In positioning work, we need to understand the competitive landscape or what we need to position against. In my opinion, many companies get this wrong because they get too caught up in their own definition of what “competition” means and forget that they need to look at it from a buyer’s perspective.
Thanks, April, for the great insights! Having been part of many RFPs (Request for Proposals) in the past, I’ve encountered situations where prospects were indecisive about choosing between alternatives. Unfortunately, we missed out on crucial details because we didn’t follow the right approach. Your tip about arming salespeople to discuss alternatives and offer recommendations for what the prospect should do next could have helped us seal the deals in those scenarios.
Great article! I love the way you break things down.
For the "do nothing" case another important lever (actually for all the cases) is customer stories and references.
If our product is successfully in use in other companies like this one, those clients had to deal with change management, the risk that it wouldn't work, etc. So their stories that "change management was OK," and "it really delivered on our expectations" can go a long way.
Absolutely! If you are going to use case studies however, it's important to make sure that you use a case study that closely matches the customer's situation. If it doesn't the customer can easily dismiss the proof saying "Well of course that worked for Walmart but we are a regional retailer and I doubt it would work the same way for us."
This is great, thanks for writing this! The insight on "Do Nothing" frequency certainly resonates with my selling experience in early stage companies and with emerging tech like AI.
I'm curious about the point on "offer your direct recommendation" to tackle indecision. What can this look like other than "you should buy my product"? Is it more about understanding their key concerns and alternatives, and then proposing a path forward to tackle these e.g. you should implement this in a 6 month POC within this part of your business, with these success criteria etc etc? Or did you have something else in mind?
I have seen recommendations used well when the rep is offering their opinion about deployment options. For example - would it make sense to attempt to buy and rollout the product for every user all at once, or should we do a staged roll-out instead? Should the customer try a POC or not? Often the opinion is general and not specific to which vendor the customer might ultimately choose. I think it really helps a rep build credibility and position themselves as a "guide."
I've also see this work when the rep is offering an opinion about the configuration of the product itself where there are options that might overwhelm a prospect. For example - different pricing tiers, different add-on modules, different levels of services or support. I think it is helpful for a rep to offer a recommendation on that as well.
I shy away from the POC and prefer POV - Proof of Value.
POC = "pilot project, which demonstrates that a design concept, business proposal, etc. is feasible." - for me that means that we just built this and we think it should work for you, but not 100% sure. Its still at the technical level.
POV = "pilot project using your own data that demonstrates the value that our system can deliver" - for me, that means we take a few thousand records and run it through our stuff and we give you the ROI/Value we gleaned from it.
Benefits:
* Confident of the results
* Less barriers for risk averse
* Can extrapolate data to give a solid differentiated # for the full project.
* Take the tech barriers off the table.
I think a newish business should pitch POC, but after you've done a bunch and have a repeatable process, and get consistent value out, then change to POV.
I love the idea of a POV - at least what I think you are calling a POV. The key to a great POC in my opinion is control and leadership. We should be very clear on pass/fail criteria, timeframes, scope. If we do that, it doesn't end up looking like your above definition of a POC and it gets closer to your POV. Doing a smart POC can be a deal accelerator - a bad one is the opposite.
I understand it’d be great if we could position against different types of alternatives from your graph.
In our exercise, we already worked through competitive alternative groups. Most of them fall under “Short List”. Now we are about to list the unique attributes. I understand from your book that we should list the unique ones that nobody else has; but it's not clear to us whether we should list the unique attributes per competitive alternative groups: for example, compared to the legacy group, A is our unique attributes; Compared to the DIY groups, B is our unique attributes. Do you think we should do that?
This is a positioning exercise we do for a new product (we have been selling the core of this product and only adding other important features - so we need to keep the positioning lose as we don’t have enough happiest customers yet)
We might only have 1 -2 unique values. When translating them into a brochure, I think we need more values than just 1-2. Does it mean we start applying the attributes/values that are important to customers, although might not be unique to us?
I think it's perfectly fine to have only one or two differentiated value themes. I've worked with companies that really only have one main one and we focused all of the marketing energy on really nailing that one theme.
