Three to five competitors. That’s how many competitors B2B customers typically consider before making a purchasing decision. It’s not hard to see why. With a wealth of options at their fingertips and the ability to compare products and services in an instant, today’s buyers are more informed than ever.
To stand out, your sales team must not only highlight what your solution offers – but also why prospects must pick you.
This is where competitive selling comes in—as a way to use the competition as another way to showcase unique value, instead of shying or steering away from it.
In this article, we tell you everything you need to know about what competitive selling means, why your sales reps need to use it, and how your sales reps can weave in an element of competitive selling in their sales conversations.
What is Competitive Selling?
Competitive selling, in principle, is about positioning your product or service as the clear choice among alternatives. It is built on using an understanding of your competitors' strengths and weaknesses to highlight your own value proposition.
In practice, it is the ability to adapt your sales tactics and messaging based on the competition, ensuring that sales conversations are aligned with what sets your product apart. It’s the skill of using competitive insights and customer needs to shape a sales pitch that persuades buyers to choose your offering over others.
But here’s an important thing: it’s not about badmouthing the competition; it’s about providing context that helps customers make the best decision. Done well, this approach builds credibility and demonstrates that you’ve done your homework – and are secure in what you offer.
An effective competitive selling approach is built on four pillars:
- In-depth knowledge of your competitors
- A focus on customer pain points
- Clear differentiation
- Social proof of value, or how have others like your prospect found value in your offering
Why is Competitive Selling Important for your Sales Team?
Competitive selling matters because whether you accept it or not, customers are already comparing you to the competition. When you ignore this reality, you miss out on a chance to take charge of the conversation and influence perceptions.
When it comes down to ground realities, it makes business sense to embrace competitive selling for three key reasons:
- Modern buyers expect transparency: Think about the easy access to online reviews, comparison tools, and industry benchmarks today’s customers have. It’s only natural for them to expect openness. Competitive selling shows prospects that you’re confident enough in your offering to discuss alternatives and still believe yours is the best fit.
- It positions you as credible, and customer-focused: By objectively highlighting strengths and weaknesses—both yours and theirs—you position yourself as someone who’s invested in helping the customer, not just making a sale.
- It allows for value-focused messaging: Competitive selling forces you to focus on customer value. This way, you emphasize the benefits that matter most to your customers – taking competitive context into account.
3 Common Approaches to Competitive Selling
Competitive selling is about finding the right approach to stand out. This means deciding what and whom to focus on – and why. Here are three tried-and-tested methods for driving sales in competitive environments.
1. Cost Leadership Strategy
Cost leadership is focused on being the most cost-efficient provider in the market. This approach appeals to price-sensitive buyers by offering lower prices than competitors – while maintaining acceptable quality and functionality. As you can imagine, this is a tricky balance of cutting prices and mastering efficiency.
To understand what cost leadership looks like in action, think about Walmart. Its popular “Every Day Low Prices” (ELDP) is what cost leadership looks like in action – with its focus on economies of scale, optimized supply chains, and advanced logistics systems.
How Cost Leadership Works
As you can imagine, businesses that pursue a cost leadership strategy need a laser-sharp focus on optimizing their processes, using automation, and reducing waste at every stage of production and delivery. It’s how they consistently deliver value at prices competitors find hard to match. They do this by focusing on:
- Streamlined operations: Optimizing processes to eliminate inefficiencies and redundancies to balance low costs with quality standards.
- Economies of scale: Using bulk purchasing and automation to increase production volume and reduce per-unit costs.
- Strong partner/vendor network: Building strong supporting relationships to secure better pricing, favorable terms, and access to reliable resources.
2. Cost Focus Strategy
The cost-focus strategy takes cost leadership and narrows its focus to target specific market segments. This approach caters to niche audiences offering them cost-efficient options that meet their particular needs.
This is exactly how fast fashion leader H&M operates, It implements competitive selling by providing low-cost, fashion-forward clothing targeted specifically at young, trends-focused, price-conscious shoppers. Low-cost production methods and quick turn-over of its inventory help keep prices competitive.
How Cost Focus Works
Cost focus hones in on well-defined groups— by geography, demographics, or industry. The three key components of this approach include:
- Focused offerings: Developing products or solutions designed to address the distinct needs of a target audience.
- Staying up-to-date on trends: Keeping a close track of the changing demands of the market segment to remain relevant.
