Who’s your biggest competitor? For most of us, there’s a short list of obvious answers that immediately come to mind:
- The competition, i.e., the companies selling a similar solution against which we compete every day.
- Status Quo, i.e., customers who determine that what they’re doing right now is “good enough.”
- Indecision, i.e., customers who fear they’ll either choose or execute poorly and thus choose not to choose, despite often deep dissatisfaction with the status quo (this is the topic of Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna’s new book, The Jolt Effect).
There are, however, two other competitors we must all consider.
The first is on virtually every seller’s radar screen: Alternate solutions to the same problem.
So, instead of solving a problem with either your solution or your competitor’s solution, customers might find a different way to solve that problem altogether (e.g., with people vs. technology, with in-sourcing vs. out-sourcing, etc.).
But the second competitor tends to be overlooked altogether—perhaps because it feels either out of scope, or out of our control. And that is: Alternate customer problems equally in need of an urgent solution.
How often have we lost a deal simply because our customer chooses to address an equally urgent, but largely unrelated problem? That decision, while superficially unrelated nonetheless eliminates either the money, the time, or the “organizational capacity,” that the purchase and implementation of our solution would have required.
So we don’t lose to the competition, status quo, indecision, or even alternate solutions. We lose to a completely different problem.
In companies’ day-to-day reality of allocating limited resources, this happens all the time. The customer simply chooses “to go in a completely different direction” as their “needs have changed” or their “priorities have shifted.”
But how do you compete against that?
The key is stakeholder alignment. But it isn’t stakeholder alignment around your solution. Nor is it stakeholder alignment around the best course of action. It’s something different altogether: alignment around the underlying problem in the first place.
What happens without that kind of alignment? You lose to a parking garage.
