Understanding Competitors

by Mark Larson, December 16, 2008

For an experienced salesperson, it is natural to navigate many potential hazards in a sales scenario because they have seen them before. They understand how competitors position themselves and how the market perceives their solutions.

The problem is, how does the inexperienced sales rep learn these valuable lessons? When it comes to understanding competitors, most salespeople learn in two ways: experience in competing against vendors over time and anecdotal comments made by colleagues. This isn’t good news for someone new. They end up losing plenty of potential business as they learn on the fly.

Primary Intelligence created Competitive Navigator to give all salespeople access to the competitive intelligence that would normally take years to obtain on their own. With a central intelligence location, all sales people receive the same training and information that helps them compete against any competitor.

Primary Intelligence does this by interviewing prospects and clients from your previous sales scenarios, regardless of whether they were wins or losses. In doing so, Primary Intelligence receives perceptions of vendors and their products directly from the person who is evaluating and buying them.

Whenever a competitor is encountered, Primary Intelligence asks key information about the prospect’s perceptions of the company, its solutions, and its sales team activities. As more instances of competitor activity are encountered, the picture becomes clearer on the market’s view of the vendor’s products, reputation, and sales practices.

Primary Intelligence is also gathering intelligence about your own company, solutions, and sales practices at the same time. Therefore, it is possible to compare your strengths and weaknesses against those of each competitor. By doing so, Competitive Navigator points out strategic methods you can use to beat any competitor in any sales scenario.

For more information about Competitive Navigator, click here.