While link surfing earlier today I ran across the term “BATNA”, and while I had seen it before I couldn’t remember what it meant. A quick trip to the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement article on Wikipedia was a great refresher: when you’re negotiating, the BATNA is the alternative that the other party will go with if they don’t choose to go with you. Sometimes this is a competitor, but often it’s “the same way we’ve always done it” or “we just won’t do it” or something similar. Part of successfully negotiating is discovering what the other party’s BATNA is and realizing that you have to beat it to win the deal. Keeping the BATNA in mind can also help you ensure a win-win outcome to the negotiations.

What does this have to do with selling services? Well, you need to think about the BATNA your potential customers have in mind when they’re reviewing your service. Is it one of your competitors? Doing it on their own? Not doing it at all? What are you offering them that makes your service better than their best alternative? How are you convincing them of that extra value?

I don’t know about your service, but when I think about Spreedly in these terms, I realize we have a lot of work to do. Folks who are interested in our service always have alternatives in mind, and while in almost all cases we beat those alternatives hands down, that’s not necessarily easy to figure out. For instance, many folks figure they’ll just use their gateways recurring billing service to handle their subscribers, and before Spreedly came along that was often the best alternative. Spreedly, though, has multiple advantages over gateway-based recurring billing; multiple gateway support, a usable UI, and quicker integration to name three. But we don’t currently do a good job of making that value-add clear.

What BATNA’s do your prospective customers typically have in mind? What techniques have you found effective for presenting your service as superior?