In a previous life I had spent many years selling oil and petroleum to commercial and industrial customers and was well taught to do so, having attended many sales training programmes. Looking back, many of the sales techniques promoted on these sales training programmes, would today be classed as old hat.
Amongst the tips for ‘polishing shoes’ before you met a potential customer, we were also taught that in order to gather as much intelligence as possible about the market place, an effective sales person always understood what their competitors were doing. This extended well beyond knowing what companies were in the market and information on their products and service provisions. The recommendation was that in order to win as much market share as possible, competitors were to be treated as the enemy to be utterly annihilated and trodden into the ground. The principle was that the only way to be successful was at the complete expense of the competitors.
On the web, I see many sales related blogs and articles are still promoting this very out of date view. Many sales training programmes are also echoing the same principles. However, that said, there are some very refreshing blogs written by individuals who are seeing the world in a completely different way. Many people, including Matt Heaton, President of Bluehost.com, talk to their competitors on a regular basis and this refreshing approach is paying dividends. The spirit of sharing and cooperation appears to be on the increase.
Surely it makes sense. What better to share information, help another with answers to dilemmas and to generally have a cooperative relationship with your competitors, it has to be better for the companies concerned and in time, their industries as well. Surely we don’t have to kill off other companies in order to see a measure of success with our own.
By Kasmin Cooney OBE | Righttrack’s Managing Director