Knowing how to handle competition in business is a critical sales skill whether you’re trying to win new business, retain existing customers or displace them from the competition.
In my experience, most salespeople get it wrong.
When a buyer mentions the competition, the worst thing you can do is start listing the reasons your solution is better, criticising the competition or desperately trying to justify your pricing.
As I always say during my sales training sessions: The more attention you give your competitors, the bigger problem they become.
The best salespeople stay cool, calm and collective, qualify and question strategically, and control the narrative without becoming defensive or resorting to aggressive selling.
In this article, I’ll explain how to handle your competitors in sales, and how to position yourself as a trusted consultant rather than a defensive salesperson.
Jump to a section:
- Never Attack Your Competitors
- How to Compete for New Business
- How to Use Your Competitors’ Weaknesses
- How to Win Clients From Your Competitors
- How to Stop Competitors Stealing Your Clients
- Final Thoughts
- Frequently Asked Questions
Never Attack Your Competitors
One of the most important rules of handling competition in sales is to avoid attacking, criticising or speaking negatively about them.
It’s unprofessional, and in my experience, it’s a tried, tested and failed sales strategy.
When you criticise another business, you risk making yourself look insecure. You also give the buyer a reason to question your professionalism, particularly if they already have a relationship with that company.
And if they’re happy with a competitor’s solution, attacking it can feel like you’re questioning their judgement.
Instead, I recommend taking the opposite approach. Acknowledge that your competitor has a good solution, show them some respect and concentrate on understanding what matters to the buyer.
You don’t have to pretend your competitors are better than they are, and there’s nothing wrong with highlighting genuine differences between your solutions.
The mistake is turning your sales conversation into an argument about which company is better before you’ve established what the buyer actually needs.
Your job is to demonstrate the value you can offer, not convince someone that your competitors are rubbish.
How to Compete for New Business
When you’re competing against another vendor for new business, your first challenge is to avoid becoming defensive.
In my experience, most salespeople start pitching the moment they discover a buyer is considering a competing solution.
They launch into a presentation about their features, benefits and competitive advantages, hoping to convince the buyer their solution is the better choice.
Unfortunately, they often do this before they’ve properly qualified the opportunity.
This approach makes you sound desperate and suggests you’re afraid of your competitor.
More importantly, you’re trying to sell your competitive advantages without knowing whether any of them matter to the buyer.
The best form of attack isn’t defence. It’s confidence.
When a buyer mentions a competitor, I recommend remaining calm and doing the opposite of what they might expect.
Compliment the competitor. Acknowledge they have a competitive solution, and then bring the conversation back to the buyer’s requirements.
Your objective isn’t to avoid competing. It’s to establish what you’re competing for before you start trying to win.
How to Handle Questions About Your Competitors
Some buyers will take control of a sales conversation by asking you to explain what makes your solution better than a particular competitor.
You might even find yourself being asked to justify your pricing or explain technical differences before you’ve had an opportunity to understand their requirements.
These questions are perfectly reasonable, but answering them too early can quickly turn your discovery call into a sales pitch.
You need to learn how to park premature questions and guide the conversation back to qualification without appearing evasive.
Here are three responses you can adapt to different situations:
- “I know them well, and they have a very competitive solution too. But I’d rather ask you a few questions to find out if we can help you before I start trying to compete for your business.”
- “I could easily give you a list of the unique features and benefits we offer, but I’d rather understand your requirements first so I can focus on the things that would actually be valuable to you.”
- “I can’t give you an honest answer to that question until I understand your needs. In my experience, every client is different, and what makes us better for one business might not matter to another.”
These responses allow you to acknowledge the question without getting drawn into a premature comparison.
They also demonstrate that you’re more interested in helping the buyer make the right decision than simply trying to win their business at any cost.
Of course, you can’t keep parking questions indefinitely. Eventually, you’ll need to demonstrate why your solution deserves their investment.
But by qualifying the buyer first, you’ll be in a much stronger position when that conversation takes place.
How to Use Your Competitors’ Weaknesses
Regardless of how well you handle your initial conversations, you’ll eventually have to go head-to-head with your competitors.
When that happens, your biggest competitive advantage is knowing how to use your competitors’ weaknesses without attacking them directly.
Let’s say you’re competing against a company with a particularly expensive pricing model.
Telling the buyer the competitor is overpriced won’t necessarily influence their decision. It might even make you appear defensive, particularly if you haven’t established how important pricing is to them.
A better approach would be to ask whether they’ve had an opportunity to review the competitor’s pricing model and understand how it works.
You’ve now brought a potential weakness to their attention without making a single negative comment about the company.
The buyer can investigate the issue and draw their own conclusions.
You can apply the same approach to almost any competitive weakness, but there’s an important condition.
Before you use a competitor’s weakness to your advantage, you need to establish whether it matters to the buyer.
A weakness is only a competitive advantage if it affects something the buyer cares about.
Turn Competitive Advantages Into Qualifying Questions
In my article about value-based selling, I recommend creating a spreadsheet to help you understand and communicate the value of your solution.
