Nuanced Account Management by Bala Shankar

Author:Bala Shankar
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

Know Your Competition

As a corollary, you must know your key competitors ’ strengths and weaknesses as well. Knowing how it differs from your company’s will be a useful insight to craft appropriate strategies . If you know the ‘chinks in your armor’, it helps to develop counters to negate arguments from the customer, especially when your competitors don’t have the same weakness. Midsize software companies, for example, often project their on-site resource capabilities as a positive difference vis-à-vis larger players who may tilt toward optimized on-site/off-site models as client engagement progresses. For many customers, the on-site ‘buffer’ is valued as a good safety net and resource for ‘quick’ fixes.

I once posed the question to a sales head of a leading technology company and asked about his two direct competitors . He could not articulate a single aspect of difference in his first recall. I reworded my question and asked ‘why does your competition succeed where you are not able to’. He rattled about seven distinct reasons. I then asked him to do a strength-weakness analysis of his company and the two key peers. It took him half a day but he had an articulated document at the end. This is the homework that is often missing in many companies.

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