Seth Godin has a good post today about positive markeing versus negative marketing with respect to Verizon’s attitude toward fighting the iPhone. This reminded me of an experience I had last year with a new system we were purchasing for work.
The system was an expensive hardware/software combination. But that isn’t important. What is important is that there were multiple vendors competing, each with different marketing approaches. Two sales teams stick in my mind from this experience: one was very positive, one very negative.
The positive team emphasized _their_ product’s strengths. They listened to our needs and they tailored every presentation to how their product’s features met our needs, or helped us solve a problem in a unique way. Aside from a brief comparison to the competition’s products in our initial meeting, I don’t think they mentioned their competition once.
The negative team spent nearly as much time denigrating (or attempting to) the competition’s products as much as they did promoting their own. They would talk up a feature for a few minutes and then waste our time and theirs telling us about which of the competitors didn’t have that same feature, or implemented it in an inferior way.
The problem with this approach–and I think this scales for big or small purchasing decisions–is that as an educated customer, I’m doing my own research. I’m talking to the competition. I’m seeing exactly what features they have and don’t have. So when you’re pitching your products to me, I don’t want to hear your opinion about the competition–I want to hear about your product.
It’s not hard to see which team was more pleasant to deal with. And ultimately, which team do you think won the contract? It was the team with the superior product, of course, whose features best met our needs. But do you suppose that if the negative team’s product really met our needs and was really best of class that they would have felt the need to spend so much time trying to cut down the competition?
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