I told a prospect spending $10M+ across 12 Vendors that we'd eventually replace all of them, and that's exactly what we did.

When you first meet with a prospect at a key account, you will likely discover they have an established list of approved vendors. They will say something like "we're happy with our current vendors" or "we're not looking to add new ones at this time."

This is just one of the many defensive plays from their playbook that our prospects can use against salespeople. It's the right play, especially if they are not shopping for new vendors or looking to replace the ones they have. It's a polite way of saying, "Thanks, but no thanks."

In B2B sales, we get this objection a lot. But if you know how to execute the right play at the right time, you can overcome this challenge most of the time.

First things first, we need to find out why the prospect is defending their current partnerships (See: The Competitive Intelligence Growth Driver). Where have they sacrificed value to keep the status quo? Are they staying with what's familiar because they don't believe better alternatives exist? Once we understand that, we run a few plays from the Value Differentiation Growth Driver to help them see how our partnership's value and business impact stand apart from the alternatives.

A few years back, I met with a top prospect that I'd been targeting for a solid year. She was spending over $10M annually and was the largest single-entry point at this customer. As expected, on our first meeting, she said, "Taylor, I have enough vendors to cover all my needs (12) and I'm not looking to add any new suppliers at this time. You can check back with me in a year."

Okay. Here we go! It took me 6 months to set this meeting, and as expected, she runs the first defensive play toward the end of the lunch shutting me down for a year.

My first move was not to overcome this objection with a feature and capabilities dump. It was to deal with the elephant in the room. Why did she want 12 vendors? It seemed odd to me that they would need that many.

So, I focused the conversation on that question and at the end of the discovery it was clear what my purpose was for calling her, why I was even pursuing this relationship. I said to her, "based on what we’ve talked about, I know my vision is to be your #1 vendor, to provide a service so valuable that you no longer need to depend on 12 different vendors for support, and as a result of our partnership, I want to see your business thriving, better than it was before."

I got back a half smile and a head nod. I was not looking for any response. I just wanted her to know the purpose for why I was pursuing this and it was not to become vendor #13. It was to become a Vital Partner to her, an indispensable ally, someone she can trust and depend on to meet most of her needs.

The other 100 vendors contacting this customer wanted something from her: time, money, opportunity… We were the only ones calling to give her a partnership built on a shared vision and purpose, one designed to prevent fires, not just put them out.

The lunch ended and we said our goodbyes. The very next week, she called me in a panic. Honestly, I had no doubt she would eventually call for help based on how the lunch ended, but I didn't think it would happen this fast.

In 24 hours, we covered an area of her business that the other vendors had not been able to deliver in the previous two weeks. That helped save her from some uncomfortable conversations. We used that opportunity to illustrate what a vital partnership looks like. The result: she now knew she could start to depend on us for hard things, areas where the other 12 vendors had failed. That turned into more opportunities, more challenges she needed our help with, until eventually she stopped contacting everyone else and dealt exclusively with our team.

In time, that buyer became our greatest champion, someone with power and influence who was willing to sell on our behalf. Not only did we expand and scale the relationship across the globe, reaching $100M in annual spend at our peak, we became friends. She joined my wife and me for lunches, sent us baby gifts when we had our firstborn, invited me to her family's annual neighborhood party. She trusted us and proved it by making key introductions to other areas of the business and industry. Her partnership helped us create a new segment for our company where we would eventually become #1 vendor across the industry.

Value Differentiation is important. In this case, it was established well before our first meeting. Based on account and customer intel, we knew how to separate from the pack. She had too many vendors to build a truly effective partnership. There were too many cooks in the kitchen for this to work at scale.

Being competitive in key account sales means being able to develop and deliver value that's highly differentiated from the alternatives. Value Differentiation is 1 of the 21 Growth Drivers covered in the Vitality Index, the Key Account Growth System. In the system, this key driver belongs to the domain we call: Competitiveness.

For Value Differentiation, we handcrafted 48 plays just for this one driver at every level of partnership. Our system will diagnose and score you in this area, build the exact growth strategy the team needs now to improve, and help guide your execution until you become a Vital Partner.

Growing key accounts can be complex, so we distilled this type of work into a system everyone can use no matter what level of experience you bring to the table. It was built from the same approach we used to create some of the largest partnerships in our industry that have lasted decades and are still running.

Winning, growing, and protecting key accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. In the Vitality Index, we don't tell you what to do. We show you, because we lived it. This is the system we wished we had years ago. But now, it's here! If becoming a top-producing account team is important to you, then the Vitality Index can help.

We made a sample for you to try. This is not the actual system, but it will show you a practical plan for growing a live customer in your portfolio. This snapshot will give you a diagnostic, analysis, and an actual growth plan for where you currently sit across two of the seven Domains: Relationships and Competitiveness.