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B2B Sales Best Practices

Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition [Book Summary]

Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition by Anthony Iannarino

Key Takeaway

The key message of this book is that you need to offer four levels of value to win customers away from your competition:

  1. Product
  2. Service
  3. Business Results
  4. Strategic Partner

In competitive displacement, you must start with Level 4.  The author’s framework for doing this is the following:

  1. Trends: “There are five trends that are causing our clients to change and making some of the decisions we are recommending…”
  2. Implications: “The impact of these trends on your industry and on your companies is …”
  3. Advice: “To benefit from these trends, or at least reduce risk, you should [insert solution that links to your product].

Introduction

  • [Th]e fundamentals [of selling] include creating value, capturing mindshare, proactively prospecting, and working to displace your competitors from your dream client companies.
  • Know that you cannot do anything about a competitor with an irrational pricing structure.
  • When confronted with the choice of doing something illegal or immoral to win business or walking away, walk away.
  • No matter who the competitor, how bad they are, whether they do things that are illegal or immoral, and no matter if you findtheir business practices to be irrational, you cannot speak negatively aboutthem directly. In fact, you should do the opposite.  [Instead, say:] ‘They’re good people, andthey do some really good work in some scenarios. That said, we have wildlydifferent ideas about how to serve our clients and the results that we produce.’
  • Your goal should be to be better than you wereyesterday and better than your best competitor today.
  • Your character and integrity are integralcomponents of your competitive advantage, so you are not going to sacrificethem in order to seek some other advantage.

Chapter 1 YOU ARE THE VALUE PROPOSITION

  • The 4 Level of Value Creation
    • Level 1: Product
    • Level 2: Service
    • Level 3: Business Results
    • Level 4: Strategic Partner
  • If all you do is provide a good product, you will find it extremely difficult to generate any real loyalty from your clients.
  • While you have a spreadsheet that quantifies the value you create and your client’s return on investment, your competitor has a spreadsheet that looks an awful lot like yours.
  • Level 4 means that you have the business acumen and situational knowledge {in other words, the experience) that allow you tocreate a strategic level of value.
  • You need to create all levels of value, as endusers require Level 1, end users and ancillary stakeholders require Level 2,management and leadership require Level 3, and leadership requires Level 4.

Chapter 2 CAPTURING MINDSHARE

  • Your knowledge and advice are what make you a trusted adviser and what allow you to steal mindshare.
    • Knowledge: Command of the facts and what they mean.
    • Advice: [Derived from] your experience in seeing the different decisions people make and their outcomes.
  • Framework for sharing advice:
    • Trends: “There are five trends that are causing our clients to change and making some of the decisions we are recommending…”
    • Implications
    • Advice

Chapter 3 CREATING AN OPENING THROUGH NURTURE CAMPAIGNS AND PURSUIT PLANS

  • It is important that you start as a trusted adviser type, as a professional, and as a peer. You have to embody this role from the very first communication.
  • “Good morning. This is Anthony Iannarino with XYZ Widgets. I am calling you today to ask you for a twenty-minute meeting where I can share with you an executive briefing about four trends that will have the biggest impact on manufacturers in the next eighteen to twenty-four months. I’ll also provide you with the questions we are answering for our clients, so you can share them with your management team there at AAA. How does Thursday look for a twenty-minute briefing?”
  • Email is what you use to follow up a phone call or a voice mail message. You are not going to use email to ask for a meeting. You will use email to share ideas of value and let your contact know that you’ll try them again later, it being your responsibility to call them back, not vice versa.
  • Four primary types of content you need to build the case for change
    • Why Change
    • Providing Proof
    • Facts and Figures
    • Views and Values
  • [When leaving voicemail] I [do not] not ask my dream client to call me back.  [I say that I will call them back.]
  • You want to be professionally persistent, not a pest,
  • You don’t want to automate [sales engagement via email, phone. social, etc.] You are not trying to be efficient here; you are trying to be effective.

Chapter 4 PROSPECTING WITH THE INTENTION OF DISPLACEMENT

  • Develop a dream list of clients
  • Create prospective client tiers
  • Conduct minimal viable research
    • First, you need to know what the company does.
    • Second, you need a list of contacts within this company, incl. the CEO of the Problem
  • Ideally, you should run a campaign that tackles stakeholders one by one, and move on to new stakeholders only after you have established a strong line of communication with the first stakeholder or failed to get a meeting with them.
  • Develop a contact plan
    • Your contact plan should start with a strong guess at who the CEO of the Problem might be
    • If you can’t reach the CEO of the Problem, you can move down a level.
    • If you have captured any information from people at lower levels in the organization, the conversation you have with the folks in the corner offices becomes much more real, and much more interesting
  • You need a series of time blocks and a well-developed plan for prospecting enough to create enough of the right opportunities.

Chapter 5 HELPING YOUR DREAM CLIENTS DISCOVER SOMETHING ABOUT THEMSELVES

  • The approach of asking your prospective client questions about their dissatisfaction has lost a good bit of its effectiveness
  • Discovery looks like in the age of value creation.
    • Individual Interior:
    • Individual Exterior: What is their company doing an what results are they generating?
    • Collective Interior: Their culture
    • Collective Exterior: The collective exterior includes it’s strategy. made up of things like the company’s organizational structure, its process, and initiatives like Six Sigma and other systems.
  • Level 4 salespeople believe that they should sell the equipment, the training, and also consult with the company’s marketing team to help them learn how to position the company to sell effectively after buying the equipment.

