Be intentional about how you approach competitive knock-out by choosing one of the following options:
- Train & enable AEs on competitive knock-out
- Suitable when: Prospecting approach, sales process, win rates, and sales cycles are similar for knock-out opps and other opps.
- Staff a competitive specialist (team) to assist AEs with competitive knock-out opportunities
- Suitable when: Prospecting approach, win rates, and sales cycles are similar for knock-out opps and other opps but sales process is different.
- Assign competitive accounts to a centralized team
- Suitable when: Prospecting approach, sales process, win rates, and sales cycles are different for knock-out opps and other opps
Tips for “ripping & replacing” a competitor in a target account:
- Selling value/ROI and reducing perceived risk are equally important
- Meet or beat the incumbent price; offer a ‘buy-out’ in the form of free overlap for ~3 mos.
- Does your solution exceed competitive gaps that address known customer needs?
- Cover the switching cost (dollars & effort to migrate data, integrations, etc.); decrease the risk of change
- Have a plan to (re-) train their team
- Tell stories about (and provide references to) customers who have switched
- Speak neither well nor ill about competitors. Remain neutral.
- Watch the ‘dark funnel’; know contract expiration dates
- Get in when the decision maker is in transition
- Get a foot in the door with a different BU or complementary offering
- Absolutely multi-thread since no single decision maker wants to admit the original decision was wrong
- Deeply understand competitive barriers to *exit*
- You’ll need a top level exec focused on transformation