The last presidential debate was by far the best. In the first thirty minutes McCain was on his game while Obama looked a little flat. Then McCain, in the midst of responding to a question on attack ads, got flustered, his emotions took over and the tide changed.
The more I learn about John McCain, the more I admire him. For example, HBO recently aired a documentary on the use of torture in Iraq by U.S. forces, it was pretty damn disturbing. McCain was shown leading the congressional hearings into the practices depicted in the photos from Abu Ghraib and the efforts to restrict the use of these types of tactics. Watching him grill and admonish the U.S. military brass you couldn’t help but think “Thank God”.
So what happened? Why is this political veteran with a great track record not wiping the floor with a relatively untested, inexperienced Obama? For starters, a series of campaign gaffes, inconsistent financial strategies, and, quite frankly, good ole fashioned bad sales practices have resulted in his current standings.
Inspired by McCain’s attempts to make “Bill Ayers” relevant, for this post, we will talk about the right way to go negative on your competitor.
Whether you are trying to convince people to vote for you or buy from you, throwing out negative information about your competition should be done with planning, credibility, and precision.
There are two common scenarios in which you should be prepared to go on the offensive against your competitors:
When the prospect asks “So why are you better than _________”
When your solution offers a specific, verifiable advantage over your competitors in a relevant area.
I used to compete against Microsoft in the Content Management space and so often I would get the
“So, why should I buy your solution over one of the biggest, most famous companies in the world?”
Start off your response by complementing your competitor. (Read that again if you have to)
Being a virtual team we had people stationed all over the country. I lived in Georgia, my primary Sales Engineer lived in Providence, and our corporate office was in Boston.
A few years ago, in the middle of summer, our inside team finds an opportunity at a DC non-profit organization. This was a common event that was made special by the first phone call “Yeah, we meant to call you guys, but we forgot, but we have you scheduled for an onsite presentation this Wednesday”.
“Whoa” was my initial response. Without giving us any written requirements, 36 hours notice, and no real contact to any of the decision makers, we were supposed to assemble our team and come into their organization and be relevant to their project based on one phone call. A project whose requirements where not going to be documented until after our first presentation. Lovely.
A few years a go, one of my Sales Engineers was involved in a bake off at financial services firm in Manhattan. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a bake off in the world of enterprise software is used to described when a company, evaluating solutions, brings in a multiple vendors and submits their systems to a series of scripted tasks. The company’s evaluation team monitors the performance and attempts to get a handle on what they can reasonably expect from the system, and look for those hidden gotchas that may come back to bite them in the butt.
So we make it into the bake off, and there is a lot of excitement around the office because if this financial services firm is a house hold name and to have them as a client would do wonders for enhancing our reputation as a major player in our field. Needless to say we threw our best people onto the project and sent a small army to pull this off.
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Being a virtual team we had people stationed all over the country. I lived in Georgia, my primary Sales Engineer lived in Providence, and our corporate office was in Boston.
