TABLE OF CONTENTS By now, you should be in good shape. You've put together a plan to meet the customer requirements and tried to anticipate competitive responses. Now you need to add something to the trial process that will catch your competitor unaware.
You should have some differentiator that the customer didn't ask for, but which supports their decision criteria. If so, be sure to include it. Even better, use your keenly honed understanding of the customer's business to offer them something based on your normal solution but that is also new, perhaps even unique. The reason for this is that we must assume that the competitor is as smart as we are. If this is true, they will anticipate our most likely flanking moves based on their understanding of our company's products and value proposition. So by proposing something new and unique, you will be able to eliminate any possibility of a response. What is better is that this strategy can even destabilize the competitor's core value proposition. Consider the following case study.
We'd reached the final stages of the sales cycle to a large record distributor. The customer had asked the two finalists to develop a prototype that was representative of five user scenarios. We were to present the scenarios to the 50 key shareholders in the division. We were ahead in the account based on what we were hearing from the customer, but the SI who was running...
