The 5 Basic Sales Strategies – part 1 of 5 – Frontal
There are five basic approaches to a sales campaign. Each strategy will work some of the time. Unfortunately, none of the strategies will work every time. Unless your product is currently unbeatable in the marketplace, you will have to be flexible in the chosen strategy.
- Frontal
- Flanking
- Fragment
- Defend
- Develop
Three “Fs” and two “Ds” are an easy way to remember this list. In school, these grades would have you fail the semester and kick you off the sports team. In sales, they are the key to your next series of steps to eliminate your competition and increase your commission.
Over the next 5 days, I am going to review each of these strategies. I hope you come back to read all five.
1. Frontal
A frontal strategy requires you to have a clear and concise advantage over your competition. This can be an overconfidence trap that you might temper when you lose a few crucial deals. It requires execution excellence, speed, or surprise to put you ahead. Because you must be front and center with your prospect, it is also resource-intensive. It requires that you are always pressing your advantage.
Unfortunately, the frontal strategy is the most often used and the easiest to defeat.
A frontal strategy is a direct approach due to your overwhelming superiority in solution, price, or reputation. It requires that the three things that you sell are all significantly better than everything else on the market.
Those three things are:
- your product,
- your company,
- yourself.
If you look at this list from the bottom up, do you honestly think you are significantly better than the individual that you are competing against? I am sure you do feel superior but are you so much better that there is no question that you would beat them in every sales situation? If you really are that amazing, reach out to me (Twitter or LinkedIn) as I will want to hire you at my current company where I am the Chief Revenue Officer.
Continuing up the list, you should ask yourself the same question about your employer. Is your employer so amazing that it cannot be compared to any of your competitors?
Finally, at the top of the list is your product. It is quite possible that your product has leapfrogged all of the competition and there is no comparison. In this situation, you cannot ever lose because a truly superior product will overcome all of the deficiencies of your company and you personally. This does occasionally happen and selling this type of product is quite literally like taking candy from babies. However, you need to be very confident that this is the case because if your product superiority is not there, it is very possible that one of the other sales strategies will ensure that you eliminate your competition instead of your competition eliminating you.
The allure of the Frontal strategy is that it is obvious. It reminds you of a sporting event: you versus your competitor. Let the best package win. Unfortunately, most sporting teams eventually lose. So you risk your commission if you cannot produce a consistently superior package.
Because it is so apparent, it is the one strategy that you can execute if you know nothing about your prospect. For this reason, it is the most common strategy of Hunters. Hunters usually arrive at a deal when it is well underway by the prospect and they are actively looking for a way to achieve one of their goals. Because of the late arrival of a Hunter, it is effortless to fall into a frontal attack.
Conversely, a Gatherer and a Farmer will rarely use a frontal strategy. A Trapper will only use it when it is evident that the Trapper has an overwhelming advantage.
If you don’t know what a Hunter, Gatherer, Farmer or Trapper is, you should read my book Eliminate Your Competition which is available wherever books are sold. You may purchase my book Eliminate Your Competition from your favorite book retailer. The ebook version is available at the most popular retailers such as Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. The paperback version is also widely available at such retailers as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books A Million.
Header Photo by jarmoluk (Pixabay)
This post is the first in a series of posts covering the five basic sales strategies. I cover the five basic sales strategies in these posts:
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