You’re Taking Theirs or They’re Taking Yours

On my list of critical success attributes for salespeople, number three is competitiveness. It follows only the master key to sales effectiveness, self-discipline, and optimism. So it deeply troubles me to see so much apathy and complacency when it comes to prospecting activity.

You need to understand that even if you aren’t interested in competing against your most ferocious competitors, they’re interested in competing with you.

What Do Your Competitors Call Your Clients?

It is critical to understand what is happening in your space right now, even as you read this post. Your competitor, the one who isn’t complacent anyway, is calling on your clients.

To your competitors, your existing client is their dream client!

Your competitor has a list of dream clients, and a good part of that list is made up your existing clients. How frightened are you that your competitors are nurturing, or attempting to nurture, contacts within your existing client accounts?

But wait, it gets worse.

What Do Your Competitors Call Your Dream Clients?

Your list of dream clients is also being aggressively pursued and nurtured by your competitors. To your competitors, your dream clients are also their dream clients.

If you are complacent, if you aren’t taking the actions that you need to build the relationships that open opportunities, if you aren’t nurturing these relationships by demonstrating that you are a value-creator, and if you aren’t competing like it counts, know that some of your competitors are.

Your competitors are trying to take your clients, and they are trying to win your dream clients and block you from winning them. They are competing, and they couldn’t be more pleased to discover that you are complacent when it comes to prospecting and nurturing your client and dream client relationships.

The question is, what are you going to do about it and when are you going to start?

Questions

Are you not motivated by the fact that your competitors are calling on your clients?

Are you calling on their clients and dream clients with the same determination and focus with which they are calling on yours?

Are you complacent about prospecting because you don’t understand that your competitors are gunning for your clients and dream clients?

What happens if you don’t prospect and you don’t compete like it means something?