Find The Accelerator

What is Your Sales Differentiation Strategy?

It is one thing to explain the sudden, spectacular growth of enterprises like Facebook or Google. When a start-up company succeeds with a brand new idea or technology, or when it takes off like a skyrocket in an emerging market, we are impressed but not mystified. When the market decides that you have invented a genuinely better mousetrap, you can sell a lot of mousetraps.

But what about companies in mature industries, the ones whose actual goods or services are hard to distinguish from those of a slew of competitors? A few such companies—a precious few—rack up gains far above their industry averages. And they go right on doing it, year after year. They aren’t skyrockets, they’re more like finely tuned, high-performance race cars. What is their Sales Differentiation Strategy? What do they do that the others don’t?

I can’t say this often enough or stress it hard enough: Any company’s greatest hidden asset and Sales Differentiation Strategy, is to develop the untapped potential of its sales force.

Your greatest hidden asset: The untapped potential of your sales force.  

If your products or services are not really new or unique, you’re in a very big club. Its members include the vast majority of all companies on Earth. But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be a plodder, just trying to keep pace with the pack. If you can’t make your products dramatically better than the competition’s—and you probably can’t, at least not in a lasting way—then the most effective way to stand out from the crowd is to get better at selling them. A lot better.

That’s something you CAN do. With the right sales system in place, you can transform your sales operation. Generate more prospects. Get to the correct buyer(s). Cut your sell cycle time. Train new hires far more effectively. Improve the tenure of your sales reps. Justify your price. Boost revenues AND margins. Create truly loyal customers who resist the lures of your competitors.

Here’s the good news: A sales system that enables all of that really exists. It’s called Action Selling. It turns boring sedans into Indy 500 winners. And they go right on winning, year after year.

Action Selling in Action

There aren’t many businesses more generic than garbage collection. But don’t tell Veolia Environmental Services of Milwaukee that it’s in a plodding industry or that the only way to differentiate itself is by dropping its prices.

Veolia has been an Action Selling customer for 10 years. During that period, the company has racked up $100 million worth of “organic” growth—that is, revenue increases that don’t count the effects of acquisitions Veolia has made.

Veolia originally chose Action Selling because its sales process was inconsistent across the company and it lacked a clear path to improvement, according to Mark Dennis, vice president of sales and marketing. Since the company adopted Action Selling, “our growth has been exponential,” Dennis says.

“To put it simply, Action Selling gave us a process for accelerating growth,” he says. “And it wasn’t just a shot in the arm. We’ve been accelerating for 10 years. We haven’t stopped yet.”

Got a question about how to put your company’s pedal to the metal? Develop a winning Sales Differentiating Strategy. Call us at  (800) 232-3485.