Your Fiercest Competitor in Sales

Your fiercest competitor isn’t the biggest company you compete against for your dream clients.

Your fiercest competitor isn’t the nimble, boutique firm that does off-the-charts work and fights way above it’s weight class.

Your fiercest competitor isn’t a company, a person, or your dream client choosing to do nothing at all—although all of these are your competitors and all of them are competing with you in a zero sum game.

Your Fiercest Competitor is Your Belief System

1. Your fiercest competitor is your belief system, if you believe that you can win your dream client without taking the actions that are necessary to winning. Your belief system will beat you if your beliefs violate the iron laws of sales and cause you to behave as if you can successfully present and create value without first having heard and understood your dream client’s needs—two to three levels deep.Winning means adopting a belief system that allows you to take all of the actions necessary to winning. Winning requires that you avoid violating the iron laws of sales.
2. Your belief system will beat you if it causes you to succumb to your fears and fail to ask for what you need to both win the deal and to perform once you win.Beating your fiercest competitor means facing your fears and asking for the commitments that you need in order to win and in order to succeed for and with your client once you have won.
3. Your belief system will beat you if what you believe causes you to behave as you have always behaved and to act as you have always act, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Winning requires that you think about what you do. Beating your fiercest competitor means reflecting on what you do, discovering what works so that you can do more of it, all the while eliminating what doesn’t work.
4. Your belief system will beat you if you believe that your dream clients base their decision on price and that you as a salesperson cannot differentiate your offering and create results that demand a higher price—results that your dream clients will happily pay more to obtain.Beating your fiercest competitor means competing on something more than price, differentiating yourself and your offering, and doing the heavy lifting of creating the kind of value that your dream clients can confidently believe is worth paying more to obtain.
5. Your belief system will destroy your opportunity if it prevents your from naming the elephant in the room and tackling the biggest obstacles and constraints to your client’s success.Beating your fiercest competitor means proving you have the business acumen, the confidence, and the courage to help your dream client face the challenges that prevent them from achieving the results that they need and that they are counting on you to deliver.
6. Your belief system will rip your dream client from your hands if you believe that you are only selling your dream client and that your management and your team don’t also need to be sold. Beating your fiercest competitor means selling your own internal team and acquiring everything you need to win and to succeed. It means managing and leading your internal team even when you lack the formal authority to do so.

You don’t have to be your own fiercest competitor. To remove the biggest threat to your success, you have to change the beliefs that cause you to act—or fail to act—in ways that cause you to lose deals. Beating your fiercest competitor requires that you adopt beliefs that provide you with the ability to act in ways that help you to win you dream client’s business.

What you believe determines how you act. Change your beliefs and you change your actions. Change your actions and you change your results.

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