The Resurgence of Eat Their Lunch

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition. Several companies have recently bought copies and requested a keynote speech and workshop. Displacement may be back in vogue, as there are too many companies in every industry, something you will see and feel over the next decade, as globalization as we know it ends.

My experience in sales was in temporary staffing, an incredibly commoditized industry. To win a client, it was necessary to remove my competitors. Fortunately, I had spent five years in operations, and I knew more about how to help companies acquire the staffing they needed. Many of my competitors lacked business acumen and an understanding of the client’s challenges and their needs.

Misunderstanding Value Creation

Over time, I noticed that salespeople spent a lot of time talking about the client’s problem and their solution. One problem when selling something commoditized is that everyone has the same solution. In one meeting, I asked a senior leader to help me understand his business and how he thought about staffing. I learned much and repeated this strategy.

To be a better salesperson, you would do well to understand business. In case you’ve forgotten, both Bs in B2B sales stand for business. Too few salespeople don’t believe they are businesspeople, or that they should be. That said, my clients didn’t want staffing. They wanted lower labor costs or flexibility or a way to acquire the people they needed without having to spend the time and money. This is the application of business acumen.

In Eat Their Lunch, the first chapter is about Level 4 Value Creation. Instead of talking about your solution, you focus on what your buyers are buying. This is what Theodore Levitt, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School, meant when he said, “People don’t buy drills, they buy quarter-inch holes.” You will do better with senior leaders when you talk about their strategic outcomes instead of your solution.

The Need to Capture Mindshare

The second chapter of Eat Their Lunch focuses on capturing mindshare, a critical outcome for those who would displace a competitor and run off with their client.

If you look back over history, you will find that people with power and responsibility surround themselves with people who have knowledge, insight, expertise, and authority. You and I might call these people “trusted advisors.” While this is true, many sales organizations don’t build these traits in their sales force.

The salesperson who captures their prospective client’s mindshare is likely to win deals. When a salesperson has been taught they should win by positioning their company and their solution, they tend to lose to salespeople who prove themselves experts and authorities.

Those who still believe that selling is finding a problem and selling a solution don’t understand selling today, when buyers and decision makers need certainty to move forward in a complex sale. A complex sale is one where the decision is rare and comes with a risk of failure. In a displacement, your client has much riding on the decision, making it difficult for the average salesperson and much easier for someone who has proven they know what their client needs to know.

Displacement Strategy

Here is a simple way of thinking about displacing your competitor: 

Identifying Strategic Targets + Relationships + Strategic Value + Time

In most displacement sales, you will first need to build a list of strategic targets (dream clients). As a young sales manager, my company’s clients were rather small. There is no way to grow the business with clients who spend little on what you sell. To address the small average spend, it is necessary to identify the companies that spend millions of dollars on what you sell.

It can take time to acquire a first meeting and cultivate the relationships and mindshare that will prove you create strategic value, differentiating you from the incumbent. Occasionally, your timing is right, and you steal the client quickly. Most of the time it will take time to execute the displacement strategy.

Many sales leaders worry about the time to win a client. You will hear them talking about velocity, which is something they should avoid. More time with a group of decision makers and their task force means you are on offense, and a sales leader should want their sales force to dominate the client’s time creating value.

Elite Their Lunch

The bookend of Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition is Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative. These two books make up a sales methodology designed to create value for clients and displacement incumbents or win a contest over your competition. Now, and in the future, the approach in these two books will be what is necessary to win clients.

One important addition here is business acumen. Those who don’t look, sound, and feel like a business expert will struggle even more than they struggle now. If this isn’t a priority for developing your sales teams, they will lose to salespeople that present themselves as peers.

The Resurgence of Eat Their Lunch + Elite

The increase of attention to Eat Their Lunch will eventually be Elite Their Lunch, as the two books make up a sales approach that works for winning large or enterprise clients. Sales leaders who worry about cold outreach and the massive numbers they need to reach their goals, would do well to learn that activity will not provide them with what they need. Instead, they should worry about the effectiveness of their sales force and their sales approach, which seems to continue its regression to transactional approaches.

In the third decade of the 21st century, those who sell like it’s still the 1980s would do well to catch up to their clients and competitors. For more help with this approach go here.