I have recently added my blog to The Customer Collective, which is an excellent on-line business community for senior executives of sales and marketing organisations.

Dave Stein, who earlier this year delivered various workshops as part of the CEO Series for the Dublin Institute of Technology and Enterprise Ireland's International Selling Programme, made a very insightful contribution to my last blog post on the CC . The post itself dealt with the issue of competitive selling skills, here's what Dave had to add.

Niall,

I applaud your raising of competitive selling as a required skill. You've made some terrific points. I've written about this again and again. In fact, based upon ESR's research, only a few sales training companies have any expertise in this area at all. That's pretty frustrating to me, since I spent a decade as a competitive sales strategist and have experienced the results of ethical, strategic competitive selling.

Here are a few of the advanced competitive selling skills that we observe winning salespeople regularly demonstrating:

• The ability to effective raise competitors' weaknesses indirectly, through customer allies or trap-setting.
• The ability to effectively and consistently devalue a competitor's strengths in the eyes of a customer.
• Understanding not only the competitors' products and services, but more importantly, how their individual salespeople sell in live opportunities.
• Having enough of an understanding of a competitor's likely selling strategy that an effective counterstrategy can be employed.
• The ability to predict and trap unprofessional behavior (lying on RFPs, for example), resulting in competitors being eliminated from consideration.
• The ability to deflect competitive attack on one's own products' deficiencies and weaknesses through immunization.
• To be able to consistently predict competitive tactics (such as last-minute price cutting) and negate their impact.
• The ability to leverage relationships with politically influential people in a customer's organization to dilute the impact of a competitor's value proposition.

These are skills that any salesperson can learn and use. Again, thanks for raising the issue.

Thanks to Dave for these offering these truly excellent points.

From my experience, a fear factor has built up around this subject leading to many simply ignoring the problem. However, the current economic reality is that competitive selling skills are now more relevant than ever before.