Pragmatic positioning: Part II

Making your customers sit up and take notice

How to position yourself and your sales campaign
for success in the new era of business

Second in a series

Jerry Stapleton
For SBT

Last month, we talked about positioning and why it’s more important than ever to be able to effectively articulate what you and your company have to offer as a Business Resource for your client.
Before we dig further into what positioning is, let’s address how it brings value to customers. There are three reasons, all related, for why positioning is an essential, value-creating activity, and why its value is even greater in the redefined world of selling.

Byte me: Information overload
The problem used to be customer ignorance — customers needed to be informed by salespeople. That situation, however, has inverted itself almost overnight. Today, customers have too much information. Customer confusion is the real problem. Positioning adds clarity and simplicity in a world that has become remarkably cluttered for buyers.

Succinctly yours
People instinctively trust simplicity. The great philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand put it this way: "Truth bears the sign of a certain clear simplicity and directness, and is harder to reach than are the varieties of error." Done right, positioning affords customers the clear simplicity they can trust.
Von Hildebrand continued, "The basic error of false simplicity lies in the assumption that it is a simple thing to have true simplicity." Indeed, Albert Einstein became Time magazine’s Person of the Century on the strength of one very simple equation: E=mc2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). Yet beneath Einstein’s theory of relativity lies massive complexity beyond the reach of most mortals.
Any sales rep can rattle off reams of information. Good salespeople can summarize that information and even make it relevant to specific customers. Great salespeople take that information and use it to position a message, concentrating on a simple theme. This is much more complex than just communicating useful information.

"But I know what I like …."
People don’t really know why they buy. For years that notion has shown up in books on selling, together with various psychological explanations. Bottom line: customers tend to make decisions for any number of emotional or personal reasons, and then look for a business rationale to legitimize the personal reason.
That phenomenon is becoming even more pervasive because information overload is getting worse by the day. To help customers make their buying decisions, sales reps need to give customers the business rationale, and do so in a way that captures the essence of the sales rep’s own, well-positioned value proposition.
Remember what Andy Grove said back in 1996 about selling in the future? "Salespeople are not going to be involved in information flow at the most basic level." Positioning is the antithesis of basic information flow.

Pragmatic positioning: This one’s for Tzu
The essence of pragmatic positioning is competitive engagement, which can be defined as the science of developing and communicating a message based on your and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Not only must you do your job to try to win the customer, but you must also take responsibility for making your competition lose.
Competitive engagement is deceptively simple: "Go where they ain’t."
It’s the nuances of implementation that make it hard. But most sales pros internalize effective competitive engagement pretty quickly once they are armed with an awareness of some of its specifics, the constant desire to use it, and a little trial and error.
The elements of competitive engagement owe their birth to a general in the Chinese army who lived more than 2,500 years ago. Sun Tzu and his principles are embodied in a remarkably thin, simple, and readable book, The Art of War. The book got a new life when US troops waiting to go to war with Iraq in 1990 and 1991 were seen reading it.
Sun Tzu’s principles continue to influence modern warfare and competitive engagements in other walks of life as well — politics and marketing, for example. Some sales consulting firms and training companies have created versions of competitive engagement based on the Chinese general’s work. One good example is found in Jim Holden’s book, Power Base Selling (Wiley).

A longer shelf life than a Twinkie
Consider these aphorisms of Sun Tzu, which have withstood the test of more than two millennia: