Competition

Sales Engineer’s Guide to Winning Competitor's Clients

Abhinandan Sahgal

September 1, 2024

4 mins

Topics

Example H2

Introduction:

During my tenure as a Senior Solutions Consultant at Zendesk, I was engaged in an opportunity (let’s call it “Buyer”), which was using our competitor (let’s call it “Competitor”), as its Customer Experience (CX) platform. We successfully won the opportunity and moved Buyer to the Zendesk CX platform. In this article, I share my sales strategy and tactics to convert a competitor’s client to our SaaS platform.

Buyer Intelligence: the foundation of a successful Deal

Buyer, acquired by another large company in 2021, is a cloud-based provider of global mortgage solutions. Buyer’s solution seamlessly unites the people, systems, and stages of the home-buying process into a single end-to-end experience, enabling loan officers, borrowers, real estate agents, and settlement agents to manage the homeownership journey in the palm of their hands. Buyer’s company has established itself as a leading digital homeownership software company in the U.S., serving more than 300 independent mortgage banks (IMBs), over 80 banks and credit unions, and more than 41,000 loan originators nationwide.

Buyer was a longstanding client of Competitor, a competitor to Zendesk. We identified that Buyer faced numerous challenges with its current customer experience (CX) platform. They were recently acquired by a large company, which was using Salesforce. Despite the significant effort involved in evaluation and migration, Buyer was willing to take a rip-and-replace approach to moving to another CX platform.

Pain Points of Buyer: Customer Discovery

Our first call with the buyer was a Customer Discovery Call with the Customer Experience team, including Senior Executives and managers. Multiple stakeholders, such as procurement, network, and IT teams, represented the buyer side.

During our customer discovery process, my Account Executive and I (Solutions Consultant) dug deeper to understand the buyer's pain points and business initiatives. We also identified a buying trigger: dissatisfaction with their current vendor. The existing vendor had promised certain features and support, but those promises had not been fulfilled. As a result, they were becoming increasingly dissatisfied and were beginning to shop around for other vendors to transition to. We obtained valuable feedback from their experiences with the existing vendor during these Discovery Calls.

We asked many "why" or open-ended questions to understand better their pain points and the issues they faced with their existing vendor. This helped us to identify the key areas that needed improvement and ultimately led to a more successful engagement with the Buyer.

Buying Criteria: Establish Trust and Expertise

Our primary goal was to listen and empathize with their pain and frustrations. We asked targeted questions to gather more details about their current situation and desired state. Our approach of empathy and curiosity led us to build a relationship based on trust. Understanding and empathizing with their situation was key in gaining that trust and coveted role as a business advisor.

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Questions we asked to establish trust and expertise:

What is working?
What is not working?
What do you ideally want from a CX solution?
What metrics are tied to your success?
Where do you see your organization growing in the next few years?

Personalized Demo: Establish Customer Value

My Account Executive and I debriefed from our Discovery Calls and other intelligence on the buyer to create a flow for our demo. We also took extra time to create a personalized product demo highlighting our capabilities with the usage data in the demo which was highly relevant to the buyer’s industry and team.

In the first 15 minutes of the demo meeting, we addressed key pain points and advised them on how to run their business more efficiently using our platform. Throughout the demo, the audience repeatedly expressed their regret for not having talked to us earlier and considered us their new best friend. This immediate feedback validates the importance of conducting a thorough discovery call before providing a personalized demo. The buyer was eager to discuss how Zendesk could help resolve their outstanding pain points. They were relieved that someone was finally listening to their issues and actively working on solving them.

Closed-Won: Importance of Personalized Demos

We engaged with at least 5 teams of Buyer and conducted 1 discovery call and 2 personalized demo meetings. Our personalized demos helped the client visualize the platform quickly. We did not get any further requests from them for a Trial. Trials usually add months to our sales cycle. Also, our pricing discussion went well as we focused on demonstrating the customer value during the demo process itself.

Lessons Learned: Tactics to Win Competitor's Clients

My key takeaway from this deal is that the most crucial toolbox that the pre-sales or Solutions team has is effective customer discovery and a personalized product demo. Effective customer discovery helps you unearth the critical pain points of your buyer. A personalized demo based on an effective discovery establishes you as a trusted Business Advisor of a client.

Here are tactics that I followed to win competitor’s client: