Benefits of Using a 3rd-party Vendor for Sales Intelligence Work

Any sales intelligence program is probably better than none, but eventually, you'll want to find ways to increase your effectiveness, productivity and results. At some point, you'll need to consider whether or not a 3rd-party vendor makes sense.

As with all outsourced work, there is a trade off. Internally resources know the company culture and climate. External service providers bring expertise and methodologies that may increase the value of the intelligence initiative. External providers cost money. They will send a bill. You will have to justify expenditures. Internal efforts may be less expensive, but mostly just appear that way. The expense of the intelligence may be spread out over many paychecks, real estate, hard costs and such, but never actually tallied and compared side-by-side with an invoice from a third-party.

Some other points to consider are included below:

Can’t we do this in-house?
Many companies claim to have performed Win Loss research, but further investigation often reveals they have only captured information from their sales representatives. Although this is a very important aspect of Win Loss, such information usually relates to pricing and products only. True Win Loss Analysis not only captures information from your sales representatives, but also from the evaluators, decision makers, approvers, and users in your competitive wins and losses.

Analyzing lost sales opportunities is never a pleasant task, which is why companies tend to focus most of their attention and effort on gathering information about their competitive wins. However, it is a well-known fact that we tend to learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. For this reason, it is critical that a company expend the necessary resources to analyze and completely understand its competitive losses.

What are the benefits of using an independent third-party to capture Win Loss information?
A Win Loss Analysis conducted by an unbiased third party will give you a complete picture of what is taking place in your company’s marketplace. It will also provide you with the means to track and measure the effectiveness of your current and revised marketing strategies and sales processes.


Capturing what took place during the sales cycle of wins and losses can be a labor- intensive, time-consuming and difficult task, especially if you don’t have the appropriate expertise. Furthermore, it may be impossible for an organization to get unbiased, factual information without the help of an experienced third party. Unlike an outside, objective third-party; your in-house researchers will often find buyers unwilling to reveal their real decision criteria for fear the sales manager may attempt to reengage them in the sales process. When this occurs the data upon which you’re making critical decisions may not be accurate.



If I'm missing any pieces of the decision-making puzzle, drop me a line. Let's chat (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Getting the Most out of Win Loss Analysis

What is Win Loss Analysis?
A Win Loss Analysis is a systematic analysis of the new business opportunities for which your sales team (or channel partners) has competed. By implementing a Win Loss Analysis program you’ll be able to obtain reliable, actionable and unbiased feedback about how well your sales team performed in recent competitive opportunities. And, you’ll be able to identify much more, including the best practices of your top performers, your competitive positioning within each opportunity, and how well your products and services were received.

What are the benefits of a Win Loss Analysis?A Win Loss Analysis will reveal the risks and opportunities associated with your sales strategies, your competitors’ strategies and your target markets. You can learn about your marketplace in a way that transcends simply knowing about your own customers. A Win Loss Analysis will also reveal the varied buying habits, challenges and adoption rates of your customers, your competitors’ customers and your mutual prospects.
If you want a clear picture of each individual sales opportunity and the emerging trends across multiple opportunities to help sales professionals win more business, a Win Loss Analysis can do the following:

-Improve individual and company-wide competitive win ratios
-Establish clear Win Loss benchmarks
-Increase sales per employee
-Build successful sales organizations that are always improving
-Discover the reasons for lost opportunities
-Increase your competitive advantage-Enhance your understanding of competitors

By obtaining reliable and unbiased feedback from your recent sales opportunities, sales representatives can refine their techniques, learn how to effectively target a client’s needs, and make appropriate presentations that put your company and products in the best possible light. A Win Loss Analysis will provide you with empirical, yet pragmatic, information to drive your business, products, and marketing decisions toward an improved competitive advantage, increased revenue growth and greater market share.

Which departments within an organization are impacted by a Win Loss Analysis?
Although many people assume the information from a Win Loss Analysis is only for the sales force, we have found that Win Loss will impact every department in your organization. Additionally, key individuals in your organization such as Sales Representatives, Sales Management, Product Development, Marketing and Executive Management will all be able to leverage the actionable information that is captured in a Win Loss Analysis program to make better decisions.

Sales Representatives will better understand the perception of their prospects and what they were really thinking about the representative’s abilities and effectiveness. Sales representatives will also begin to better understand their strengths and weaknesses, the company’s positioning, their competition and the overall marketplace.

Sales Managers will get data on the key issues that are hampering their over all sales efforts. Hard data on what your competitors are doing right, what you’re doing wrong or not doing, and data on how the market perceives you. This information will help sales managers to refocus, redeploy, and retrain where it’s most important.

Product Development can now begin to understand more about where a solution or product may be lacking against their competitors and what features and functionality are most important to the prospects in the pipeline.

Marketing will receive direct feedback from their audience as to what is working and what isn’t working. They’ll learn which marketing tools have the most impact with whom and which are not worth the investment of time and money.

Executive Management will now get actionable intelligence on every aspect of the entire sales process. They’ll learn about new players in their markets and gain insight into current market trends.

Know Your Prospect and Sell More

Primary Intelligence has recently introduced a new product called Target Prospecting. Our goal is to provide our clients with the strongest chance to win business and outmaneuver the competition.

It’s the salesperson who has the clearest understanding of an opportunity who has the greatest advantage. Imagine speaking with a prospect, already knowing their specific needs and having a clear understanding of what it will take to win the sale – while your competition is still struggling to determine the best person to talk to.

