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HVAC
Articles |
Learning
About Your Competition
"I'm concerned about
what my competition may be doing. I know I should be
aware of what they're doing, but I'm not sure how I can
find that out."
This is an issue that's growing in importance. Our
industry is heating up and becoming more competitive.
All around us things are changing at an ever-increasing
rate. That means that it's more important than ever for
you to be aware of what your competitors are doing so
that you don't get blindsided or seriously
outmaneuvered.
That happened to me. To this day, I still get a sick
feeling in my stomach as I remember the day when I lost
my largest account to my arch competitor. It was an
account that made up 20% of my total volume. In my
blissful ignorance, I was content to grow my business by
calling on the end users and purchasing department,
while my competition was successfully building a
relationship with the administration. The result? My
best account signed a prime vendor, sole-source
agreement with my competitor, and within 60 days, I was
almost totally out of that account. I was totally
blindsided.
That's a lesson that sticks with me, and one from which
you can learn. To become good at knowing what your
competition is up to, begin by thinking of yourself a
little differently. If you've read my book (How
To Excel at Distributor Sales), you know that I
believe that distributor salespeople must see themselves
as "managers of information" as well as
"sellers of stuff." To be effective in the
Information Age economy, you must become adapt at
collecting, storing and using good information. The
knowledge of what your competition is doing is one such
piece of information.
Begin by consciously collecting little bits and pieces
of information at every opportunity. For example, you
may have lost a bid or a particular piece of business to
your competitors. Rather then just moping about it, use
it as a learning opportunity. Try to find out from your
customer why they awarded the business the way they did.
If it was price alone, try to find out how much lower
their price was. If it's something else, find out what.
That information won't help for that particular piece of
business, but it may give you an insight into the
pricing policies of your competition. Write the
information down on a 3 X 5 card, or piece of scrap
paper.
Take your good customers to lunch, and casually see if
you can steer the conversation in such a way as to learn
something about your competition.
Keep your eyes open to the coming and going of
competitive salesmen. Note when you see them, and in
what account.
Subtly probe the manufacturer reps you work with. See if
they can't give you some insight into the strategies and
tactics they've seen. Be sensitive and aware of
competitive literature, business cards and price quotes
lying around. And don't forget to talk with the other
salespeople who work for your company to get their
insights.
All these are ways to collect bits and pieces of
information. By themselves, they won't help much. But,
if you combine these bits and pieces, you may very well
see trends, uncover strategies, and discover tactics
your competition is using. As you collect each bit of
information, capture it by writing it down, and putting
the note in a manila folder marked
"competition." If you're automated, type the
information into your computer, and store it in either a
word processing or database file.
Regardless, what you're doing is assembling a quantity
of information. Diligently collect those bits and piece
of information, and file them away. After you collected
a quantity of these, you'll be able to open that file on
a regular basis, consider all the pieces on information,
and discover a great deal about your competitors.
The trick is to consistently collect and store
information. Eventually you'll assemble an accurate
picture. It's like the popular game show "Wheel of
Fortune." When Vanna White turns over one letter,
it doesn't give you much of a picture of what the total
answer is. But after she's turned over several of theses
small individual pieces, the whole becomes clear and the
answer to the riddle is simple to understand. That's the
way collecting information about your competition works.
The back of an old business card on which you noted that
your you saw a competitive salesperson showing a new
carbide line, by itself, doesn't mean much. But if you
filed that along with all the bits and pieces of
information you've collected, and then pulled it all out
and analyzed it, you might see an entirely different
situation. Suppose you reviewed that business card note,
and combined it with the note you made to yourself that
you saw some sales literature on the competitive carbide
line on the desk of one of your purchasing agents, and
then saw that you lost a major bid to the competition
because he quoted a new line at lower that traditional
prices. All at once you've uncovered a potential treat
to your business. Clearly, your competitor is pushing a
new, lower price carbide line. You didn't learn that
from any one piece of information, but rather from the
combination of all those pieces, considered as a whole.
The key to uncovering that information, to discovering
what your competition is up to, is to consistently
collect pieces of information, store them, and then
analyze them as a whole from time to time.
Some of the best companies I deal with do that, and take
it to one layer deeper. They meet from time to time in
sales meetings, and share the information each
individual salesperson has collected. The sum of all the
information collected by the entire sales force is
bigger and greater then that of any one person. So, the
composite information, collected by the entire
salesforce and assembled and analyzed by the sales
manager, gives the company an insightful picture of the
competition.
Keep in mind, as a distributor salesperson in the
Information Age, you're a dealer in information as well
as a seller of stuff. Seriously address the process of
systematically collecting, storing, and analyzing
information, and you'll gain incredible insights into
your competition.
About Dave Kahle, The Growth Coach®:
Dave Kahle is a consultant and trainer who helps his
clients increase their sales and improve their sales
productivity. He speaks from real world experience,
having been the number one salesperson in the country
for two companies in two distinct industries. Dave has
trained thousands of salespeople to be more successful
in the Information Age economy. He's the author of over
1,000 articles, a monthly ezine, and six books
including: 10
Secrets of Time Management for Salespeople and Transforming
Your Sales Force for the 21st Century. He has a
gift for creating powerful training events that get
audiences thinking differently about sales.
His "Thinking About Sales" Ezine features
content-filled motivating articles, practical tips for
immediate improvements, useful resources and helpful
tips to help increase sales. Join for NOTHING on-line at
www.davekahle.com/mailinglist.htm.
You can reach Dave at:
The DaCo Corporation
3736 West River Drive
Comstock Park, MI 49321
Phone: 800-331-1287 / 616-451-9377
Fax: 616-451-9412
info@davekahle.com
www.davekahle.com
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