Sales Managers & Team Leaders: How to Respond to Competitors

How well do you know your competitors?

In this episode, Bob and Jeremy look at how sales managers and team leaders can respond more effectively to competitors. Instead of relying on assumptions, they explore the value of running real competitor checks – picking up the phone, testing the buying experience, and seeing what happens.

They talk about how competitor behaviour, not just products or pricing, can influence sales performance, and how teams can use simple benchmarking to improve their own approach.

There’s also a practical look at identifying gaps in the customer experience and using them to strengthen your position in a competitive sales market.

To find out more about our work and to see what we could do to help your organisation, visit www.realitytraining.com.

Transcript

Why Sales Managers Must Benchmark

Bob Morrell 0:14

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Reality is Sales Training. Today we're going to take a bit of a focus on sales managers. So if you are a salesperson listening to this, this will help you because we're going to think about things very much from a team leader or sales manager's perspective. And if you are a team leader or sales manager, we're going to give you some really, really clear stuff that you can do that's going to help your team determine how good they are compared to your competitors.

The India Call That Changed Minds

Bob Morrell 0:46

Jeremy.

Jeremy Blake 0:47

Well, I thought I'd start with a story. So some years ago, Bob will know how many years ago, we were training in India. We're in Gorgaon, and we are training a major travel business. Now it appeared that everybody in the room was very concerned about one named competitor. They thought they were better than them, they preferred their website. They were in awe of them. And I just simply asked the question: how many of you in the room have actually rung this competitor pretending to buy a holiday? Not a single hand went up. I said, okay, should we do it right now? And we got out my mobile phone and I called the main number. I was on Loudspeaker and I tried to book a flight with a hotel a couple of nights to New York or something from London to New York. I can't remember what the ruse was. I was on a business trip or whatever. Because that's what they specialized in was short breaks with flights. And the person was dreadful. The person was poor, they didn't ask me any questions, and the energy in the room just bounded upwards. Everybody lifted and thought, what are we worrying about? And I just put the phone down. The whole exercise took five minutes. And what we're saying here in Bob's intro is you are a team leader. Have your team customer experience checked your competitors? Have they tried to buy the product and service? Now let's be very clear. They don't have to go through with the purchase, but have they investigated the product buying from the competitor or the service and tried to buy it? Very much more easier to do if it's a consumer product or service, but still very possible, even if you're in trade. You can be a business that requires something. So that's what we're putting out there today.

Different Models Still Compete

Bob Morrell 2:25

I know we um we spent some time with a client a little while ago, and they were talking about the fact that their competitors operated in a different way, which meant that what they did was slightly cleaner, um, less salesy. And I thought that was a really interesting perspective that because they had a different operating model, they didn't want to see the competitors as a true 100% competitor. But the fact is that that competitor was stealing business from them because they were more sales focused. Now, it didn't necessarily mean that they had better products or or the way that they deliver those products, they just had a different way of behaving in front of customers. And just because you operate differently than your competitor doesn't mean you're not competitors. You should still judge that marketplace accordingly. And if they're very good at selling, then they're going to be stealing your market share. So I think there's a real opportunity to think, okay, we need to actually know what it's like to try and buy from our competitors. Then we have a benchmark to develop

Run A Team Competitor Test

Bob Morrell 3:41

from.

Jeremy Blake 3:41

Well, taking your word benchmark, what you can do is if there's 10 in the team, 15, however many, get the competitors divided up between you. Just as Bob said, direct competitors, the ones that you're more emotional about because they have the same size company, same founder story, whatever. But also all those direct competitors, indirect competitors who are nicking your business, and off you go. You go and try and buy, maybe all try and buy the same thing. And you need to do the calls within a similar period or the face-to-face visits or whatever. And then have a uniform report. So it's not massively different where people fill in, you know, what did they ask, what did they say, and score them, get a scoring matrix, and then you have a meeting and you thrash it out between you. What have you learned? What does this now inform?

Learn From What Rivals Miss

Bob Morrell 4:24

There's a great example of this told by Rory Sutherland, uh, one of the great marketing gurus, who talked about a restaurant in New York. The entire staff of the restaurant went to the major competitor and they observed everything that happened whilst they had a meal at that restaurant. And then the guy who owned it said, look, they do lots of things that we do really well. What were the bits that they didn't do very well? And we will double down on those and make those bits really, really good. So they then said, Well, that wasn't very good, that wasn't very good, that wasn't good. They made a note of the things that weren't so great, made those things amazing in their own place, and immediately became very, very popular and successful. Now that's a really interesting perspective. Let's not just look at what they do well. What are the bits they don't do so well that we can be brilliant at? That's our differentiator. Yeah. That's what you're looking for.

Homework And How To Get Help

Jeremy Blake 5:17

Compete where you can compete and really win there. Okay, that's your homework, folks. Go off and do your own customer experience checks. And they're different to mystery shopping because you are so much more knowledgeable than getting somebody off the street to go and test them because you're looking at it with the lens of a salesperson. Okay. Thanks for tuning in. See you soon. Bye for now.

Bob Morrell 5:39

This podcast comes from Reality Training. For the last 25 years, we've transformed the customer interactions of many leading UK businesses and developed thousands of managers to be better at what they do. To find out more about our work and to see what we could do to help your organization, go to realitytraining.com.