Champion v Challenger Campaigns – WIN-WIN for all Businesses
It is always fantastic to receive a phone call from a prospective new client that wants to throw plenty of work your way. But this does not happen every day. In fact, you may go weeks or months between these types of phone calls and easy win client acquisitions.
There are any number of tried (or should that be tired) and tested sales methods to get yourself in front of prospective new clients to showcase your business and your service offering. Before I became a solicitor, I held a number of roles in the legal industry which involved sales and marketing projects with the aim of attracting new clientele.
There is no doubt in my mind that within our industry picking up the phone and or going out to meet people face to face is still the best method of attracting new clients. It achieves better results than all your online and email marketing campaigns thrown together.
But once you have the attention of a prospective new client how do you go about showcasing your talents?
It is a common experience to speak to a potential new client that you are certain you could provide excellent professional services to but they are reluctant to make the switch from their existing supplier or even try out your services. Most prospective clients in our industry have incumbent service providers. How do you convince the prospect that your service offering is better than the service provider that they already have in place?
Champion v Challenger
The champion v challenger model is a strategy that businesses can use to determine the best performing solution, in this case, that solution is the incumbent service provider versus a prospective new service provider with the same or a similar service offering.
The champion represents the current service providers, while the challengers are the potential replacements aiming to impress and win the business. After the campaign has run its course, the decision-maker reviews the results and the best service provider becomes the new champion. In some instances, the challenger will only compete for a piece of the business at first and then work towards growing that share over time by outperforming the incumbent and winning more of the business.
It is a WIN-WIN for the client
The champion v challenger model removes bias from competing parties and paves the way to choosing the best performing vendor for a specific set of services. When a challenger starts small, they have an opportunity to showcase success and begin to win new portions of the business. The prospective client has set them a challenge and can expect to get their absolute best efforts in order to try and oust the incumbent.
By comparison, any incumbent worth their salt should relish the challenge to prove that they are providing the absolute best services that the client could source. Anyone who is succeeding in business should have a healthy competitive streak and it is that competitiveness that is piqued by being thrown up against a challenger to the business. They should get a kick out of meeting the challenger service provider head-to-head and delivering better performance.
There may be an eventual winner and an eventual loser in the battle between champion and challenger but the party to the campaign that cannot lose is the client that is running the campaign and testing its service providers to provide their absolute best efforts. In the end, it is the client who benefits from this test of vendors and their services.
WIN-WIN.
Paul Thorndike
Should you have any queries with relation to this or any other article on our website please do not hesitate to contact Paul Thorndike 0429 008 247.