What does it means to be unique? And how can this help you achieve a competitive advantage? If you spend time selling to an account, clearly you want to win their business. So how can you create the foundation to secure the win?

1. Competitive
Advantage and
Your Unique
BusinessValue
WHITE PAPER

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CREATINGVALUE
Your competitive positioning and Unique BusinessValue
are determined by your customer’s Business Initiatives,
Compelling Events and the project they’re executing to
address one or more of their initiative’s‘Critical Success
Factors’.This project of course creates your sales opportunity.
An example will help: Let’s start with the company’s business
profile.The company is a local bank, called Old Bank.They
have been in business for 15 years in the same town with the
same customers. Business Drivers are significant pressures
that weigh heavy on the mind of the executive.This business
pressure is that Old Bank is losing customers to a new bank,
called New Bank, part of a chain that has just built a new
bank in the town. Old Bank has lost so many customers to
New Bank that they must find a way to address the loss.They
Competitive Advantage andYour Unique
BusinessValue
INTRODUCTION
ThisWhite Paper discusses what it means to be unique
and how you achieve competitive advantage. If you
spend time selling to an account, clearly you would
like to win the business. So how do we create the
foundation to secure the win?
As with any of ourWhite Papers, there will be a
big variance in the seniority and experience of the
readership. Some of you will perhaps be in your first
sales representative role, looking to focus on what’s
really important in the deal. Others may be more
seasoned sales leaders, at Director, Managing Partner
orVP level, tuning in to make sure you’re in step with
the latest thinking and technologies.ThisWhite Paper
aims to provide something for the complete range of
requirements, since the ideas and recommendations
have applicability right up the leadership hierarchy.
However, if you want to dig deeper, or move wider, we
urge you to get in touch with us individually.You can
do this via email to: info@thetasgroup.com.
The agenda for thisWhite Paper will cover 4 main
topics:
• Creating value
• Strengthening your position
• Outmaneuvering the competition
• Managing your team to succeed
implement an initiative to increase customer investments
in the bank.The‘Compelling Event’is an event that forces a
customer to take action.The compelling event is that Old
Bank must increase the customer base, and ultimately the
money deposited, or they will continue to lose customers.
Critical Success Factors (‘CSFs’) for Old Bank could revolve
around a target amount of customer events by a target date.
The CSFs drive the customer’s project – your opportunity.
You create value by determining which capabilities will
best help the customer execute the project and initiative
successfully, then packaging those into a complete solution.
You position yourself, relative to you competitors, by focusing
on those capabilities that are your unique strengths and
create superior value for the customer.

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This means that you have to create Competitive Advantage
and Unique BusinessValue one deal at a time.There is no such
thing as absolute Competitive Advantage or Unique Business
Value.You cannot rely on your company’s value proposition
or marketing messages to ensure a win.You have to adapt
those to the specifics of each buying situation, which are
determined by the key issues that the customer has decided
are important.
So your competitive positioning and Unique BusinessValue
are not just about understanding those issues and selecting
the right capabilities. Rather, they are really about your
influencing the customer’s opinions and decisions about
which issues are most important and how they should best be
addressed. If the customer decides that the most important
issues are those that you best address, then by default you
have Competitive Advantage and can create Unique Business
Value. If not, then at best you’ll be competing on a level field,
and at worst one of your competitors has the advantage.
The key, therefore, to creating Competitive Advantage is to
determine which issues will create value for the customer and
which you can address better than your competition, and to
determine who within the customer’s organization can decide
or influence those issues or decision criteria.
So creating advantage and Unique BusinessValue starts with
understanding the customer’s Business Drivers, Business
Initiative and Compelling Event. But that’s just the start.
There are countless issues that the customer must consider
and address to ensure their success. It is those issues and
their specifics that determine the details of your competitive
positioning and Unique BusinessValue.The customer’s
challenge is to sort through those issues, determine which
ones are the most important, and how to best address them.
Once those issues have been determined, your challenge is to
then select the right capabilities that are your strengths and
best address those issues.
This challenge is made more difficult by the fact that the
Drivers, Initiatives and Compelling Events that create the
projects that are unique to each customer at a given point
in time. Thus the value required by the customer will also be
unique in each case, which in turn means that the specific
issues that the customer must address are also unique to each
opportunity.
Business
Profile
Business
Drivers
Differen-
tiation
Solution Capabilities
Compelling
Event
Unique
Business
Value
Business
Initiatives
Critical Success
Factors
• Customer’s Project
• Your Opportunity

