How To Identify Your Differentiation? - Sales Training

This information is for the sales person who either wants to reevaluate the product and company differentiation they have been taught or to ascertain what differentiation they can establish.

There are two exercises below that you can follow to also identify your competitor’s differentiation, which will allow you the opportunity to strategize a counter-response.

Exercises:

Exercise 1 identifies product differentiation and exercise 2, company differentiation. Review each of your products, and based on your current knowledge and customer feedback, complete table one by incorporating your top four most commonly wanted features for each of your products. Once you have identified and listed four features, review your top three competitors. Identify their equivalent products and incorporate each of their product’s corresponding features. Once this is completed, you will be able to ascertain which of your features, if any, your competition does not have. These will be your exclusive features.

Incorporate your exclusive features into table two and then complete the table with the benefit of each feature, what the result would be and if there is a financial return from the result. For example, let’s say you are a salesperson selling manufacturing conveyor systems and one of the features within your conveyor is a 240HP engine that offers a processing speed 30 percent faster than your nearest competition, and the increased speed enables your customer to ship 20 percent more orders each week. If the potential customer’s average order fulfillment is 100 orders a week, this exclusive feature would garner the customer an additional twenty orders per week. If the average order value is $350, these additional twenty orders would equate to $7,000 per week and an increased revenue of $364,000 per year.

Table three should be completed if you have identified a competitor’s exclusive product feature. Your advanced understanding of your competitor’s differentiation will give you the time to prepare an intelligent response that could help to reduce the competitor’s importance and redirect the focus back to the benefits and results of your product. For example, fingerprint security on your cell phone might sound like an excellent benefit that your competitor has but that you do not; however, what if you need someone to access your telephone when you’re not with it? Perhaps you need a stored number or information from a text? Your ability to look at situations before they are in front of you increases the likelihood that you will effectively address your customer’s concerns and will greatly improve your chances of moving the sale forward.