Do this as part of your Sales Pitch!

22 Jun

(tell them about your competition)

Do you talk about your competitors to your potential customers or do you prefer to pretend that they don’t exist? If, like most companies, you like to present a world where you are the only company that can solve their particular problem, then you may be missing a trick.

Let me explain.

What is the main job someone buying software has?

If you’ve ever been tasked with buying software on behalf of a company, you’ll know that while “understanding the features of the product” is up there, what you really need to do is make sure you don’t buy the wrong thing.

And while, as the vendor of your software, you may think that the problem you are solving is one of the most important ones that any business might have, the person buying your software may disagree. She may have very little knowledge of anything to do with what you’re selling. She may not even be the one who has that problem herself and has been tasked to go and find something on behalf of her boss. Whatever the background, one thing you can be sure of is she doesn’t want to be the one that buys or even recommends something that ends up being a massive waste of time and money.

Discovery Calls and Wrong Assumptions

I remember in the early days of ScreenCloud we realised we needed an HR Tool. I’d never used one before and we didn’t have an HR person who had experience of something from a previous role. But it fell to me to find one.

So I did what anyone in my situation would do: went onto Google and typed in ‘best HR tools’. This gave me a shortlist. I kind of clicked around and found a couple that looked OK and people were saying nice things about them. So I apprehensively ‘booked a demo’ (aka - please sell to me for 30 minutes). This was, of course, the discovery call, where the vendor tries to ask a load of questions to discover what my problems were so they can the show me how their product solves them.

But wait, I hadn’t really given this much thought other than we probably needed something.

Vendor: “How do you manage on-boarding new staff currently?”
Me: “Errr, well we’re kind of new we don’t… err.”
Vendor: “Well, let me show you our onboarding workflow.”

Vendor: “Do you conduct exit interviews?”
Me: “Nobody’s left us yet”
Vendor: “Do you plan to?”
Me: “Errrr, yeah. Definitely going to be doing something like that. Yeah.”
Vendor: “Cool, this is how we assign exit interviews.”

All the time I’m thinking, ‘Is this what we need? Is this the right sort of thing, or is there something different that is better for us?’

“The Fear or Messing Up is Greater than the Fear of Missing Out”
- Matthew Dixon & Ted McKenna

The Sales Person’s role isn’t just to sell the features

In the example above, the sales person skipped that whole part about me not wanting to buy the wrong thing. To quote Matthew Dixon & Ted McKenna in their book, The Jolt Effect, I was way more worried about ‘Messing Up than Missing Out’.

If your prospect’s Fear of Messing Up is high, what will they choose? What is the safest thing to do? Answer: Nothing. Nobody is going to blame them for doing nothing and sticking with the status quo. There will be a million excuses: I haven’t got the time right now; I’m going to wait until so-and-so starts and get their take on it; let’s wait until the new year; I need to bed in my new team first; I’m going to ask our investors if they have a recommendation etc etc. In other words, I’m going to kick this down the road for the time being because I don’t want to do something I might later regret.

Anyone who has ever sold software or consultancy will know that exasperating feeling: they’ve told you they have a need, you’ve demonstrated that you can solve that need and yet they still won’t commit. WTF?

So, what is the answer?

Well, what would have been really, really helpful for me would be a clear explanation of what my choices were. To set the stage and as part of that, to explain the competitive landscape. In short, to help me get past that ‘do nothing’ option, which was still the most appealing at that point.

Imagine if the conversation had gone more along the lines of:

Vendor: “What we typically see is that companies start off by building their own processes using spreadsheets and templates.”
Me: “Yes that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

Vendor: “Cool. But as more people come on board and there are more people managing the tasks of recruitment, offers, contracts, onboarding, payroll, holidays, benefits, appraisals etc, that these systems start to buckle and so they start to look for tools such as ours that can manage everything under one roof.”
Me: “I guess that’s where we’re at right now”

Vendor: “So we see the HR Software landscape as being broken down into three broad categories: The first are more focused around recruitment and talent management, the second is HR management - which is where we fit, and the third is more around employee experience.”

So now I can start to get a sense of what I’m looking for which is HR Management. I’m already starting to feel calmer because I know I’m in the right ball park.

Vendor: “Within our space, there are several players: basic tools such as HRLite and SimpleHR which are really just glorified spreadsheets - they don’t give you any analytics or integrations. At the other end you have MegaHR, EnterpriseHR and HRInc. These give you a lot of extra functionality and workflows, require a professional services layer to tailor the solutions and are designed for multinational enterprises with tens of thousands of employees - they also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I can see how our company would fit into that description of the landscape: we don’t want the glorified spreadsheet and we don’t need the enterprise mega-bucks solution either.

Vendor: “Where we come in is for companies like yours who need to manage the employee lifecycle. Who want an out-of-the-box tool that will integrate with their payroll system and give them easy reporting functionality that can be shared with the leadership team. It is designed for companies with staff levels of 10-1000. After that, we tend to see people opting for the more bespoke tools.”

OK we’re getting there. I feel like I know what I’m dealing with. Yes there are 1000s of solutions, but I can see what I need and who I should consider. I can also see what other companies who look a bit like me tend to use and I’m getting a sense of what HR Tools actually do for companies like mine and I like it. I’d never really considered that it would be handy to integrate with our payroll system and how generating reports around our biggest expenditure: people, makes total sense (the ‘differentiated value’).

Now I’m ready to be given a demo.

What else can you do?

Other than describing the competitive landscape in your sales pitch, is there anything else you can do to help your customers feel reassured that they are not going to Mess Up?

You may have seen some vendors comparing themselves to their competitors in a table that conveniently has a check next to all the features that are listed and the competitors woefully lacking in comparison. These are OK although I think potential customers are going to treat these with a bit of cynicism. In the example below, not only is it obviously biased, but I’m pretty sure it’s inaccurate.

Another option is to write an article about the competitive landscape. If it’s written honestly and helpfully, that will be a good thing. But there’s another obvious reason for you to do something along these lines: SEM. Statistically, prospects have already done over 50% of the research they are going to do by the time they reach out to you. And you can bet your life part of that will be searching for ‘best <your sector> tools’ or ‘alternatives to <name of your/your competitors’ product>’. If you can create content that will rank for those sorts of search terms, then you get to own more of that conversation.

In the table example above, Yodeck has nineteen landing pages each comparing themself to one of their nineteen competitors. And they rank really well. They’ve understood how their buyers research the market before making any decision.

I’d love to know whether you agree with this: would you ever consider talking openly about your competition? Do you feel that mentioning a close competitor may mean your prospect learns something about someone they’d never heard of and ends up buying from them, or does it foster a degree of trust if the person doing the buying feels that the person selling wants them to have a full picture of the options before they make the sale?

Fear of Messing Up is real

Finally - I remember when we hired our first HR Person, I had some anxiety that they were going to shake their heads in despair when they learnt what HR SaaS we were using. And who would get the blame if they did? I was thinking of the excuses I could make: we had to find something quick; someone I know recommended them; not particularly wedded to it either; really happy for you to swap it for something else. I wasn’t thinking about how good the onboarding process was or how effectively the platform assigned exit interviews.

In the end they were approving of the choice I’d made. So I gave myself a mental high five.

David Hart