Chapter 6 CREATING OPPORTUNITIES

  • You create opportunities when you help your clients develop a vision of the better future available to them, show them what is possible, and help them understand how to get there.
  • The way you want to set up this strategy is to define the current state, define the future state, and then define the solution that will be necessary to move your client from the current state to the better future
  • Sometimes the way to begin a competitive displacement is to identify and pursue a small opportunity that shifts your status from “salesperson “to “partner, “and shifts your company from one that is calling on your client to one that is already serving them and providingthem with an invoice.
  • It can be useful to give your client therationale for letting them go by describing how much things have changed, howdifficult the business is, how tough their business model is when it comes toproducing the same result, and how you have a lot of respect for yourcompetitor and the work they do.

Chapter 7 BUILDING CONSENSUS HORIZONTALLY AND VERTICALLY

  • Identifying the stakeholders
    • The CEO of the Problem:
    • End Users: They care deeply about Level 1 and Level 2 value.
    • Ancillary Stakeholders: They need you to consider their Level 2 needs.
    • Management: They care most about Level 3 value, and much of the time, they care about Level 4 value.
    • Leadership: These stakeholders need Level 4value.
    • In a competitive displacement, you must start [withLevel 4].
  • For each stakeholder, determine
    • Engagement Level
    • Compelled to Change
    • Authority
    • Influence
    • Preference
  • Five [dispositions] of stakeholders
    • Allies
    • Potential Allies
    • Neutral
    • Obstacles
    • Opponents
  • You can deal with obstacles and opponents in oneof two ways. The first, which is my preferred approach, is to isolate them byavoiding bringing them into the process for as long as possible and building asmuch consensus as possible first. The second approach is to engage them earlierin the process. You might also choose to avoid a vocal opponent with lowinfluence.

Chapter 8 FINDING A PATH TO A DEAL

  • Internal challenges
    • Your Stakeholders Disagree on the Problem
    • Your Stakeholders Disagree on the Solution
    • Your Stakeholders Disagree on the Process
  • A sales process is necessary but not sufficient to sell well
  • Things to avoid:
    • Moving Forward Without the Necessary Stakeholders
    • Committing to a Single Strategy
    • Not Exploring the Sequence of Events: Sales is a complex, dynamic, nonlinear human interaction, with too many variables for there to be one right answer for all situations.
  • Understand the outcomes you need to deliver for each stakeholder.
  • Sequencing and Deciding When to Engage Stakeholders
    • The first strategy is to identify early on the people who will be supportive of hiring you
    • The second strategy is to acquire executive sponsorship early in the process to ensure that you have ground cover to protect you from any resistance.
    • The third strategy is to bring people who are not compelled to change and who have high influence into the process in the early discovery meetings.
  • You need to control the process as much as is humanly possible. This doesn’t mean that you slavishly follow a fixed, predetermined process.
  • In The Lost Art of Closing I wrote about the ten commitments necessary to win sales: time, explore, change, collaborate, build consensus, invest, review, resolve concerns, decide, and execute

Chapter 9 CREATING A PREFERENCE

  • The act of selling is about creating a preference to work with us instead of our competitor.
  • You are now the most significant part of the value proposition.
  • You need to have at least 52 percent of yourSME’s expertise. That means you need to be thoroughly conversant in the first- and second-level questions that any client may ask during a sales call
  • Every time you call or meet a client with a subject matter expert from your team, write down the questions that the SMEasks your prospective client as well as their answers.
  • There are three areas where it is critical that you are a subject matter expert:
    • Trends That Will Impact Your Client’s Business
    • How to Change
    • How to Tie Your Solution to Better Results
  • Intangibles that create preference for you
    • Likability and Rapport
    • Business Acumen
    • Caring
    • Attitude: positive, optimistic, future-oriented,can-do, will-do, “I own it”
    • Presence [F2F]: The person who shows up [at theirlocation] is the person who is committed to the client and their business.
    • Your Process

Chapter 10 BECOMING A TRUSTED ADVISER AND CONSULTATIVE SALESPERSON

  • Being truly consultative means being a trusted adviser, and that is a much higher bar than most imagine.
  • By suggesting that you are simply exploring ideas, you reduce their need to defend.
  • When you struggle with your dream client over bringing other stakeholders into the process to gain their support, that decision most likely leads to your losing an opportunity.
  • Believing that a lower price is an indication of greater value is a fundamental error.
  • If what you are attempting to sell your dream client will not ultimately benefit them, don’t sell it to them. If something else will produce the result they need, but acquiring it means buying something else from someone else, recommend that they do so and retain your role as a trusted adviser.
  • One of the biggest mistakes salespeople and sales organizations make is allowing their clients to underinvest in the results they need.

Chapter 11 DEVELOPING AN EXECUTIVE PRESENCE

  • Executive presence is the ability to present yourself as someone with the knowledge, skills, and capability to help lead your dream client’s company forward.
  • The first thing you need to build an executive presence is confidence.
  • A trusted adviser’s advice comes from having a strong, informed opinion and a point of view as to why and how your dream client should change.
  • You are continually searching for new insights and new ideas to bring to their business to keep them ahead of their competitors.
  • When you are helping your dream client decide to change, there will be conflict. When you are asking them to fire their friends, there will be conflict. As you are working with stakeholders who are obstacles or opponents of the change you are recommending, there will be conflict.

Chapter 12 HOW TO BUILD A WALL OF FIRE AROUND YOUR CLIENTS

  • Focusing on their continued growth is the only way to avoid slipping into the complacency that opens you up to the risk of being competitively displaced.
  • You need to ensure that your client obtains the outcomes you sell, and you are responsible for that because that is what you sold.
  • Solving the day-to-day challenges your clients face isn’t enough to retain them. From quarter to quarter and year to year, you have to create new value proactively.
  • It is dangerous to rely on a single sponsor/stakeholder
  • You can protect your clients from risk by developing a cadence to your relationship. One of the best ways to do so is with quarterly business reviews, but it is also important to establish the beats between those major meetings.

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