Sales Laundry

Q&A’s are excerpts of questions I have answered as part of Sales Laundry or other forums that I am apart of. If there is a relevant sales message for the masses I post it here to share, gather feedback and discuss.

Q:  How do I convince a prospective customer to switch from using a competitors product to using mine?  He likes my product but is content with the product he is using.

A:  There has to be a compelling reason to get them to switch.  If there is no compelling reason, you are probably better off spending your time on better prospects.

With that said, here are a few strategies to try and help you find that differentiator.

Strategy 1: The laziest solution is to cut your price to the point you still make money but have undercut the incumbent significantly enough to convince his customers to move.  This, of course, will eventually be followed up by someone else undercutting you.

Strategy 2: Analyze the prospective customer’s product, learn it, and look for significant feature/function/benefit advantages your product provides to justify the change.

Strategy 3: Analyze the competitors business looking for weaknesses that you can exploit to facilitate a change.  Better yet, just be better than your competition at every turn.  Better still, look past your competitor and give your customers more than what than they want, give them what they dream of and let them do your selling for you.

Strategy 4: Help the prospective customer so they can help you.  Per Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone, you could try a strategy of helping the prospective customers solve some of their personal/business problems, if you can identify them, with contacts from your network of people.  Providing legitimate answers to their problems without looking for direct compensation might give the prospective customer just the compelling reason they need to switch.

Strategy 5: Look for a way to change how the game is played, like what Amazon did to Barnes & Noble/Borders; Netflix is doing to Blockbuster, what Napster/iTunes did to CD sales for the record labels, etc.  A good book on this topic would be Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

Strategy 6: Tie your product to something bigger that makes switching to you a more compelling proposition.  Kellogg’s cereals tied Mini-Wheats to bigger issue of improving education of our children; Microsoft has tied themselves to Jack Welch of GE fame and a video interaction series to help teach businesses executives, or what Lance Armstrong did by tying his story, celebrity, athletic ability, and even the color yellow from the famous Tour De France winners jersey to his foundation and cancer research with a simple yellow Live Strong bracelet that became the “cool” thing to have and cause to support.

Strategy 7: Bundle your product with a product or service that is compelling to your prospective customer that your competitor can’t offer.

Strategy 8: Be attentive to your prospective customer and take care of them and keep an eye out for an opportunity to sweep in when your competitor ignores their customer or makes a major misstep.

Strategy 9: While not a full strategy, per se, find the leaders or first movers in the industry of the prospective customers you want to reach and focus your efforts on winning one or all of them.  Getting the respected thought leaders of any group using your product will make future sales easier as their followers will be more easily convinced.

Where do you find these thought leaders?

Here is a hint:  They are often the people quoted in the Business Journal, the newspaper or the trade magazines on the hot industry topics of the day.

Good luck.  It can be a very daunting task to get a happy customer to change from a vendor/product that is a known quantity to a vendor/product that is an unknown quantity, even if it is a significantly better product.  However if they are willing to take that jump with you, then they were probably not that happy to begin with.