Why Your Ideal Prospect Just Picked Your Competitor (and How to Win Next Time)

Why Your Ideal Prospect Just Picked Your Competitor (and How to Win Next Time)

And you want to be seen as the company with something to offer that your competitors don't. Understand their current level of knowledge about the issues you address at each stage of the buyer's journey. If everyone is talking about a new piece of research, how can I reframe the research, or cross-reference it with another study to come up with new insight? Your competitor delivered personal value We often forget that B2B marketing is still person-to-person. The business value has to be there: You absolutely have to meet the business need, or you won't even make it to the consideration set. Personal value is where B2B buyers look when trying to decide between several good options. Even if in your content you've nailed providing new insight and personal value, you haven't convinced prospects that they need to buy from your company. Content that reframes the purchasing criteria converts prospects to customers. Uncover what their current beliefs are about how to solve those problems or achieve those goals. If your content's new insight leads decision-makers to realize your company alone can fully solve their need, they're much more likely to take action and contact you, rather than a competitor.

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You feel a ripple of nausea as your stomach falls. You just heard from the sales team that your company lost a hot prospect that you really wanted to add to your client list.

You’d followed the tracking notifications as the prospect read your articles, downloaded your premium content, read additional articles, and checked out the case studies and bottom-of-the-funnel content that the sales team had sent.

Your hopes were sky-high when your company’s best salesperson was assigned to this prospect, and you just knew she would close the deal.

But, no… And the worst part is, you lost the prospect to a competitor you’ve been enviously watching win again and again.

What happened?

Your competitor offered new insight

Content is like a new baby: To the people who made it, it’s perfect—even though there are hundreds of thousands of other babies out there that are arguably just as “perfect.”

To capture attention and get a response, your content needs to offer new perspective, new insight. If the prospect has spent any time at all trying to find ways to solve a problem or to achieve a goal, he or she has hit up Google; and if your content just re-hashes what’s on the first couple of pages of search results, you aren’t going to garner much respect.

Decision-makers want to learn something fresh and valuable that has an impact on their business. And you want to be seen as the company with something to offer that your competitors don’t.

Action step: Get a clear picture of exactly who your prospects are and what challenges they are trying to solve. Understand their current level of knowledge about the issues you address at each stage of the buyer’s journey. And before you create a piece of content, search Google to see what already exists. Then ask yourself a few questions: What’s not being said about this issue? What new angle can I view this topic from? If everyone is talking about a new piece of research, how can I reframe the research, or cross-reference it with another study to come up with new insight? What thoughts do our company experts have on this…

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