Why Should Customers Buy From You?

In July of 2012, SEC launched the Challenger Workshop Series to help members begin building an organizational capability to develop and support Challenger behaviors within their companies. One of the workshops in this series, An Introduction to Challenger Messaging, focuses on arming attendees from members’ sales and marketing functions to create a scalable commercial insight generation capability for equipping reps with the insight necessary to effectively challenge customer thinking and shape the nature of their demand.

But, it will come as no surprise that developing such an organizational capability is far from easy. Before companies can even begin thinking about moving in that direction, they need to prove they can first develop effective commercial insight. This means creating and piloting a proper commercial teaching pitch that delivers insight in a way that not only scales across customers, but also drives action and reframes customers’ assumptions.

The first and often largest challenge we see organizations encounter when creating their first insight-based pitch deck is identifying their underappreciated, unique strengths in the market that will lead to them as the only supplier positioned to best fulfill customers’ newly taught needs.

Exploring unique differentiators—identifying what they are, and what they aren’t—is one of the first exercises we work with members on during the Challenger Messaging Workshop. In our research over the years here at SEC, we’ve identified several ways the best companies approach distinguishing their differentiators and answering the age old question, “Why should customers buy from us?”

One of these best practices comes from Dow Chemical, where they developed a customer outlier analysis to arrive at their unique strengths. To pinpoint what set their company apart in the market place, Dow took a three-step approach:

Ascertain Relative Performance on Loyalty Driver Survey—Using the results from an existing customer satisfaction and loyalty survey, Dow captured customer opinions on its performance relative to the competition to determine where they had distinct performance advantages.
Segment Customers by Loyalty Drivers—Dow used survey responses to segment customers by similar needs and loyalty drivers to identify large groups of like-minded customers.
Conduct Outlier Analysis—Dow explored variations within the needs-based segments to identify the capabilities that had been highly valued by its most progressive customers, but had not yet been appreciated by other customers in each segment.

So how does your sales organization go about identifying its unique differentiators and developing commercial insight?

SEC Members, to learn more about Dow Chemical’s Customer Outlier Analysis make sure to read the best practice and visit the Identify Your Underappreciated, Unique Strengths resource center. Also consider registering up to three of your colleagues from sales leadership, sales enablement, marketing and/or product for our next Challenger Messaging workshop.