I’d also recommend adding a fourth column to that spreadsheet called Qualifying Question.
For every feature or competitive advantage you’ve identified, think of a question you could ask to establish whether the buyer has a genuine need for it.
Let’s say you know one of your competitors has weaknesses in data protection.
Rather than immediately telling the buyer about those weaknesses, start by asking how important data protection is to their business.
If they tell you it’s a critical requirement, you’ve identified an area where your solution could offer a meaningful advantage.
You can now explore their requirements in more detail, demonstrate how your solution addresses them and recommend they ask your competitor some specific questions about how they handle data protection.
This puts you in a much stronger position than simply claiming your solution is more secure.
You’re helping the buyer establish their own buying criteria and encouraging them to investigate an area where you know your solution is stronger.
And rather than sounding like an aggressive salesperson trying to discredit the competition, you’re behaving like a professional consultant who understands the buyer’s requirements.
Give Your Buyers Questions to Ask Your Competitors
I also recommend preparing a list of questions that help buyers investigate areas where your competitors may struggle to meet their requirements.
These questions should be based on genuine differences between your solutions, not assumptions or exaggerated claims about what your competitors can and cannot do.
If you’ve qualified the buyer properly, you’ll know which questions are relevant and which ones are best left alone.
Rather than directly communicating your competitor’s deficiencies, you can encourage the buyer to investigate them for themselves.
If you find yourself in a situation where the buyer appears ready to choose a competitor, you could use a final approach along these lines:
“I know them well, and they have a great solution too. Before you make your final decision, there are a couple of things I’d recommend asking them about. Would it be useful if I shared those with you?”
You can then share two or three questions that are relevant to the buyer’s requirements.
This technique can be particularly effective because you’re not asking the buyer to take your word for anything. You’re encouraging them to conduct their own due diligence.
And when those questions expose a genuine weakness, you’ll have given them a very good reason to reconsider their decision.
The important thing is that your questions must be relevant and your concerns genuine. You’re trying to help the buyer make a better decision, not manufacture problems that don’t exist.
How to Win Clients From Your Competitors
Trying to win a buyer who already uses a competitor’s solution is a different challenge from competing for a new client’s business.
You’re not simply trying to convince someone to invest in a solution. You’re asking them to reconsider an investment they’ve already made.
And that means you’ll probably encounter more resistance than you would with a buyer who isn’t currently using anything.
The buyer already knows your ultimate objective. They understand that you want to replace their existing supplier, and they’re unlikely to welcome an aggressive sales pitch about why they should change.
Before you can persuade them to consider an alternative, you need to establish whether they have a reason to move.
That reason might be a unique benefit your solution offers, a significant cost saving or an existing problem that their current supplier hasn’t managed to resolve.
But none of these will matter until you’ve discovered what the buyer actually needs.
Ask Questions About Their Current Solution
Your qualification process should begin with the usual questions about their business, objectives and requirements.
However, you’ll also need to understand their relationship with their existing supplier and how satisfied they are with the solution they have in place.
I recommend using some of the following questions to qualify the opportunity without putting the buyer under unnecessary pressure:
- “What solution do you have in place today?”
- “How long have you been using it?”
- “What do you like most about it?”
- “What made you choose that solution in the first place?”
- “Have you managed to achieve those objectives so far?”
- “Were you involved in the decision to invest in this solution? If not, who was?”
- “If you were the CEO of [Competitor’s Name], what would you change about the solution or include in future updates?”
- “What would changing suppliers involve, and when could you realistically make that change?”
These questions will help you understand why the buyer chose their current supplier, what they value about the relationship and whether there are any weaknesses worth exploring.
The seventh question is particularly useful because it encourages the buyer to discuss potential improvements without directly asking them to criticise their supplier.
You might discover an important problem that creates an opportunity for you, or you might find that the buyer is perfectly happy with what they have.
Either way, you’ll have a much clearer picture of whether there’s a genuine opportunity worth pursuing.
Don’t Force Someone to Change Suppliers
One of the biggest mistakes salespeople make when trying to win a competitor’s clients is allowing their passion for their own solution to become a problem.
They genuinely believe they have something better to offer, and they can’t understand why the buyer doesn’t immediately agree.
That passion quickly turns into frustration, and before long, the salesperson starts becoming increasingly aggressive in their efforts to secure the business.
If the buyer is happy with their current supplier and has no interest in changing, don’t push them.
You can still communicate the value you offer and highlight any genuine advantages, but you need to recognise when the opportunity simply isn’t there.
This is where Reverse Qualification becomes particularly important. Not every potential client represents an opportunity worth pursuing, regardless of how much you’d like to win their business.
It’s far more powerful to leave someone with a positive impression of you and your company than to ruin the relationship by trying to force a decision.
If you’ve conducted yourself professionally, you’ll be in a much better position when their current supplier eventually disappoints them or their requirements change.
And when that happens, you want to be the first person they think of calling.
How to Stop Competitors Stealing Your Clients
Winning business from your competitors is one thing. Stopping them from taking your existing clients is another.
The best way to protect your clients is to make sure you’re looking after them long before a competitor starts knocking on their door.
