How can Competitive Intelligence help your sales teams?

This article entitled how can Competitive Intelligence help your sales teams? And it explains 5 ways you can compete against the offers and claims of your competitors?

Your sales and business development teams are on the front line of your business battle, and it is essential to give them as much cover as possible. Competitive Intelligence offers them answers when pinned down by your competitor’s features, claims and pricing strategies. Being on the front line, they speak to customers and prospects all the time and they usually get to hear an unbiased view of your service and that of your competitors.

So here are 5 ways Competitive Intelligence can help your business development teams.

1. Identify their customers

How about if we could give you a list of your competitors customers? Would you find this valuable? Identifying competitor customers is something you can do with Competitive Intelligence. You will be amazed by what you can work out. And all legal, above board and ethical. Great for prospecting for your sales teams, but also builds s picture of the types of companies your competitors are chasing. And which companies they are avoiding and why? Does it reveal the strengths and weaknesses of their products or services? Sometimes the information you can generate from CI about rivals customers is jaw-dropping.

2. Information

How about providing your sales teams with accurate, timely and up to date information, so they can offer counter-arguments and go on the offensive with buyers and decision-makers. Having this knowledge at their fingertips will help them understand what your competitors will be telling them. And to play to your strengths in terms of offering, features, benefits and pricing which counter competitor strengths. The information that will dilute what they are hearing from your competitors.

3. Expose their claims

What are your competitors telling buyers in their sales meetings? What’s really going on in their company? Competitor statements and sales presentations reveal priceless information about their capabilities, weaknesses. Dig deeper and find out what they think of your strengths and their fears about your company. Not surprisingly these messages and signals will differ from what they are telling the world on their website.

Competitive Intelligence will help you understand your competitive landscape and increase more wins and sales.

4. Understand customer needs and motivations

You don’t need to be in business for very long to find out people are unreliable and change their minds. We have our eye on buy one product, fall in love with it and then see something else we like. Suddenly the initial shiny new toy had too many limitations, and you buy the last on you see. Sales teams need more than just hearsay, comments on CRM notes and surveys

Competitive Intelligence gets to the bottom of it all, so your senior and sales teams know precisely why customers made individual buying decisions. What was their experience of buying from you, their motivations and how happy are they with their decision now. Build the picture, and your sales teams will be able to sell with confidence, knowing what the prospect wants and how they intend to make a decision. To create a more qualitative and consistent process, then use Win-Loss analysis as discussed next.

5. Win-Loss Analysis

If you’re not asking why they didn’t buy from you, how do you expect to find out the answer?

It’s easy to ignore the real reason for failure and success. But you need to get to the bottom your customers’ decision-making process. To know how the market sees you. Why you are missing out, and just as importantly why you are winning customers. Also which competitors are getting the better of you? And most importantly, why?

Win-loss analysis is a powerful Intelligence tool which allows you to see the trends and patterns early. So you can either keep doing what you are doing or do something else to get back on course.

Finally

This article was called how can Competitive Intelligence help your sales teams. It discussed how to use Competitive Intelligence to compete against the offers and claims of your competitors.

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