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Competitive Analysis of You Versus? What Do You Know About Your Competition and What Do You Know About Your Deliverable Versus Theirs?

Everyone has competition in some form and in some degree, a sales professional knows who those competitive challengers are and has well defined selling plans for selling against them in interactions with prospects and active clients.

You should embrace the challenge and not fear it. Always be ready and be confident in addressing competitive challenges and threats as they present themselves and how to compensate for any weakness.

One powerful way to objectively compare and contrast any specific product, service or your organization over-all in comparison to any primary competitor is to use a “Ben Franklin Analysis Model”. Legend has it that when ever Benjamin Franklin was challenged and need to make a decision he would take a piece of paper, divide it into two equal sides and place at the top of each side the differing issues he was perplexed over. He would then proceed to chronicle all of the positives for each under the appropriate header, then when he was done, which ever side had more responses would be the direction in which he would make his choice.

An example, you could use the “Ben Franklin Analysis Model” to compare strengths/weaknesses organizationally between your organization and number one competitor over-all:

This same model can be used to compare and contrast products, services or organizational threats to a sales professional line-up in a live presentation before a prospect or client, as well as a mental pre-exercise before engaging the market.

Successful sales professionals have the ability to objectively look at what they represent and what the competition has to offer. In fact, the more product knowledge that a sales professional has on the competition, the more effective they can become at focusing their prospecting efforts, Selling Presentation skills and in qualifying Suspects as profile potential customers.

When you think in terms of competitive analysis and reflect upon your strengths and weaknesses as compared to a competitor, then sales professionals can make informed decisions. Here’s an example … Think of a professional sporting teams’ coach (your equal as a sales trainer/sales manager/small business owner) and game day, it would be a fair expectation to expect that coach to know by name the opposing teams coach and by name that teams primary players. The coach will have studied their strengths and weaknesses of each and coached their players on what to expect from both that opposing team overall and the individuals within that team. The competitive analysis impacts their decisions and choices for how to position themselves for success.

As a sales professional be your own coach and evaluate your competitive analytics, what do you know and what could blindside you from success?

Your working knowledge is a never-ending learning curve, you can have data on-line, housed in the cloud, or manually at your finger-tips, but what you don’t know can be the difference between success, market dominance or finding yourself playing catch-up to others.




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