Your job is to ultimately influence the decision criteria with your differentiation. You have to understand it cold, and you have to understand it from the customer's point of view. You're listening to the Audible Ready Podcast, the show that helps you and your teams sell more Faster. Will feature sales leaders sharing their best insights on how to create a sales engine that helps you fuel repeatable revenue growth. Presented by the team at Force Management, a leader in B to B
sales effectiveness. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. I'm Rachel Klatt Miller. I know that some of you have some big sales goals as we start out the new year, those big wail accounts that you'd like to attack. John Kaplan is here today to give you some motivation on attacking those accounts with incumbents. Hi. John, Hey, Rachel, how are you good? Good? This is a topic that we get frequently and you probably have a good like level set for us as we talked
about this today. Yeah, I think for this subject, let's just get our minds right when talking about incumbents. We have to have a competitive mindset to do this well. And I'm reminded of a little story that we'll just maybe just used here throughout, But one of my most rewarding years in selling came from a focus on competitive installs, And to be honest with you,
it wasn't even my idea. I was just coming off a great year and struggling with the mindset that I drained the pond, which is probably really relevant for a lot of people at the end of this year when you're thinking about the next year, and you know, I didn't feel like that there was anything left in my territory. So luckily I had a great boss who knew that I would go through the struggle every single year, and he was proactive about it. So he called me in at the end of the year,
congratulated me on my performance and said, let's talk about next year. And that was like a punch in the stomach for me. But that's not what he meant it to be. So he was all excited about what he called the white space, and the white space was where my competition was and I
was not. And he and I went on to work through in identifying those opportunities and putting together a plan of attack, and I got to tell you, it's probably one of the most rewarding years of selling I ever had, and it turned out to be my biggest year in selling for that company. So jem, let's start out with really assessing that plan of attack. We've done some testimonials or reps who have done this, and it always starts with
great preparation, good sales fundamentals. But if you're going to go after an account that you know has an incumbent, what are your first action steps? Yeah, I think I'd start off with, you know, identifying your opportunities by matching them with your ICP or ideal customer profile. And why would I do that? Because that means that you'll be real. Event if you're isolating those accounts that have the ideal customer profile, you know you're going to be
relevant. So next, prepare your discovery. What do I know about the account, their business, their industry. Who do I know in the account their industry? You know that might be able to give me a warm introduction and you know. And then the bottom line is it's our job to identify problems that have negative consequences that impact business issues. Then I have to be able to map that back to what I do to what's important to them,
ultimately influencing decision criteria with our differentiation. All the while, I need to be executing that strategy with champions and economic buyers, Yes, iding your opportunities, maagining their ICP. Going through that process in the beginning can help you really formulate a plan of attack, as we said, but one that's going
to be successful. And when you actually get the convert station, let's say you get an opening to have the conversation, that's not the time do you ignore a current Stay right, You don't want to ignore that they have an incumbent. You also don't want to go in real hard because the customer may see it as unnecessary to replace an incumbent and you could seem irrelevant. Yeah.
I think those are really good points, Rachel. When it comes to the incumbent, I find that buyers are loyal to those not present in a conversation. What I mean by that is they tend not to tell you, or be ready to tell you about the bad things about that incumbent, even
though there probably are things that they struggle with. So and one way to combat that is to ask easier questions, like what do you like most about working with XYZ incumbent, So people tend to be more honest when asked this question, you know, what do you like most about this current situation? And they most people don't want to mislead you, so they're probably going to tell you a few things about what they like, and then they're going to
talk about what their struggles are. But they're not going to feel like you're both attacking somebody who isn't there. So give that one a try. That one works really really well. And then also, you know, focus on your buyer, take an outside in approach. First, make it all about them and earn the right to make it all about you. You want to be confident in your value, so you want to make sure that you are prepared with the four essential questions, What problems do I solve for my customer,
How specifically do I solve those? How do I solve them differently or better than the competition? And where have I done it before? Next, you want to show empathy. You want to understand their business and you want to listen. That's the best way to show empathy. And then make sure
you have a clear understanding of your differentiation. Yeah, I want to dig in on that differentiation point because to your point, John, you don't want to go after an incumbent unless you really think you have a shot, And all those things go into thinking that you have a shot, And so a crucial component is understanding your differentiation. How do you do it better or differently
than the incumbent that's in there now. And this is something that you really should have a point of view on before you ever even approach the conversation with the customer. Yeah, Rachel, I mean, you got to know your differentiation inside and out, and your job is to ultimately influence the decision criteria with your differentiation. You have to understand it cold, and you have to understand it from the customer's point of view. So we talk a lot about
differentiation that's unique and differentiation that only you can do. And if that's the case, you get it into the required capabilities a decision criteria and you're done. You win every time. But more than likely you're dealing with comparative differentiation because if it's any good, if unique differentiation is any good, it's going to be copied over time. So mostly we're competing on the playing field with comparative differentiation. Which means others say they can do it, but the way
