Let’s talk about trap-setting.
Effective trap-setting increases your win rate by disqualifying your competition. This is done by influencing your buyer’s required capabilities to include your differentiators.
Here’s how:
Define your differentiators
Identify your differentiators across three types:
Unique (features only you provide)
Comparative (features you share with the competition that you do better)
Holistic (company advantages, e.g., more engineers which lets you innovate faster)
Defend your differentiators
For unique differentiators, you’ll need to defend why your company took a different approach than the competition and the value it will bring your customer.
For comparative, you must define why it’s better and matters.
For holistic, establish why these advantages would give your customer peace of mind.
When to use
You should introduce unique and comparative differentiators early in the sales process. Here’s one way to introduce on a discovery call after your customer describes one of their required capabilities:
“Many customers that require [insert customer required capability] also require [insert unique or comparative differentiator]. They’ve found that without that capability they [insert negative consequence].”
Holistic differentiators are best at the end of the deal cycle. Use them to give your customer confidence they are partnering with the right company, not just purchasing the right product.
Effective trap-setting is one of the most effective ways to increase your win rate in head-to-head competition.
That’s it for this week! Shoot me a message if this was helpful for you or if you have topic requests for future newsletters 🙂
-Kyle
