“The importance of baselining everything — and not just a few key transactions or defined metrics — is that IT outages are chaotic. It can be the smallest database connection pool that causes a catastrophic outage on your critical ‘Checkout’ service. If that connection pool is empty or the disk was thrashing hours before customers experience checkout errors, AppDynamics can detect these gremlins before even the first user is ever impacted. If you don’t count, measure, and score every metric you risk a major outage from the things you don’t know.”*
*Competitors adopted baselining, but could not support the millions of raw metrics and calculations, so they focused on just a few. Good enough to meet the baselining requirement from Gartner, but not enough to convince a customer they’ll capture every deviation. So we guided conversations into the ‘what if’ scenarios.
if Strength(A) = Strength(B),Strength(A) + Strength(A’) > Strength(B) + Weakness(B’)3) Have an objection-handling plan
No company is perfect in everything, and even if you do are the best of breed there will be gaps. Knowing these weaknesses and knowing where you’re not as strong as a competitor means you’ll know where they’ll hit. Time to reverse the script! There are a number of frameworks to handle objections or critical conversations — I won’t cover them here, but I highly suggest you look into them all.
Option A - Diminish the impact, pivot to strength, impress upon the value
We haven’t made an investment in Ping Identity SSO because we’ve made a major engineering investment to be the first and only FedRAMP compliant [vendor in our space]. We have several other SSO authentication methods that our federal customers have found sufficient, and they are immediately interested in FedRAMP status. One three-letter acronym in particular told us that they would drop any vendor contract if not FedRAMP certified by 2022. I’d like to explore how FedRAMP would affect you, being a Fed service provider.
Option B - Yield the fact, but emphasize the value
We are going to be roughly twice as expensive as the next vendor on this initial purchase, for good reason! Our rate of adoption is nearly twice that of anyone else (measured in people onboarded, onboarding time, daily active users) but more importantly our customers recognize ROI within 4mo as opposed to 12–18mo. In fact, for every dollar spent with us typically yields four dollars within 12mo time. So when the business review comes up you’ll be in the best position to be recognized for your investment.
if [WEAKNESS] < [STRENGTH],[weakness] + STRENGTH > [strength] + WEAKNESSOption C - Yield the fact, but diminish the value
Our UI wont match up to other tools with beautiful, complex widgets and advanced calculation and reporting — it was designed for basic operations. We’ve found the trend of data applications atop a core engine is rapidly rising and the need for a traditional user interface losing ground. In the next five years we predict the use of a ‘single pane of glass’ to become as antiquated as the monolithic three-tier architecture of past. We’re investing in API access and layers for data-application access controls for this reason.
Option D - Yield the fact, admit deference
They have the superior solution or feature and there’s no way around it. Admit it. Don’t fight fate. In the end, people respect humility and honesty. If this comes up time and time again and is impacting your ability to sell, your leadership and engineering need to be aware and remedy posthaste.
4) Position the sun behind you
Positioning the sun behind you on a battlefield is a way to gain a tactical advantage because the enemy will be squinting into the sun, and ideally up a hill (I recognize the hypocrisy using battlefield terminology in this article, but I already mentioned Sun Tzu so give me a break). You can position your campaign by aligning your biggest strengths with the business drivers of your prospect, defending yourself with champions, and rationalizing the business value of your solution. Frameworks such as MEDDIC and Three Whys, exist for this reason. Paint the vision of the future in such a bright, positive light that anyone competing against you will thrash against the sun itself.
Hint: All the above should be part of your sales playbook
Wrap it up
There’s no downfall to positive selling. Period. At least not one I can think of. You’re seen as an advocate, a credible industry source, and a trustworthy individual… all doing the best he or she can for you. Let’s close with a sales allegory…
A sales rep is talking to a difficult customer, one who doesn’t trust vendors. The customer says, “I don’t trust salespeople. All they do is try to sell me something.” The salesman, being a moral individual, responds,
“That’s true, I’m trying to sell you something. That’s my job and how I provide for my family. And doing your job is how you provide for yours. Therefor I’ll only sell you something if you benefit from it. If we trust each other we’ll both be very successful.”