- Narrowing value delivery: Identifying and eliminating non-essential features or services that don’t align with the audience’s priorities. This avoids the risk of over-engineering solutions for a focused market.
3. Differentiation Focus Strategy
Differentiation focus is about creating unique value for a narrow market segment. This approach moves away from competing on cost alone – instead delivering offerings that address specific, unmet needs not matched by competitors.
Rolex exemplifies differentiation focus. Its luxury watches are targeted at a narrow, high-income market that values exclusivity and craftsmanship. By emphasizing its design and superior craftsmanship it creates a strong emotional connection that justifies its premium pricing to customers.
Another example is Whole Foods Market. It focuses on health-conscious and environmentally aware shoppers through its promise of organic and sustainably sourced products.
How Differentiation Focus Works
Differentiation focus aims to dominate a niche with special solutions that resonate deeply with the target market – be it eco-consciousness, superior quality, innovative features, design, or unparalleled service. The three tenets of this approach include:
- Developing distinct offerings: Focus on niche-specific offerings, such as features or designs that solve unique problems for the target customer. Think ergonomic office furniture for remote workers, or how Notion focuses on productivity-focused users.
- Telling a compelling brand story: Highlight what makes your product or service unique. Share customer success stories or explain how your approach is different from competitors in ways that resonate with your audience.
- Focus on perceived customer value: Whether it is meeting unwavering standards of quality, developing strong emotional connections, or offering exclusivity, differentiation-focused companies ensure that their positioning and features focus on things that their customers perceive to be valuable.
Here’s a quick look at the three competitive selling approaches and how they align with key business aspects.
The Prerequisite to Competitive Selling: A Sharp Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Having a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is how you set your business apart from competitors. A strong UVP doesn’t just explain what you do; it builds an emotional and practical case for why customers should choose you.
An important thing to remember is that this focus on “value” – which means that your sales reps need to be coached on using customer benefit-focused language.
When you think about UVPs done right, Apple is one of the first names to come to mind. Its value proposition focuses on premium design, innovation, and a seamless user experience. Another great UVP is that of Hubspot which positions itself as an all-in-one CRM that aligns marketing, sales, customer service, and operations teams to drive growth.
Steps to Craft a Winning UVP:
1. Use customer data to tailor your messaging: Capture the Voice of the Customer (VoC) by collecting feedback through online reviews, social media, surveys, interviews, focus groups, customer support interactions, and sales conversations. Combine this with data on customer demographics to craft a UVP that
- Focuses on common traits or challenges among different customer groups
- Uses the language that customers use to articulate challenges and value
- Establishes competitive differentiation
2. Continuously gather feedback: Your UVP should be a living, evolving statement that adapts to your customers’ changing preferences. Conduct regular customer interviews and pulse checks to uncover what existing customers values most. In addition, monitor online reviews, social media mentions, and analyze sales conversations at different stages to capture unfiltered customer insights.
3. Assess what resonates: Analyze patterns in customer conversations to determine which aspects of your UVP drive the most engagement in sales calls. For example, track how customers respond to specific messaging, product features, or service benefits.
Revenue intelligence tools can help you pinpoint what’s working and what needs adjustment.
The right revenue intelligence tool can help you continuously refine your UVP by surfacing continuous insights into customer conversations – so you have a better understanding of customer sentiment, needs, and preferences. AI-based revenue intelligence tools like MeetRecord can help you surface the right feedback by identifying patterns in what resonates most.
For instance, Coverflex achieved a 35% increase in prospect engagement by using MeetRecord’s AI-driven insights. The Coverflex faced challenges in tracking interactions and aligning internal teams. By integrating MeetRecord, they were able to review client conversations and take steps to improve client engagement by delivering a more consistent and personalized experience, directly aligning their value proposition with customer expectations.
3 Must-Have Strategic Competitive Selling Techniques
In its essence, competitive sales is less about tearing down your competitors and more about positioning your offering as the most relevant to your prospect’s specific needs.
Three proven approaches will help your team refine its approach to competitive selling, without compromising professionalism or trust.
1. Mine for Weaknesses in Your Competitor’s Strengths
Every strength comes with a price. For example, if you have a competitor product known for its comprehensive, all-in-one approach, the platform might also come with a steep learning curve, or extensive implementation/integration efforts.
