Gaining a Sales Advantage by Collecting Information about Your Competitors

by Dave Kahle

Excerpted from Take Your Sales Performance Up a Notch, by Dave Kahle

As sales people, we love to complain about the competition.  Unfortunately, complaining doesn’t do us any good.  A better approach is to create a system to learn about the competition.  Knowledge of the competition — not only their strengths and weaknesses but also their patterns and tendencies – will provide you with a distinct advantage, and prevent you from getting blindsided or seriously outmaneuvered.

     That happened to me.  To this day, I still get a sick feeling in my stomach as I remember the day when I lost my largest account to my arch competitor.  It was an account that made up 20% of my total volume.  In my blissful ignorance, I was content to grow my business by calling on the end users and purchasing department, while my competition was successfully building a relationship with the administration.

     The result?  My best account signed a prime vendor, sole-source agreement with my competitor, and within 60 days, I was almost totally out of that account.  I was blindsided.

Sales Leaders - A rare and real opportunity to UP YOUR GAME

Take it to another level. Multiply your influence, success, knowledge, and confidence, with our Sales Management experts.

A mix of live training combined with videos, audio, and written material.

That’s a lesson that sticks with me, and one from which you can learn.  To become good at knowing what your competition is up to, implement this simple three-step process:

           Step One.  Collect bits and pieces of information

           Begin by consciously collecting little bits and pieces of information at every opportunity.  For example, you may have lost a bid or a particular piece of business to your competitors.  Rather than just moping about it, use it as a learning opportunity.

     Try to find out from your customer why they awarded the business the way they did.  If it was price alone, try to find out how much lower their price was than your price.  If it’s something else, find out what.  That information won’t help for that particular piece of business, but it may give you an insight into the pricing policies of your competition.  Write the information down on a 3 x 5 card, a piece of scrap paper or a post-it.

           Take your good customers to lunch, and casually see if you can steer the conversation in such a way as to learn something about your competition ... CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE