How to Set Traps in a Presentation
In one of my earlier posts I talked about one reason why you should consider presenting first in a sales cycle: so that you can set traps for your competition. Setting traps is a delicate topic for most Sales Engineers: you can lose credibility quickly by slinging mud at the competition. But setting traps well can make all the difference in a competitive sales cycle.
The key to effectively setting traps is truly understanding the needs of your prospect combined with knowing the weaknesses of your competition. While it may be true that your competition has difficult to configure software your prospect may not care about this characteristic and setting a trap won’t be worth the effort.
The steps to setting an effective trap in a presentation are:
- Understand the specific needs of your prospect and areas where your product can clearly meet those needs
- Compare these strengths with the known weaknesses of your competition (using whatever competitive intelligence you might have)
- Bring these differences to light in a presentation (or demo) AFTER you have firmly established credibility
- Make a clear statement of comparison to your competition, such as, “Ask the other vendors whether they have this capability”
- Discuss the traps “during the break” with the prospect to ensure you hit the mark
Establishing credibility first is critical to success in setting traps. For a trap to be effective the prospect must challenge your competition directly in their presentation. If you don’t have credibility, and the trust that goes with it, the prospect won’t take action on your suggestions. It is because of this credibility that Sales Engineers are in a unique position to set traps during a presentation or demonstration.
Traps don’t have to be about product features or functions: they can be about anything you feel is weak in your competition AND matters to your prospect. You can set traps about company stability, overall product quality, ability to deliver or even demonstration style. When I was working at PeopleSoft one of our competitors, Lawson Software, set an extremely effective trap against us multiple times. They set the perception in the prospect’s mind that PeopleSoft was just a “tool” for creating applications and that Lawson, by comparison, was a fully-bake solution. Specifically they suggested that audience members should write down how many times the word “toolset” or “tool” was used during a PeopleSoft demonstration as a measure of the truth of that statement. Unfortunately we used those terms all the time to describe the flexibility of our product. It was only when we saw an audience member putting tic marks on their notes (and asked what they were doing) that we discovered the trap that had been set.