Competing Against The Status Quo

According to the latest findings from Sirius Decisions, Sales Benchmark Index, and many other respected researchers, an increasingly common outcome for even seemingly well-qualified sales opportunities is not a win, or a competitive loss, but a decision to “do nothing”.

If you’re involved in complex sales process, your most significant competitor is almost certainly not another vendor, but the status quo.

So, how do you get your potential buyer to do something and break the Status Quo?

People weigh up their decisions on what they will lose, not what they will win. Loss aversion is the tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. The principle is prominent in the domain of economics. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. Loss aversion was first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.

Loss aversion implies that one who loses $100 will lose more satisfaction than the same person will gain satisfaction from a $100 windfall. In marketing, the use of trial periods and rebates tries to take advantage of the buyer’s tendency to value the good more after the buyer incorporates it in the status quo.

Now that you know that the fear of…