By: Stephen Bergeron, Founder of Mountain Ties
How do your capabilities align with your prospect’s needs? Equally as important, do your capabilities differentiate you from the competitors.
Let’s start with a basic SWOT Analysis Strengths/Weaknesses (Inward Looking) and Opportunities/Threats (Outward Looking). Do your strengths align with market and prospects needs, Opportunities. Do they create a barrier for entry? Are your weaknesses enabling these threats? What can you do to remove the weaknesses?
Now that we have identified your Strengths, lets look for your Core Competencies and Unique Selling Proposition. This should be a team effort. It is crucial for your internal teams to be aligned with your products, services, and overall capabilities. This alignment is essential when presenting to a prospective customer and involves a two-step process:
- Identify Core Competencies: Begin by identifying your company’s core competencies. Why have you won business in the past, and why do customers continue to stay with you? There should be four to six core competencies that clearly define your strengths and unique value proposition.
Once we understand who we are and what our strengths are and how they make us different. It’s time to develop a series of questions around each of our core competencies that allow us to uncover opportunities within a prospective client and validate alignment.
- Uncover Prospect/Customer/Alignment: Develop questions that can be asked of the prospect to document and validate alignment. Always remember that this discovery process uncovers opportunities and areas of alignment. It is not meant to interrogate the prospect. These questions should be designed to understand the prospect’s needs and how your core competencies can address them. How you ask the question is equally important. You want to build confidence with the prospect that you have solved similar problems before. Then ask an open-ended question that gets them talk and you taking notes and listening.
The information gathered in these discovery sessions become the input to the proposal where you highlight your ability to match your solution to their needs.
About the Author
Stephen Bergeron is an accomplished international sales and marketing executive with over 30 years of experience in B2B, SaaS, and retail point of sale industries. He excels in strategic business development and delivering exceptional marketing campaigns. A performance-oriented leader, Stephen approaches problem-solving, customer acquisition, and profit targets with a strategic and analytical mindset.
With a deep passion for technology and a talent for building high-performing teams, Stephen consistently drives data-driven results and sets new industry standards. His extensive expertise and commitment to excellence make him a trusted authority in sales and marketing, known for achieving outstanding outcomes.