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At this point, you want to leverage the Compelling Event and
your executive credibility to create advantage and ultimately
Unique BusinessValue. You can’t create value without a
Compelling Event, and you can’t influence the buying criteria
without executive credibility. If you have that credibility, they
will listen to your ideas on how to best address their needs.
For the purposes of thisWhite Paper, assume a compelling
event exists and you have established executive credibility.
You use your understanding of the compelling event to
anticipate the key issues and the capabilities that you have
that can address those issues. You then assess the value
that can be created by addressing those issues with your
capabilities.
Next you deploy that value and your credibility to gain
additional inside support, which in turn enables you to
influence the informal decision criteria. You want the key
players to think that the issues that your strengths best
address are the most important. These then get included
in the formal decision criteria, which in turn enable you to
enhance your Unique BusinessValue.
You then use that value and its impact on the agendas of
the key players to create political alignment. If the decision
criteria include the issues that represent your strengths, and
not those that represent those of your competitors, then you
have Competitive Advantage. If you then do a good job
articulating the value of your solution, and connect that to the
agendas of the key players – then you should win.
It is worth exploring this strengthening process in a little more
detail....
STRENGTHENINGYOUR POSITION
Let’s walk through a process that you could go through
to create Competitive Advantage and Unique Business
Value. First, based on your understanding of the customer’s
situation, you anticipate the key issues that the customer will
consider and how they might best address them.
You then match your capabilities to those issues, and identify
the issues that your capabilities can uniquely address, or
address better than your competition. These are the issues
that you want to ensure become key issues. If the customer
thinks these are the most important ones, then you’ll have
Competitive Advantage because they can only be addressed
or best addressed by your capabilities. You also need to
identify those issues that you don’t address very well. You
need to make sure that these do not become key issues, or if
they do, you need to minimize their importance.
You then identify the key players that decide or influence
the key issues, and determine their business and personal
agendas. These issues will become the most important if you
show them how they impact both business value and their
agendas.
Next you analyze the competition. You go through the same
exercise as if you were the competitor’s sales person, who
of course wants the issues that they handle well to be the
most important, and the ones that they don’t to be excluded.
Remember they’re trying to create Competitive Advantage
too.
You then ensure that the informal criteria and the decision
criteria include the issues that you handle well, and exclude
those that you don’t handle so well, or that the competitors
address well. Once you’ve done this – you have Competitive
Advantage. Of course the key to doing this is to develop
inside support and earn executive credibility. The key
players decide which issues are important, so this is all about
influencing them.
Having the decision criteria stacked in your favor then means
you can create a stronger value proposition, which you use
to create political alignment by connecting that value to the
agendas of the key players.

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You then conduct a more comprehensive competitive
analysis – starting with your own position. You should
analyze your own strengths and weaknesses, focusing on
how your capabilities map to the key issues in the formal
and informal decision criteria, and on the inside support and
executive credibility that you currently have, which you will
need to influence the criteria. If your capabilities and solution
best address the issues included in the decision criteria, and
you have better inside support and executive credibility, then
you’re in a good position.
You then analyze each of your competitors. In particular you
want to understand who they are aligned with, their strengths
and weaknesses relative to the key issues, and anticipate
how they will try to create competitive advantage. In other
words, which issues will they focus to create advantage? This
enables you to understand your current competitive position,
which competitor represents your biggest threat, and most
importantly to understand which issues you want to ensure
are excluded or included in the decision criteria.
The first step is to analyze the key issues included in the
decision criteria and their relative priority. Early in the
opportunity these will more likely be in the form of informal
criteria – in other words, in the minds of the individuals
involved rather than formalized on paper. From this you
determine what they think are the most important issues and
how they should best be addressed. You then compare these
to your strengths and weaknesses.
Throughout this process you need to be influencing the
customers’opinions by asking pointed questions that get
them to think about issues that you handle well, and the value
that can be created by addressing those issues. That gets
the customers to understand their importance, which in turn
starts them down the path of prioritizing those issues.
This analysis then helps you determine your competitive
position in terms of how well you address each of the issues
included in the decision criteria.

