It’s here! My first newsletter. Thanks for signing up.
Here’s what you’ll get every week:
A tactic to make complex sales simpler
Where you’ll find me this month (live & virtual events)
The rescue pup of the week
My LinkedIn nemesis of the week
A cold email before/after rewrite from one of YOUR submitted cold emails!
Let’s get into it.
Tactic of the Week: Reframing the Narrative
Dwight Schrute gave one of the best lessons I've ever seen re: how to defeat a bigger competitor.
Here's what he did + how he did it + 2 examples I've seen of this working in B2B.
It’s Season 3, Episode 12 of The Office.
Jim and Dwight meet with a prospect who wants to buy from their big-box competitor because their prices are cheaper.
At first, Jim does what most of us do. He rambles on about discounts and free custom work to increase the value and be more competitive on price.
Meanwhile, Dwight uses the prospect's phone to call the customer service line of their big box competitor.
Jim asks - "How important is customer service to you?"
Prospect: "Very important."
At that moment, the competitor's automated customer service line says, "Your call is very important to us...please hold...".
Dwight hangs up and calls their own customer service line. Kelly picks up immediately.
Here's why I love this scene.
We don't win competitive deals when we try to compete in areas where our competitors clearly outperform us.
We win competitive deals when we reframe the customer's decision-making criteria in our favor.
Jim and Dwight can't compete with big box pricing without destroying their margin.
So, they reframe the prospect's decision-making criteria from price to service.
But, they don't TELL the prospect they're "better" at service. If they had, it wouldn't have worked.
They SHOW him. They give the prospect the information he needs to realize it for himself.
Now, here’s how we can make this tactic work in our own deals.
Step 1 - Identify what makes your solution different (not better).
Step 2 - Identify how NOT having that difference impacts your customer's business.
Step 3 - Give them a way to do the math on their own to see the implications of it.
Examples I've seen in real-life:
1 - Small manufacturer vs. bigger manufacturer.
Bigger meant more layers of approval for change orders. Waiting for change orders = more downtime. Downtime carried a significant cost. Seller helped the buyer do the math on cost of avoidable downtime.
2- Medical diagnostic product that gave more accurate patient results, but was slower than their competitor.
Kept losing because buyers valued faster results. Helped the buyer realize the costs/ implications of inaccurate patient results.
TLDR - Reframe the customer's decision criteria in your favor. Help them see the implications of the difference, don't just tell them the difference.
Where You’ll Find Me in August
I'm co-hosting a free webinar (thanks to the team at Allego) on How to Defeat Status Quo When Selling to an Executive on August 12 at 1PM EST.
Here's what the key takeaways will be:
A step-by-step approach to building your own Cost of Inaction story for your team
How and where to use COI and ROI across the sales cycle
