Use cases, not features, show who you compete with
A few months ago, one of our sales reps reached out and asked for some help on a deal. The prospect was evaluating Sprout and Competitor A (CA)for their social media suite. They already had deployed Competitor B (CB), which was firmly a best-of-breed product but shared some similar features to Sprout, to handle part of their social strategy and it was working well for them. The rep wanted to know how she could both beat out CA and get the customer to cancel CB and shift that investment to Sprout.
As she laid out the details of the opportunity, I saw that we were making a mistake that’s all too common in SaaS these days. We wanted Sprout to be the one tool to rule their entire social strategy. We thought it was a zero-sum game that in order to win we had to eliminate everyone else. We failed to see how a “competitor” can actually complement your own product.
The issue was that while CB did have some overlapping features with Sprout, the customer’s use case for CB was highly specialized. And while customers on G2 rate Sprout as the number one social media suite in the market, that doesn’t mean that we can handle every single social use case that a customer may need. A product simply cannot be everything to everyone.
CB was a competitor only in theory. In reality, CB was complementary to Sprout and if we didn’t change our strategy, we were going to lose this deal.
I don’t blame salespeople when their eyes light up at the opportunity to land a big customer by replacing three or four tools with our product. At that moment, every one of those tools feels like it is a competitor. They all stand in the way of success.
But if you think that every tool that shares overlapping functionality with yours is an immediate competitor, you’ll waste energy trying to sell against the entire market.
In our case, just because CB shared some features with Sprout doesn’t mean that the customer was using CB for those specific features. As we discussed the deal more, it became clear that was the case and the more energy that we spent trying to eliminate both CA and CB, the less likely we were to win the deal. We thought both companies were competitors.
In reality, only CA was. Sprout could perfectly complement CB for the customer’s use case and the sooner we figured that out, the better off we’d be.
The best sellers understand how their product fits into the customer’s tech stack and corporate strategy. They focus on how the product can complement what’s already working and where it can replace what isn’t. Most importantly, the sellers don’t promise that their product can do something it can’t.
Selling like this builds a tremendous amount of trust with the customer. If you can clearly discern when a tool is competitive or complementary and adjust your own value propositions accordingly, you show your industry knowledge. If a salesperson tells me that their tool can easily replace several of my existing tools that I use for completely different use cases, my bullshit radar is going off like crazy. But if they show how their product can replace the tools that make sense and seamlessly fit into my stack, I’m much more inclined to trust them moving forward. The salesperson knows about the other companies in their space and how their product fits into the ecosystem.
It also shows you understand my business. The worst salespeople show up to a call and immediately start shoving features down your throat. They tell you that their tool can do everything you could possibly need. They never bother to ask about workflows, other team members, technology already in place etc. Frankly, they don’t seem to give a damn about anything other than selling their product.
The best salespeople take significantly more time to learn about your business than they do talk about their own. They poke, prod and pull out every small detail they can. When they go to make a recommendation for how their product fits into your strategy, they clearly understand the opportunity.
They make you feel like you are talking to a consultant, not a salesperson.
Clearly, we were trying to do too much in our deal. And trying to do too much will lead you into trouble.
Let’s say we managed to convince them to both pick Sprout over CA and ditch CB at the same time. I can tell you with confidence that we would not have kept them as a customer come renewal time. If you oversell your capabilities, it will come back to bite you in the ass. Sure, you may end up with the 12 months of revenue, but you’ll end up with a disgruntled customer and bruised reputation. This type of selling is sure to negatively impact your net dollar retention.
The more likely outcome though is that we’d just fail to win any part of the deal. I train our reps to not compete individually with every vendor mentioned. If we try to get too granular and differentiate at the tool-by-tool level, we’ll water down the core value propositions that make Sprout different from every competitor in the market. In this case, we were trying to win on two fronts, causing us to lose focus on the true competitive threat with CA.
After talking the deal through with the rep, they dug in further with the customer. As I suspected, it turned out that there wasn’t really an opportunity to replace CB. Even though we shared some product similarities, the use case was outside our wheelhouse. It became clear that the best option we had was to beat out CA and complement CB.
While the deal is still in progress, I feel much more confident knowing that we’re zeroed in on beating the real competition.
At the end of the day, just because a tool shares some functionality doesn’t mean that they are your competitor.