A fantastic example of this is HubSpot which leveraged Salesforce’s complexity as a weakness by positioning itself as a simpler, user-friendly CRM for small businesses. While Salesforce offered robust features, HubSpot highlighted its ease of use, transparent pricing, and quicker implementation. This attracted the right audience that would have found Salesforce’s steep learning curve and hidden costs overwhelming.
Work closely with the product team to help your sales team understand competitors’ market positioning and customer reviews. Next, make sure your sales pitch – without explicitly naming competitors, emphasizes how your solution avoids common pitfalls that competitors have.
2. Use the ARR Framework to Handle Competitor Mentions
The ARR framework (Address, Reframe, Redirect) is a powerful tool to handle objections while applying competitive selling:
- Address: Acknowledge the customer’s concern
- Reframe: Shift the focus to a more favorable context (for your product)
- Redirect: Steer the conversation toward your offering’s strengths
Example: If a prospect says, “X has been in the market longer and is a recognized name. I’m not sure if I should take a risk with a newer tool like yours."
Your sales reps can use the ARR framework:
- Address: "I completely understand why the competitor’s established presence is reassuring – they’ve been around much longer, and have gained the trust of their customers."
- Reframe: "That being said, as a newer player, we have the flexibility and speed to experiment and innovate much faster. For example, we’ve been able to customize our reporting widgets for our SMB customers, which many established tools don’t provide because of their legacy architecture."
- Redirect: "I could walk you through case studies where clients switched from larger providers to us and saw improvements in their delivery timelines and budgets?”
3. Seek the Prospect’s Consent to Highlight Competitive Differentiators
Directly criticizing competitors has the risk of coming across as unprofessional and defensive. Instead, explicitly seek the prospect’s consent to discuss your offering’s unique strengths.
Here are a few other things for your sales reps to keep in mind:
- Use a neutral tone to acknowledge the competition: For instance, say, "I know you're also considering X. Would it be helpful if I shared where our approach differs so you can see how it aligns with your needs?". This avoids dismissing the competitor while signaling you have unique value to offer.
- Use data to reinforce your point: Highlight measurable outcomes to shift the focus to proven value. For example, say, "Our customers last quarter reported a 20% faster onboarding time, which means they started seeing results in just two weeks. "
4 Tactical Tips to Apply Competitive Selling
As important as the ‘big picture’ strategic approaches are, you need to also focus on tactical sales techniques – or the day-to-day actions – that help your teams apply competitive selling in their sales approach. Here are some such tips that your sales reps can incorporate while practicing competitive selling:
1. Focus on timing
The best time to target prospects is during transition phases – like during leadership changes, market shifts, or when the prospect’s contract with the competition is nearing renewal.
You could be dealing with new decision-makers or old decision-makers who are more likely to be more open-minded and yet, intentional in these stages of transition.
This is also the best time to capitalize on early engagement, through say, a free audit or trial, to build trust before a competitor gets a chance to make their move.
Another way to use timing to your advantage is to make your competitive move early. Buyers often form their opinions early in the sales process, so don’t wait until the end to demonstrate your competitive edge.
Lead with key differentiators at the start of your presentation or pitch. Use customer stories or case studies to anchor these points in a real-world context.
2. Build multi-level relationships
To influence a decision against the competition, your sales team needs to build a strong case with not just decision-makers, but gatekeepers and influencers within the organization. This includes end-users, managers, and even administrative staff who have the potential to advocate for your solution internally. It’s by gaining trust at multiple levels that you will be able to show how and why you’re a better bet than the competition.
3. Make a personalized pitch and presentation
In competitive selling, your sales team and your brand need to stand out. The key is to be as authentic as you can – while you center your focus on the customer. A tailored presentation with examples of their use cases and focused on their challenges significantly increases your chances of standing out. For instance, instead of saying, “Our tool offers real-time analytics,” frame it as, “We understand your team is used to making quick, data-driven decisions for staffing. Let us show you how we simplify that process with real-time analytics.”
As you can imagine, your sales reps need to understand your customers – industry, business model, and challenges – to craft a pitch that feels bespoke. The key is for salespersons to speak the customer’s language and use industry-specific terminology and examples to build credibility and relevance.
4. Differentiate on service and support
When it comes to competitive selling, one of the most compelling ways to stand out is by demonstrating how your customer service, onboarding, and ongoing support are a step above the competition.
Highlight your strengths in these areas to win trust:
- Service and support excellence: Share metrics like faster response times, higher satisfaction ratings, or proactive outreach. Example: "We respond to all support tickets within X hours, compared to the industry average of Y hours." or "Our customers consistently rate us 4.8/5 for support experiences."
