The Secret to Establishing Competitive Enablement at the Enterprise Level | Chris Agnoli, Juniper Networks

Hosted by: Adam McQueen

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts

The Sparknotes 📝

🪦 The old way of doing competitive intelligence is dead.

“The old way is just a one-way street where someone is in a cubicle doing research, sharing their perspective, and vomiting it out to the entire team…“

But, the new way? Oh, it’s way more fun. And way more effective.

Chris has established a competitive culture with a two-way line of communication not only with leadership but with sellers in the field too.

Now, the burden isn’t on Chris to know. every. single. thing. Sellers share back what they hear on calls, from changes to a competitor’s go-to-market message, to new landmines that are being laid in the field.

Crowdsourcing intel allows Chris’ competitive information to be more efficient, accurate, and up-to-date. And that effort has helped him establish competitive enablement at the enterprise level.

The results? Sellers actually trust and use the intel at their disposal. Trust that translates into the same sellers increasing their consumption of Chris’ competitive content by over 187%.

👀 Know your limits, stay within it

“Our enterprise account rep mentioned, ‘Geez, it’d be great if you could build a bot that I could ask any question that the customer has about competitors and it would just answer it for me’… Great, where’s my spaceship?”

The key to competitive enablement success is setting the proper expectations. The moment you try to boil the ocean by satisfying every single sales request and analyzing every single competitor, then you’re doomed.

Chris started small, built the right relationships, set expectations, and shared quick wins to get early support from sales reps and leaders. How?

He started by analyzing the sales confidence survey filled out by reps at Juniper and identified the low-hanging fruit he could tackle that aligned with their responses and pain points.

The same goes for leadership. Chris aligned the objectives of his program to the priorities that leadership expressed to him.

This approach created a dynamic where they trusted in Chris’s vision for the program for competitive enablement at the enterprise level.

Don’t overpromise and underdeliver.

🔒 Lock it all up somewhere safe and central

“If you’ve got 10 or 11 different places reps are going, and Google happens to be one of them… well, that’s not a winning strategy.”

When Chris started there was a smattering of intel everywhere. Nobody knew where to go.

Twenty different variations of a sales deck. Four different versions of the same battlecard, all with outdated messaging. You know the deal.

Once Chris began to centralize all competitive information into one a singular place, it ensured:

1. Reps weren’t going rogue with different decks and messaging
2. It made it simple for reps to know where to share back competitive information.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts