In order for you to get into existing sales cycles, capture competitive

accounts or launch a new territory, you need cut differentiators to get you

traction, then greater amounts of deal control.

You recognize people have already begun sales cycles, using Google, and

opinions have begun to form. You are now an interloper, coming in where you

were not invited in the first place.

The ground may be laid by competitors making it difficult for you. Your

company is probably either not well known (or you would be in the deal) or

your company's white noise marketing has so smothered your differentiators

as to make you an "also ran" rather than a leader. You must overcome

barriers your own marketing department erected.

That's the bad news, and if you are a street smart sales pro, you also

recognize a huge advantage you have, that nobody else will have.

Your differentiators are not yet in the fight. That is significant and

let's talk about it here to set the stage for confrontational marketing,

the most powerful hidden force in marketing. Much of its power comes from

the natural tendency for marketing professionals to "run to the white

noise."

Confrontational marketing is not a marketing strategy to get people angry or

mess up their hair. Confrontational marketing means we take our cut

differentiators and show them to the people who matter in the sales cycle.

We eliminate everything not a differentiator and stop pushing it on the

customer.

If it ain't different, why are we saying it?

Often prospects do not want to hear cut differentiators. They made a

"religious" decision for a specific product or service and

institutionalized their beliefs in documents and presentations to others.

If you read the basic Sales Training 101 material, you know people cling to

beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Thus, you

must engage with such people on the battlefield of differentiators. You must

slowly show them evidence their world-view has another dimension. You do

this with compelling information and proofs on your cut differentiators.

The prospect sees an equation where all the incumbent vendors are on one side

doing exact match search. Another vendor, me, stands alone. My product is

not being evaluated on how big we are, our website, our customer base, our

marketing material. We are evaluated according to our cut differentiator.

This is important because when you're going against well known competitors,

who are entrenched in an account, and have many resources you do not have,

you need to use street smarts. Street smarts marketing is confrontational

marketing-selling differentiators only, focusing on differentiators,

proving them at every turn.

Street smarts assumes you are coming from position of general weakness, at

least early in the sales cycle. Over time, your differentiators will gain

you traction, but not at the beginning.

Confrontational marketing means delivering your cut differentiators slowly,

over time. You do not drop them all at once, since they have greater value

when delivered, like bacteria medicine, over a prolonged period.

The sales rep's job is to deliver the confrontational marketing message

around cut differentiators the marketing department has muddled with white

noise. We are the marketing department for our company and we are

responsible for revenue, not press releases.

Because our marketing department is typically pushing white noise, people

have either chosen not to look at our products because they don't

understand our differentiators, or they think there are no differentiators

there.