#032: 4 tips to win competitive deals

Read time: 5 minutes

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Max is a sales coach for seed and Series A biotech startups. He partners with founders and early sales teams to discover product-market-sales fit and build a scalable sales process. Max posts daily tips about early-stage biotech sales on his LinkedIn.

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April 18 at 12 pm ET

Competition in the life sciences is fierce.

But most sales reps try to avoid talking about competition at all costs.

In reality, your prospects are already comparing you to all the other options they have to achieve their objectives.

You can choose to own the narrative or be a victim of their perceptions.

If you let the buyer dictate how they perceive you in the market, you'll end up looking like every other solution and you'll get grinded down on price.

If you proactively position your solution amongst all the other alternatives in the market your differentiated value will become a "must-have".

Position or be positioned.

Before we jump in to the 4 techniques to win competitive deals, let’s look at the 3 types of competition you will likely face.

Competition isn’t always a direct competitor/company. You’ll be competing against the way things are done today. That could be something done manually in-house, an alternative approach to get the same outcome, or direct competition.

Here are some examples:

• Selling a CRISPR gene editing service

  • DIY → They are doing their own editing in-house

  • Alternate approaches → They are using a different technique such as viral delivery or RNAi

  • Direct competition → They are evaluating other CRISPR editing service companies

• Selling custom reagents

  • DIY → They are creating their own formulations in-house

  • Alternate approaches → They are buying off-the-shelf reagents

  • Direct competition → They are evaluating other custom reagent suppliers

• Selling an instrument

  • DIY → less likely to be your competitor but they could be combining a few workflows to get a similar output

  • Alternate approaches → One may be analyzing DNA and another could be analyzing proteins

  • Direct competition → Two instruments that achieve the same outcome in the same fashion (ex: competing short read sequencers)

Your first step is to understand which type of competition you are likely up against. You’ll need to position yourself differently against each of these competitors.

Use their strengths against them

One of the best ways to win competitive deals is to use their own strength against them. Instead of trying to call out all the ways the competition is bad (don’t do this), focus on what makes them really good.

Then turn that strength into a potential weakness.

The prospects that are aligned with your strengths will be more likely to buy from you in this approach.

Make a table of each competitor you face (including DIY).

Write down their strengths and what they are good at.

Then turn those strengths into weaknesses.

Here are a few examples:

Quick dismiss

Now that you know their strengths and can turn them into weaknesses, let’s see how to use them in a conversation.

The quick dismiss is a technique you can deploy early on in the sales process. The earlier you deploy this the better. You want to shape their opinion of the competition before the competition can shape their perception of you.

Here is the 4-part framework:

Example script

“Oh yes, I know all about them. They are really good at X and Y, but they aren’t the best at Z and approach it in a different way from us. Given that you’ll need Z to accomplish [objective], I can show you how we uniquely approach it.”

The quick dismiss is a great way to try and eliminate the competition early. But it doesn’t always work.

So what do we do when the competition is annoyingly sticking around?

We drop landmines for the competition to step on.

Drop competitive landmines

Landmines are carefully crafted questions or remarks that sow seeds of doubt in a potential customer’s head about the competition.

They’re usually indirect, leaving the customer to come to his or her own conclusion.

Identify as many of their weaknesses as possible, specifically the ones that correspond with your own strengths.

Here is the framework for dropping landmines:

Here are a few landmine examples:

• How heavily do you value the post-purchase customer experience for troubleshooting and what not?

• How important is it to have functional data vs RNA-based data?

• Where would you place the speed of project completion on your priority list?

• How valuable is it to do yourself or do you just need the results?

• How important is it to work with a specialist on this part of the project?

• Have you considered the off-target effects of taking that approach?

All of these questions are indirect ways of highlighting your unique strengths and getting the prospect to prioritize them.

To win competitive deals, your differentiated capabilities need to be in the “must-have” decision criteria.

Document & rank decision criteria

When the required capabilities are only defined by the customer, the lowest-cost solution wins.

You must influence the decision criteria by getting your differentiated capabilities listed as “must-haves”.

But don’t assume because you talked about it, that it will be remembered. Most people are busy with other things and buying your solution isn’t the most important thing on their plate.

So document and rank all the decision criteria and get buy-in/feedback from everyone involved in the decision.

Here’s what that looks like:

• Document the decision criteria they are using to make the ultimate decision (this might require conversations with different people)

• Have them stack rank most important to least important and must have vs nice to have

• Your goal is to have as many of your differentiated capabilities included in the “must-have” section

• This is how you rig the decision criteria in your favor

• Make sure it’s documented, shared, and agreed upon with all the influencers and decision-makers

Now you have a single source of truth for how they will choose a solution. If you've made sure your differentiated capabilities are on the “must-have” list, your chances of winning the deal skyrocket.

TL;DR

• Know who you’re competing with

• Position yourself early in the conversation (don’t wait)

• Use their strengths against them

• The quick dismiss framework will get them out of the race early

• If they stick around, drop landmines for the competition to step on

• Document everything and get your differentiated capabilities on the “must-have” list

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