we do it is better for the customer. It's either faster, more accurate. So this is where we're competing most often is on the comparative level. It always has to be of value to the customer. And a great way to check yourself on that is to take the differentiation and look at it and say, so what if I don't have that differentiator? What bad things will happen to me if I'm the customer? And then just start looking for questions to ask. That's how we set traps for the competition. And then we
also want to make sure that's validated out in the marketplace. So we got to ask ourselves, says who, And that's like a proof point for the differentiator. So so what and says who? Very important? Yeah, those are great question to ask yourself. I mean, I think what John is saying is that for those of you listening, you know you want to understand
your differentiation, but you've got to go deeper. It's so what, it's just says who, Because if you're trying to unseat and incumbent, there has to be a compelling reason for the buyer to do so it has to be meaningful for the buyer because we all know how difficult change can be, so aligning your differentiation to better outcomes for that customer is really going to be critical
to your in seeding and incumbent. So, John, I know that sometimes you use the term slow dance when talking about a sales process, when doing discovery, when engaging prospects, and that term for me comes to mind when we're talking about unseating and incumbent. Yeah, I mean when you talk about slow dance, it's kind of like thinking about playing the long game. So everybody loves to be led, provided that you can take them to a place
they can't get to on their own. And we know through the seller deficit disorder that most buyers don't believe sellers understand their business and they don't believe sellers listen very well. So the slow dance is you first need to make it all about them and earn their right to make it all about you, which means we have to ask a series of discovery questions to uncover pain, which
has negative consequences and has business impact. We need to establish decision criteria to solve that problem, and that decision criteria needs to be from the customer's point of view and influenced by our differentiation. And lastly, we always want to know how they will measure success. And again we need to influence this here. So once we get all that, we've built our case, which allows us to say, here's what I heard you say, and we can substitute
in their positive business outcomes. Here's what you said the capabilities needed to be. We can call that decision criteria require capability, and here's how you said that you will measure success metrics. And once I have all this, I can pivot to talk about how we do that, specifically, how we do the decision criteria, how we do it better or differently than the competition. That's our differentiation. And here's where we've done this before, which are proof
points. So lastly, we need to be building this case with people who have power and influence inside the account and these are champions and economic buyers. And in my beginning story that I shared with you about my boss and I targeting those competitive installs, these proof points became critical once I beat that competitor, and so once I beat them the first time, the rest fell like
Domino's. Yeah, That's such a good point because then you have the proof point to show that you can do it with the next customer, just getting that first one. So, John, once you feel like you've done some discovery, you've got a good case. How do you orchestrate it? I mean, are you pitching a pilot project? You try to go for a small piece of some business to try to get in there. What's your take on this strategy? Yeah, I mean I would say with pilots, sometimes
you do and sometimes you don't. I don't mean to be fickled there. Let me just expand a little bit. So I found that most customers need to understand that your stuff will work in their environment, so some type of validation or proof of value is normally required. And a good rule for me has been if I do a pilot, I only do it if I have a champion. I've met the economic buyer, and I'm piloting criteria that we can win, and I have a commitment that they will purchase when validated.
So I don't want to be in the kicking the tires business. So what I noticed over time was that my proof points got better and better so that I could reference those similar environments as the validation itself and use them as proof points versus having to do a pilot. So let me just be clear. I know that a lot of the audience listening has a wide variety of go to market motions, and many of you listening are part of a product led
growth or PLG market motion. So this is where many people tend to push quickly to demos. But my rules still remain. We better be demoing in a way that is against established criteria, that is favorable for us, with champions, with economic buyers, with the intent to solve impactful problems. It's still important when people are spending money. We have a great podcast that we
did on pilot projects. We kind of talk about some of these concepts that John mentioned here, So go ahead and check that out in the show notes. And we're summing this up in a ten minute podcast. John, I know, unseeing incumbents is no easy fee, but there's also value in determining where you can do it right. That's our job as elite sellers. It's not an easy feat, but it can be done. Give us a bottom
line and some spirits on this topic as we wrap up. Yeah, I mean, first, I think you have to have a mindset that you're going to go after comparetive placements, and you've got to feel like you're jumping into warm water. They're already buying what you're selling if you follow the stick to
the ideal customer profile, they're just not buying from you yet. So understand and leverage your differentiation being it for the long game, which means you know, build your case with champions and economic buyers and criteria that you can win, and make sure you do a great job measuring the success. So at the end when you do that, if you measure the success, you're going to have great proof points to share with the next customer to unseat the next
incumbent. And again, once one falls, they all can fall. And there we go. I want to give that a little dramatic pause after you said that, John, when one falls, it fall. Appreciate you going through that topic with me today. My pleasure go get them all right, Go get them everybody, And thank you for listening to the audible Ready Sales podcast. Management. We're focused on transforming sales organizations into elite teams. Our
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