This is a straightforward guide to have more sales in a competitive market. Basically – how are you different from ‘X’? How to answer that question?
In this blog post, I’ll show you the answer. This is actually going to be super straightforward, I hope you’re ready for this!
How To Sell To a Competitive Market – Alex Berman
B2B Sales 5:49: minAny service business is going to have a bunch of competition because it’s very easy to say that you do services.
It’s very easy for me to go to on AngelList and cold email people that are looking for iOS developers and say that I develop iOS, there’s nobody that’s going to check that, at least not for a little while.
How to Sell More in a Competitive Market
#1 Make a list of competitors that come up often
Your competitive sales guys have to know the difference between you and all those firms.
If you take a bunch of calls and you are always hearing the same names, these are the ones that you want to pay attention to.
When I was at Inspire Beats, the one that came up on almost every call was Lead Genius. So, I became a master at Lead Genius; I had to learn all about that. At Dom&Tom, people would mention Fueled.
At Fueled, people would’ve mentioned Huge or Fuss. These are all agency names in New York City.
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So, who are your biggest competitors? Train your sales guys and train yourself on the biggest differences between you and those firms.
You know who most of your competitors are, you can also find them using tools or on Google.
If you’re in mobile app development I would search ‘App developers’ and then your city to find your competitions. Especially if you’re here in the US, or Canada, or UK or Australia, the ones on the first two pages on Google are your biggest competitors.
Those are the ones that you need to learn about as much as possible.
Also, if you’re in web development, learn about Leadpages. About Unbounce or Squarespace; learn about the tools that would let people build a website or mobile apps themselves and tell them WHY you guys are better.
#2 Buy or Demo Competitor Products
My advice is that if you’re in mobile app development, pretend to have a mobile app and go talk to a sales guy from Fuss. See how they sell you, go talk to a sales guy from RGA. Go to larger companies and see what that sales process looks like.
Is that morally and ethically right? I don’t know, is it? Ask yourself. If it doesn’t match with the way you want to live your life, don’t do it. I’m just telling you what actually works here.
If you need help trying to sell more in a competitive B2B market, just contact us!
What if after all this research – you realize everyone is doing better than you?
#3 Improve your Product
There are a few ways to do that:
3.1 Taking time to figure out what you can add to get customers more interested
For X27, we actually started as a content marketing company. We would only write blog posts and it was like a clone of Scripted.com. It was $200 for a blog post.
We were all kind of feeling bad about it. Because, how much ROI is one blog post really going to give you, if you’re not buying in bulk and it’s not part of a strategy?
We had to take the time to talk to our customers about why they weren’t buying, and also talk to the customers that did buy about what value we could deliver to them outside of that. That’s how we pivoted into more marketing services.
3.2 Find a new non-competitive market that hasn’t heard of you
If you can’t get better, or if there’s too much competition, find a new market! For instance, app development for software-as-a-service, startups or web development for small businesses are totally flooded in my opinion. They’re textbook competitive sales which are going to give you a hard time.
For example, we used to do marketing just for Mobile App Development companies. There were a bunch of agencies out there that did marketing for B2B. However, I hadn’t found a single one that only did it for Mobile App Development.
UX/UI design, branding, advertising; in this market, we were the only people that knew what they were doing.
Our business-changing sales course is a series of step by step lessons where I’ll take you into email campaigns we use to generate millions of dollars per month in recurring revenue for our clients.
Another B2B agency can come in and say that they’ve marketed this or that professional services firm, but I can always come back and argue that they don’t specialize on Mobile App Development and that wins every time.
Find a new market that hasn’t heard of you; basically, niche marketing. Should you move from marketing for everyone to marketing for dentists, or just for fast food restaurant franchise owner? There are million dollar businesses in all of those and that’s the solution.
You can try to take on the entire market, or you can improve your product and dominate the one niche that you’re in.
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