Trash Talkin'

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A backhanded compliment can be equally as effective. When Rory J. Cutaia, chairman and CEO of Telx, a 40-employee telecom company in New York City, is asked about the competition, he has a line ready: "You know, I really admire those guys," he'll say. "I admire their determination and the challenges that they must have to overcome on a daily basis just trying to keep up with us." It usually gets a laugh, but it also leaves a faint negative impression, which lingers when Cutaia moves on to discussing his own company. Then, there's the "but and however" trick--a favorite of Hellen Davis. "Anything before the word 'but' or 'however,' no matter what it is, they'll remember it less," she says. For example: "That company has a great track record. But it has a limited range of clients." It sounds silly, but think about it. If someone said to you, "You know, you look great, but..." wouldn't you be desperate to learn what comes next?

What comes next, of course, is a positive message about your own company. No matter how skilled a basher you become, it won't make a shred of difference if you can't make a convincing case for yourself. Sure, you want to dispatch with the competition, but you don't want to make your entire sales pitch about them. So hit fast, and get back to you and your company as quickly as possible. "If you talk about your virtues, the prospect will probably conclude that your virtues are the flip side of the competition's shortcomings," says Ira Davidson, director of New York City's Pace University Small Business Development Center. "Let the customers draw their own conclusions."

Sidebar: What to Do When Your Company Is the Target

A good defense may be the best offense you have.

Perhaps you're shocked--shocked!--at the idea that anyone would dream of going negative during a sales pitch. But chances are, your competitors hold few such scruples. So you need to think about how to respond when your company becomes the target of a negative campaign.

The most important thing is not to be put on the defensive. Tim Berry, president of Palo Alto Software, a business-planning software publisher in Eugene, Oreg., learned that back in 1996. His main competitor, Berry discovered, was raising all sorts of questions about Palo Alto--spreading misinformation about the capabilities of the company's products and suggesting that Berry himself was less than capable because his background was in software design rather than business planning. Palo Alto was a young company, its product new to the market, and a sustained hit to its reputation could have been disastrous.

But rather than getting angry and launching a negative campaign of his own, Berry responded with a deft act of business jujitsu. Instead of responding directly to the attacks, Palo Alto tweaked its own sales presentation, emphasizing the fact that Berry is a Stanford M.B.A. with more than 20 years' business-planning experience, and stressing the quality of its engineers. The new pitch also did a better job of demonstrating the specific capabilities of Palo Alto's software. Says Berry: "Knowing about the attack helped us strategically."

Berry's prospects never mentioned the attacks during a sales call, but should it come up, it's important to remain calm, says David Rubin, a partner and sales consultant at JH Cohn, in Parsippany, N.J. Rubin also suggests instructing your attorney to write a strongly worded letter telling your rival to back off. In Berry's case, the combination of an attorney's letter and the new sales presentation did the trick--the competitor beat a hasty retreat. And Berry got the last laugh: While the trash-talking competitor was twice the size of Palo Alto Software at the time, eight years later, its market share is one-fifth that of Berry's company.

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