A ‘Compare Us’ document is another compelling resource to share with the customer. Develop a detailed side-by-side comparison of your service and support metrics versus your competition. You could even offer a 'Service Guarantee' like saying "16/6 support response within 2 hours or your first month is free." to build confidence in your reliability.
- Customer onboarding: Showcase tailored plans, dedicated teams, and faster time-to-value. For instance, create defined value propositions like
"We build tailored onboarding journeys based on your specific goals, with a dedicated point of contact from Day 1”
"Our customers see measurable ROI within X weeks, against the average of Y months.”
- Use customer stories: Leverage testimonials and case studies that specifically highlight service excellence and onboarding success. For instance, try using testimonials like “After switching from [competitor], we finally had a support team that felt like an extension of our own."
Key Skills to Master for Competitive Selling
Competitive selling is as much about honing your skills as it is about strategy and tactics. To consistently beat the competition, your sales reps need a strong foundation of competencies that elevate their performance and position them as confident in your product.
1. Deep Product & Domain Knowledge
There’s no overstating this. To sell competitively, your team needs to be more than just familiar with your product—they must develop expertise in understanding and articulating how it helps customers in different domains.
They need to understand how your product works across industries, domain-specific pain points, and how it fares against competitors.
As a sales leader, you need to
- Invest in ongoing training: Conduct regular sessions with the product team to be current on the product and the industry. Expose your sales reps to external seminars or conferences so they develop a stronger understanding of the market and the industry – beyond your offering.
- Help connect features to outcomes: Train your team on how specific features solve real-world problems. For example, if your sales team sells a marketing automation tool, they need to know how it can drive ROI for e-commerce businesses facing high bounce rates.
2. Objection Handling
By design, objections are a part of competitive selling. They’re opportunities to build trust and address concerns head-on. To help your team, here are some practices to engrain within your team:
- Active listening: Make sure your sales reps remember to fully understand the objection before responding—avoiding the temptation to rush to defend the product. Train them on active listening skills like empathizing, summarizing, paraphrasing, and others so customers see that their concerns are being acknowledged.
- Responding with clarity: Coach your sales team to use data, examples, or testimonials to provide evidence-based responses. The ARR framework is a great tool to help sales respond with clarity. For instance, when a customer raises an objection like: “Your pricing is much higher than your competitor’s.”. Your team should know how to respond with clarity and confidence. For instance, they could say, “ Yes, many customers initially feel the same but quickly realize the additional value we offer through features like X. Would it help if I shared how this impacts ROI?”
3. Building Trust and Credibility
In competitive selling, trust is ultimately the deciding factor. Buyers can see through the fluff – they need to feel that your team is recommending the best solution for them, not just trying to close a deal.
Here are a few guidelines for your sales team:
- Be transparent: If your product isn’t the perfect fit for a specific need, encourage your sales teams to admit it and highlight where it excels. Customers will appreciate the transparency.
- Leverage social proof: Make sure that your team is aware of all available resources (success stories, case studies, or testimonials from similar customers) and the right time to share them with customers.
- Follow through: Make sure your team delivers on promises – whether it’s setting up a proof of concept (PoC), sending additional information, or arranging a follow-up demo.
Key Mindsets to Help Sales Reps Make the Most of Competitive Selling
Ultimately, the mindset your sales team brings to competitive selling can make all the difference in how effective they are. As a sales leader, your role is to nurture healthy, honest, and customer-centric approach that prioritizes long-term relationships and customer value. Here are the core mindsets that will help your team make the most of competitive selling:
1. Customer value precedes everything else
Focus on finding the right customer – not making yourself the right choice for every customer.
This means that your sales reps need to go beyond features and pricing—to prioritize measurable long-term value for their customers.
To help cultivate this mindset, make sure your sales conversations focus on:
- Long-term impact: Focus on positioning it as an investment rather than a one-time expense. For example, if you sell a project management tool, highlight long-term value, such as: "Our clients see continued benefits year after year. A marketing agency cut project overruns by 40% in year one, improved budgeting with our analytics in year two, and boosted client retention by 20% in year three"
- instead of pitching it as "the best platform to organize tasks and deliver projects on time", your sales reps could say, "Our clients continue to see value way past the first year. They typically start with streamlining task management, but there’s more value each year. For example, a marketing agency used us and cut project overruns by 40% in the first year. In the second year, they used our analytics capabilities for budgeting. By year three, they were able to use our automation features to drive a 20% increase in client retention."
