To differentiate yourself and gain an advantage that boosts sales, you need a competitive edge.
Without a distinctive competitive edge, your buyers will commoditize you. Unless you have a well-defined edge that is meaningful to your buyers, you will lose sales to competitors who do.
So what is your competitive edge? Contrary to popular belief, you can bet it’s not:
- Your position as a market leader
- Strong tech support
- Your mastery of social selling, insight selling, challenger selling or any other methodology
- Superior quality
- Low prices
- World-class customer service
- Convenience
- Your sales process, automation, enablement, talent or collateral materials
- Brand, image or reputation
- Satisfied customers
Those are all nice things to have. But they are secondary. They come after you demonstrate the competitive edge that matters to your buyers. You will never get the chance to showcase those aspects of your company, products or services until you get the appointment where, presumably, you might share these talking points.
There’s only one competitive edge that counts. It’s what mattered in 1950 and in 1970 and in 1990. It’s what matters more than ever before in this age of empowered buyers.
Put simply, the competitive edge that will land appointments and get you invited back is customer focus.
Customer focus means that your attention, activity and attitude is primarily centered on your customer. Not on your product. Not on your company. Not on your goals or commissions.
With customer focus, you display empathy and interest. You listen. You ask questions that are not solely and obviously aimed at making the sale. You expand your conversations to build trust, to form relationships and to create value for your buyer.
With customer focus, you make sales by making sense. You step into the customer’s shoes and solve problems by co-creating solutions. You set your must-make-quota mentality aside, knowing that you’ll get there faster and more consistently by helping customers meet their goals, too.
Customer focus is the competitive edge you need.
To learn more about customer focus, register for Top Sales Academy where, in PHASE ONE, you will find a recording of a panel discussion with Deb Calvert, Bernadette McClelland and Colleen Stanley. You’ll learn what it takes to develop this critical competency so you can be set apart from the competition.