Thanks, April, for the great insights! Having been part of many RFPs (Request for Proposals) in the past, I’ve encountered situations where prospects were indecisive about choosing between alternatives. Unfortunately, we missed out on crucial details because we didn’t follow the right approach. Your tip about arming salespeople to discuss alternatives and offer recommendations for what the prospect should do next could have helped us seal the deals in those scenarios.
Great article! I love the way you break things down.
For the "do nothing" case another important lever (actually for all the cases) is customer stories and references.
If our product is successfully in use in other companies like this one, those clients had to deal with change management, the risk that it wouldn't work, etc. So their stories that "change management was OK," and "it really delivered on our expectations" can go a long way.
Absolutely! If you are going to use case studies however, it's important to make sure that you use a case study that closely matches the customer's situation. If it doesn't the customer can easily dismiss the proof saying "Well of course that worked for Walmart but we are a regional retailer and I doubt it would work the same way for us."
This is great, thanks for writing this! The insight on "Do Nothing" frequency certainly resonates with my selling experience in early stage companies and with emerging tech like AI.
I'm curious about the point on "offer your direct recommendation" to tackle indecision. What can this look like other than "you should buy my product"? Is it more about understanding their key concerns and alternatives, and then proposing a path forward to tackle these e.g. you should implement this in a 6 month POC within this part of your business, with these success criteria etc etc? Or did you have something else in mind?
I have seen recommendations used well when the rep is offering their opinion about deployment options. For example - would it make sense to attempt to buy and rollout the product for every user all at once, or should we do a staged roll-out instead? Should the customer try a POC or not? Often the opinion is general and not specific to which vendor the customer might ultimately choose. I think it really helps a rep build credibility and position themselves as a "guide."
I've also see this work when the rep is offering an opinion about the configuration of the product itself where there are options that might overwhelm a prospect. For example - different pricing tiers, different add-on modules, different levels of services or support. I think it is helpful for a rep to offer a recommendation on that as well.
Thanks for sharing April. Love how you always pull everything together!
Thanks!
Hi April
I shy away from the POC and prefer POV - Proof of Value.
POC = "pilot project, which demonstrates that a design concept, business proposal, etc. is feasible." - for me that means that we just built this and we think it should work for you, but not 100% sure. Its still at the technical level.
POV = "pilot project using your own data that demonstrates the value that our system can deliver" - for me, that means we take a few thousand records and run it through our stuff and we give you the ROI/Value we gleaned from it.
Benefits:
* Confident of the results
* Less barriers for risk averse
* Can extrapolate data to give a solid differentiated # for the full project.
* Take the tech barriers off the table.
I think a newish business should pitch POC, but after you've done a bunch and have a repeatable process, and get consistent value out, then change to POV.
Love to hear your thoughts.
I love the idea of a POV - at least what I think you are calling a POV. The key to a great POC in my opinion is control and leadership. We should be very clear on pass/fail criteria, timeframes, scope. If we do that, it doesn't end up looking like your above definition of a POC and it gets closer to your POV. Doing a smart POC can be a deal accelerator - a bad one is the opposite.
Thank you April, another great article!
I understand it’d be great if we could position against different types of alternatives from your graph.
In our exercise, we already worked through competitive alternative groups. Most of them fall under “Short List”. Now we are about to list the unique attributes. I understand from your book that we should list the unique ones that nobody else has; but it's not clear to us whether we should list the unique attributes per competitive alternative groups: for example, compared to the legacy group, A is our unique attributes; Compared to the DIY groups, B is our unique attributes. Do you think we should do that?
This is a positioning exercise we do for a new product (we have been selling the core of this product and only adding other important features - so we need to keep the positioning lose as we don’t have enough happiest customers yet)
Looking forward to hearing your perspective!
Just to add on that:
We might only have 1 -2 unique values. When translating them into a brochure, I think we need more values than just 1-2. Does it mean we start applying the attributes/values that are important to customers, although might not be unique to us?
Thank you!
I think it's perfectly fine to have only one or two differentiated value themes. I've worked with companies that really only have one main one and we focused all of the marketing energy on really nailing that one theme.