- Gathering and acting on customer feedback: Encourage your sales reps to ask for feedback, say at the end of every product demo, or at key milestones. Highlight instances of how past customer input has fed back into the product to demonstrate your commitment to customer value.
2. Branding Matters
Your sales reps are your brand ambassadors on the ground. A consistent and authentic brand personality will help your sales team build deeper connections with your audience. This brand-focused mindset revolves around positioning your company as not just a product or service provider – but as a value-driven trusted partner.
To strengthen your team’s brand mindset, ensure your sales reps represent the brand voice and values that are consistent with your brand positioning, website, social media, or customer service. Craft your messaging and positioning to reflect your company values. Use sales coaching to reinforce call scripts or talk tracks that help maintain consistency across multiple conversations.
If you’re a sales leader, conversation intelligence tools like MeetRecord analyze all your sales reps’ conversations to help you assess if your brand personality comes across consistently across all interactions.
3. Customer Service at All Stages
Customer service doesn’t begin when a sale ends. Competitive selling thrives when businesses offer an exceptional experience beyond the product itself.
Stellar customer service starts at the sales stage. Create a seamless and informative sales process by providing prospects with the right tools and information to make informed decisions at each stage. Instead of overwhelming them with information and resources, stagger them such that they receive the right resources – be it case studies, comparison sheets, or custom demos – at the right time.
Post-sale, make sure your sales reps continue to check in with customers to check on onboarding assistance, troubleshooting, and more.
How Revenue Intelligence Tools Can Help Your Team With Competitive Selling
While strategies, tips, skills, and mindsets are key to competitive selling, your team needs all the help they can get to apply them in practice.
The right tools give you and your team data-driven insights, timely feedback, and personalized recommendations that enable them to sell more strategically.
Revenue intelligence tools have the potential to improve all facets of your sales team’s performance – including competitive selling can provide these capabilities, enabling teams to sell more effectively and strategically. Here’s how the right revenue intelligence tool can support your team’s competitive selling efforts.
1. Data-driven insights: Revenue intelligence tools provide sales teams with real-time feedback and conversation metrics that can directly influence how they approach deals. Historical consolidated data on customer preferences, pain points, and buying behaviors will allow reps to craft pitches that take competitor features and mentions into account.
These tools can also help uncover shifts in buyer sentiment and industry changes so they know when and how to make proactive adjustments to stay ahead of competitors.
2. Conversation analytics: Winning in competitive selling often comes down to how well your team communicates. Conversation analytics tools provide a competitive advantage by analyzing sales calls and meetings, offering insights into what works and what doesn’t. That way, you can replicate successful pitch patterns across the team.
Even better, analysis of competitor objections can help you as a leader refine responses to neutralize them effectively.
Sentiment analysis adds another layer of insight that can enable your reps to tailor their messaging for maximum impact.
3. Streamlined sales processes: Consistency and speed can make all the difference in competitive selling. Revenue intelligence tools automate manual tasks such as lead scoring, follow-ups, and data entry, so your sales team can act quickly and decisively. Automated alerts ensure you or your sales team engage leads at the right moment – reducing the risk of losing prospects to competitors.
AI-driven lead prioritization also helps reps focus on high-value opportunities, giving them an edge in closing deals faster.
4. Enhanced collaboration across teams: Competitive selling isn’t just about the sales team—it’s a company-wide effort. With the right revenue intelligence tool, you can share competitive insights across marketing, product, and customer success teams. This unified customer data ensures alignment, reducing miscommunication and enabling more targeted strategies against competitors.
5. Improved data-driven sales coaching: Lastly, the best way for your sales team to excel in competitive selling is through ongoing, targeted coaching informed by real-world data. Revenue intelligence tools provide sales managers and leaders with detailed metrics, so they can strengthen areas like objection handling and competitive positioning.
Competitive awareness coaching, based on data-backed insights, equips reps with the strategies they need to handle rival claims and highlight your offering’s unique advantages.
Over to You
The right revenue intelligence platform can make all the difference when it comes to competitive selling. With every prospect and customer conversation analyzed, MeetRecord gives you actionable insights and AI-driven recommendations – for each prospect and for each of your sales reps.
Sign up for a MeetRecord demo to see how it can help you outmaneuver the competition.
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