Unfortunately, far too many businesses invest considerable time and money in acquiring new clients, only to abandon them once the contract is signed.
They take the money, deliver the solution and assume everything will be fine until it’s time for the next renewal.
Meanwhile, their competitors are actively looking for opportunities to win those clients away.
If you’ve neglected your clients, you’re making your competitors’ jobs much easier.
Build Relationships That Protect Your Business
One of the simplest ways to protect your business from competitors is to maintain regular contact with your existing clients.
You don’t need to arrange lengthy meetings or invent reasons to call them. Sometimes, a quick courtesy call or email every couple of months is enough to keep the relationship alive.
Set up reminders in your calendar or CRM to stay in touch. If you don’t have the resources to manage this manually, you can even automate parts of the process.
The important thing is that your clients know you haven’t forgotten about them.
Regular contact also allows you to identify problems, discover changing requirements and resolve issues before they become serious enough for a competitor to exploit.
Sadly, many companies and account managers either don’t understand the value of these activities or simply can’t be bothered to make the effort.
They then find themselves dealing with the constant threat of losing clients to competitors.
If you’ve consistently provided excellent service, maintained a strong relationship and delivered a solution that meets your client’s needs, you’ll have a considerable advantage over anyone trying to replace you.
In many cases, your clients will be the first to defend your business when a competitor comes calling.
But even the strongest relationships aren’t enough to guarantee loyalty.
Some clients will always be tempted by the promise of additional features, improved benefits or a substantial reduction in costs.
And when that happens, you’ll need to know how to defend your business without allowing your emotions to take over.
How to Handle a Client Who’s Considering a Competitor
Discovering that a competitor is trying to steal one of your clients can be frustrating, particularly when you’ve invested considerable time and effort in the relationship.
But getting upset or becoming defensive will do nothing to help your situation.
Your first responsibility is to remain calm and professional.
Thank them for being open about the situation, acknowledge that they’re entitled to explore other options and ask what’s prompted them to consider a change.
It’s business, after all.
You then need to ask for a little of their time so you can conduct a brief review of their account.
Your objective is to re-qualify your client as though they were a new buyer.
Go back through the qualification stage of your sales process and establish whether anything has changed since they originally decided to invest in your solution.
You need to understand their current requirements, identify any problems they might be experiencing and discover exactly what has attracted them to your competitor.
This process will also remind the client why they selected your business in the first place.
Perhaps their existing solution still meets every important requirement. Maybe the competitor’s additional features offer little practical value, or the proposed cost savings aren’t significant enough to justify the disruption of changing suppliers.
On the other hand, you might discover that their needs have changed and that your current solution no longer delivers everything they require.
Either way, you need to understand the situation before you can respond effectively.
Your goal is to help the client evaluate whether the potential benefits of switching suppliers outweigh the value of their existing relationship and the possible headaches involved in making the change.
Don’t turn the conversation into an aggressive sales pitch or start offering discounts before you understand what’s motivating their decision.
Ask the right questions, listen carefully and allow the client to reconsider the situation based on their actual requirements.
If there’s a compelling reason for them to stay, your qualification process should help bring it to the surface.
The psychology behind great questioning will always outweigh the forceful persuasion of an elevator pitch.
Final Thoughts
Competition is an unavoidable part of business, and no matter how good your solution or how strong your client relationships are, you’ll occasionally lose business to your competitors.
What matters is how you respond.
If you become defensive, start criticising other companies or allow the fear of losing a deal to influence your behaviour, you’ll only make your job more difficult.
Learn about your competitors, understand their weaknesses and use that knowledge to ask better questions and demonstrate the value of your solution.
And when it comes to protecting your existing business, remember that the relationships you build today will have a direct impact on your ability to retain those clients tomorrow.
Above all, remain calm, confident and professional, regardless of who you’re competing against.
Because confidence sells, and desperation doesn’t.
About the Author
I’m David Craig White, a British B2B sales trainer, coach and consultant with more than 20 years’ experience helping sales teams get results.
When I’m not writing B2B sales articles, I’m providing B2B sales training, coaching and sales consulting to B2B sales teams, sales leaders and business owners.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Handling competition in sales starts with understanding your prospect’s requirements rather than immediately promoting your competitive advantages. Research your competitors, identify meaningful differences between your solutions and concentrate on demonstrating the value that matters to the buyer.
When a prospect mentions a competitor, acknowledge that the company has a competitive solution and avoid becoming defensive. Ask questions to understand the prospect’s requirements before explaining how your solution compares and where it could offer greater value.
Winning customers from competitors requires identifying a compelling reason for them to change suppliers. Understand what they value about their existing solution, uncover any unmet requirements and demonstrate whether the benefits of switching justify the investment and disruption.
Lowering your prices to beat a competitor should not be your first response. Establish whether price is genuinely influencing the buying decision and demonstrate the value of your solution before considering whether a discount is commercially justified.
Protecting existing clients from competitors requires maintaining strong relationships and consistently delivering value. Stay in regular contact, monitor customer satisfaction and address changing requirements before another supplier has an opportunity to exploit them.
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