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capabilities into the impact that you make on their success
– which will be greater than that of your competitors. Better
yet, if they include issues that only you can address – then you
truly have unique value – value that they cannot get from any
of your competitors.
Once you’ve articulated your business impact you then focus
on enhancing executive credibility and proving that you
can deliver what you say you can. The lower your executive
credibility and the less they believe that you can actually
deliver, the more they will discount your value proposition.
So you want to maximize your own credibility and of course
decrease that of your competitors. Armed with a credible
value proposition, you then focus on creating political
alignment by linking that value to the agendas of the key
players.
To recap: early in an opportunity we started with a
Compelling Event and had executive credibility. We were
unsure of our inside support and weren’t particularly
competitive.
By focusing on shaping the opinions about issues to match
your strengths – based on the personal and business value
created by addressing those issues – you now have stronger
inside support. The informal and formal decision criteria favor
you, which by definition mean you have a superior solution fit
and the appropriate resources to compete. You’ve improved
your relationship with the customer and have credible Unique
BusinessValue.
In other words, you are positioned for an effective win.
OUTMANEUVERINGTHE COMPETITION
Once you understand the issues as well as all the competitors’
strengths and weaknesses, you leverage your inside support
and executive credibility to first influence the informal
decision criteria. You of course want to include those
issues that represent your strengths and the competitors’
weaknesses, and exclude – or at least minimize – your
weaknesses and your competitors’strengths.
You then shape the informal decision criteria by connecting
these issues to the personal and business agendas of the key
players. Once you’ve shaped the mind of the customer – that
is, their opinions and beliefs – you then ensure that these get
written into the formal decision criteria based on the business
value that they could create for the customer.
This is how you ultimately achieve Competitive Advantage –
the key players think that the issues that you best address are
the most important – because you’ve shown them that these
issues have the biggest impact on both personal and business
value. By influencing what’s in the mind of the customer
as well as what’s included in the RFP or tender, you create
Competitive Advantage and by default Unique Business
Value.
Later in the opportunity, the most important formal decision
criteria should be the issues that you handle best. The least
important should be those that you don’t handle so well, and
the ones that your competitors do handle well.
Once these issues and their priorities are formalized, you need
to make sure that your strengths remain in the criteria and
that your competitors’strengths and your weaknesses are not
added. This is what your competitors will be trying to do.
If you have advantage, then they will execute what we call a
‘flanking’strategy to negate that advantage and create their
own advantage by changing the formal criteria. To prevent
that, you have to ensure that the key players are invested in
having your strengths included in the criteria because of the
value they create.
This then positions you to create Unique BusinessValue in the
mind of the key players. Remember, value is not absolute –
there is no gold standard – rather it’s like a floating currency.
Value is determined by the opinions and beliefs of the key
players. They decide what is valuable.
Because you have already influenced their thinking on the
most important issues, you only now have to translate your
PersonalValue
BusinessValue
Informal
Decision
Criteria
Formal
Decision
Criteria
Include:
• Your
Strengths
• Competitors’
Weakness
Exclude:
• Your
Weakness
• Competitors’
Strengths

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Sales managers should make sure they stay aligned to
the customer buying process and don’t get ahead of their
customer. This boils down to:
• Focusing on the right issues and the right people
-- The Compelling Event
-- Executive credibility
• Aligning with the customer buying process
-- Focus on customer objectives
-- No product presentations
• Making sure that until there is a defined compelling
event, there should be:
-- No solution presentations, demos or pilots
-- No education
-- No forecasting
Finally, managers should continually encourage the sales
team to deepen their understanding of their customer’s
political structure. As well as traditional hierarchies and
the formal process, managers should direct their teams to
discover who is affected by the problem or opportunity
and who can affect – and be affected by – strategic and
investment decisions.
MANAGINGYOURTEAMTO SUCCEED
The sales manager’s playbook should be to help the sales
team qualify properly, stay aligned with the customer
and continually expand the team’s view of the customer’s
organization.
Qualifying the opportunity is a crucial early step in an
opportunity’s life, to make sure you are correctly engaged on
only the right deals. Once you’ve helped your team qualify,
you must help them analyze, formulate strategy and create a
plan to win.
What do you need to know to do this? The required
knowledge can be summarized as follows:
• Understanding the customer
-- What are their business drivers and initiatives?
-- What are their goals, objectives and strategies?
• Compelling Event
-- What are the consequences and payback for the
Compelling Event?
-- What is the date by which it’s too late?
• People affected
-- Who are the winners and losers if this is addressed?
-- Who are the winners and losers if nothing happens?
• Alternative uses of capital
-- What is the competition for funds?
-- Who can affect the funding decision process?
SUMMARY
It’s worth reemphasizing this important subject with
some key bullets. Establishing Competitive Advantage
and Unique BusinessValue in the mind of your
customer on a particular opportunity involves seven
essential facets:
• Validate the Compelling Event with the key
people
• Anticipate the key issues
• Identify your key capabilities
• Analyze the competition
• Set or change the decision criteria
• Create a stronger Unique BusinessValue
• Connect the Unique BusinessValue to the
agendas of the key players
This way you are best positioned to win the deal. Good
luck.
If you wish to find out more,please contact us at:
info@thetasgroup.com.

8. ABOUTTHETAS GROUP
TheTAS Group helps progressive sales organizations increase their sales velocity resulting in higher win rates, bigger
deals, shorter sales cycles, and more qualified deals in the pipeline. Our unique value is deep methodology embedded
within intelligent Dealmaker software, 100% native in Salesforce. Smart coaching, delivered just-in-time, improves
sales performance and accelerates sales results.We have changed the paradigm of improving sales effectiveness from
traditional sales training to delivering sales methodology and insights when and where the sales person is working a
sales opportunity.
For more information visit www.thetasgroup.com
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