Stop 5 of 9 · Weekly
Displacement
Taking an account off an incumbent carrier on a business case built from the customer's own numbers, with a migration risk answer and the four objections rehearsed.
Displacement is a timing play, not a price play
Every account in Wael's territory already has a carrier. Selling to them means taking them from somebody, and the ones that move do so for one of three reasons: something broke repeatedly, the business changed shape and the incumbent could not follow, or the person who chose the incumbent left. Price is fourth, and price is where these deals go to die.
The artefact for this stop is a displacement pack for one account: the timing map, the business case in the customer's own numbers, the migration plan, and four rehearsed objections. Your manager reads the business case page.
The timing map
| Signal | Where it comes from | What it opens |
|---|---|---|
| Service end date | The end date field in your CRM | The window to shape requirements |
| New site or lease | The customer, news, their own site | A design conversation with no incumbent |
| Repeated outages | The customer's outage log | The reliability case |
| A new IT director | Their announcement or LinkedIn | A review nobody has to defend |
Attached is my territory export with service end dates and last activity: [attach the CSV]. List every account whose service end date falls between nine and fifteen months out. For each, give me the account, the months remaining, the services involved, the last two-way contact date, and one line on what I would need to learn to know whether this is winnable. Sort by months remaining, ascending. Mark any account where the end date field is empty, because that is the first call to make.
The business case, in their numbers
The rule that keeps this honest: every figure in the case belongs to the customer and is attributed to them in the document. Wael asks for the outage log and asks what an hour of downtime costs at a depot. He does not model it, and he does not build a saving from a rate he has not been given.
Attached: the customer's outage log for the last twelve months and my notes from the operations conversation, including the figure they gave me for a stopped depot hour: [attach both]. Build a one-page business case. Section one, what happened, from the outage log only, by site and by month. Section two, what it cost, using their own hourly figure and attributing it to them by name in the sentence. Section three, what changes in the proposed design, in plain words with no product names longer than three words. Leave every price and every saving as a bracketed placeholder and list them at the end. Do not use any figure I have not given you, and do not reference any competitor pricing.
Migration risk and the four objections
Here is the site list and the account plan: [paste both]. First, draft a site-by-site cutover plan: the order of sites, the overlap period at each, who is on site, and the rollback point. Ask me the questions the plan needs rather than assuming answers. Then write the four objections I will hear on this deal, in the customer's own likely words, with a reply of no more than four sentences each. One objection must be the incumbent offering to match. Replies must contain no rates and no discounts.