At SP Home Run, our clients have found the greatest success growing their revenue when they’ve integrated these five essential pillars for growth in their overall strategy and company culture:

Meet The Five Pillars for Growth:

1. Differentiation
2. Thought Leadership
3. Competitive Positioning.
4. Sales Cycle Acceleration
5. Revenue Growth

Competitive Positioning Defined

In a digital-first world, companies need to be prepared to go up against three different categories of competitors: direct competition, indirect competition, and non-business model competition.

• Direct competitors are the obvious competitors that you run into all of the time at the end of the buyer's journey -- at the end of your sales cycle.
• Indirect competitors sell similar products and services to your company, but their companies are either a lot larger or a lot smaller than your company, or they’re not quite as geographically relevant as your company.
• Non-business model competitors are companies that create educational, thought leadership content on a regular basis about your category of products and services and the problems that you solve.

How good of a handle does your company have on its competitive positioning?

And when was the last time you took a really hard look at the competition -- not just your obvious direct competitors? But your indirect competitors? Non-business model competitors?

Basically any legitimate alternative to your company’s core products and services?

Are You Sizing Up Your Competition With Outdated Wishful Thinking?

All too often companies have a wishful-thinking way of evaluating the competitive landscape. They’ll spend a lot of time fretting about deals that their sales team has lost for one reason or another.

And that kind of win/loss analysis is certainly very important, as is having the kind of entrepreneurial sales leadership that works closely with your product team and company leadership to adapt its core products and services over time to what the market is demanding.

But that kind of competitive analysis is no longer enough. Why?

Is Your Sales Team Earning the Right to Compete in the Modern Buyer’s Journey?

Today, your sales team is rarely involved in early stage conversations with prospects and clients.

The buyer’s journey today is largely self-propelled, driven by large amounts of searches made and questions asked on search engines and social media channels.

In most industries, by the time your sales team even earns the opportunity to have a real conversation with a potential client, 70% or more of their decision-making process may be over.

So the harsh reality: most companies are only doing a realistic competitive analysis of what’s happening during the final 30% of the buyer’s journey.

Have You Buried Your Head in the Sand, Hoping for Print Media, TV Commercials, and Dial-Up Internet to Enjoy a Renaissance?

As a result, these companies have buried their heads in the sand -- and are completely clueless -- about what their prospects and clients are doing during the first 70% of the buyer’s journey -- during the Awareness and Consideration stages, when there’s an enormous opportunity to position their company and staff as trusted advisors, educators, and subject matter experts.

During these early stages, your team can really make an enormous impact on how your potential clients navigate their buyer’s journey and compare various competitive alternatives to your company.

It’s a thing of beauty when this happens. But it can also get very ugly when it doesn’t.

Is Your Company Positioned to Compete? Or Vulnerable to Disruption?

Frankly most companies, in most industries, have let themselves become extremely vulnerable to being disrupted by their much more aggressive competitors.

To learn more about what full funnel competitive positioning looks like, here’s what we recommend.