The key issue brought to us by our Target Prospecting clients is simple: they have a list of potential customers they want to reach out to, but they don’t know anything about those prospects. Going to the Web and grabbing demographic information on the company may tell you whether or not they are in your “sweet spot,” but it doesn’t tell you anything about what they are looking to buy, how they make their decisions, or what their unique needs may be. Without this information, our clients’ sales teams were going in cold, wasting valuable time simply trying to get a sense of the opportunity, oftentimes finding out that it wasn’t even a good fit for their solutions.

Primary Intelligence’s Target Prospecting does all this initial groundwork for our clients. All they have to do is provide us with their “wish list” of prospects and, using our proprietary methodologies, we will conduct in-depth interviews with these potential customers to gain a better understanding of their plans, their needs, and what they are looking for in a product or provider.

With Primary Intelligence’s Target Prospecting, our clients now have the information they need to understand the opportunity as they enter it, and can address prospects’ unique needs. Specifically, from the prospect interview profiles, our clients learn:

• What features/functions are most important in the minds of their prospects
• When their prospects will be looking to buy
• The nuances of their prospects’ decision making processes
• Which competitors their prospects have used, and which ones they are considering
• The factors that might lead their prospects to change vendors
• The products and services their prospects are looking to implement

With the information they’ve gained, our clients have not only been able to qualify and prioritize their prospective customers; they have been able to strategize the way they approach individual prospects, giving them a much greater chance of winning these accounts.

Download a SAMPLE or talk to me. I can tell you more. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

The Infinitely Small Nuances of Sales Meetings

In a recent sales opportunity interviewed by Primary Intelligence, we found that a point as small as the introduction process should not be discounted. (For more on this sales opportunity, please see my post from 5/9/2007

Do you have any comments regarding the vendors’ in-person presentations?
“They were very good. It was a very tough decision. The presentations when they came in here were just fine; when we went into their facilities, things were just set up differently.

“At Trilight, we went in and we sat and chatted, but we also walked around more and met the person that we would be working with in each area there. It was like a round robin tour. At Manifesto, we did do a tour of their facility, but all of the meeting basically took place in one room. We could ask questions of the experts and they would come and go. Sometimes when you're walking around it's hard to focus because there's so much going on.

“When we did the tour with Trilight, we knew where we were going, but I don't think we realized what was coming next. When we were at Manifesto, we had an agenda, and we went through it. In hindsight, Trilight’s way seems to be a little more efficient, with Tracy answering all the questions, but I think that's where the team got the feeling that Tracy had all the knowledge, not her team.”

The most important thing here is that Trilight had information that would have told them that a sit-down meeting would be more beneficial, but the value of that information was discounted to the point that they made the wrong decision. Ultimately, this mistake essentially cost them a very large bit of business.

If you want to know the right moves to make, you need to talk to Primary Intelligence. Helping sales teams sell more is what we do. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Win Loss Makes Selling Easier

If you found a surefire way to make your company grow, you would have to consider the ROI potential of the program, initiative, solution, right?

Well, I did a little digging today with a couple of clients to find recent ROI success stories. The results were surprising. I’ll share a couple of experiences here:

“We did a round of win loss analysis with Primary Intelligence. The process included interviews with our newly won accounts and lost prospects from the past 6 months. Primary Intelligence provided us with individual opportunity profiles for each sales engagement.

“After we (sales leadership) received the profiles, we identified the 10 biggest losses (based on opportunity size). We reviewed the feedback, needs and perceptions that caused the prospect to choose our competitor. Then, we created a plan to reengage each of those 10 lost prospects. Since this was our first attempt at a formal post-sales reengagement, we didn’t have any expectations of success. We just wanted to see what was possible.

“So far, based on the intelligence we received, we have won 3 of those 10 losses. These were multi-million dollar accounts that potentially stretch out over long-term
contracts.

“This is just one way we are using our Sales Intelligence provided by Primary Intelligence. The ROI potential of this sales intelligence is mind-boggling.”

A second client of Primary Intelligence described their ROI experience in this manner:

“When we perform win loss analysis with Primary Intelligence, we provide PI with a list of our recent wins and losses. These sales opportunities are pulled from our SFA and are based on the best information that our sales reps have.

“Primary Intelligence calls through the list of opportunities, setting up appointments for interviews and weeding out opportunities that don’t qualify for analysis. While engaged in this activity, PI regularly finds a few opportunities that were categorized by our company as losses, but are still in consideration. These opportunities may be lukewarm to very warm, but they are not dead.

“PI immediately calls us to let us know when they have discovered a ‘nugget,’ or a potential opportunity that needs immediate attention. We send that information directly back to the sales rep and our conversion rates in these instances is surprisingly high.

“We more than pay for our entire sales intelligence effort based on these nuggets alone. The strategic and tactical data we use to create new business is actually just frosting on the cake after you consider the revenue that PI creates for us.”

Primary Intelligence provides data and consulting to help companies in over 45 industries create strategic and tactical improvement. Our work extends from the executive boardroom to sales, marketing and product leadership and down to each individual sales rep. We have a methodology to improve the performance of the most key departments in your company.

If you would like to know a little more about these experiences or specific information about the companies that have achieved these results, call me. (801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Win Loss and SellingPower

Last year, SellingPower interviewed me (on behalf of Primary Intelligence) to understand the potential of intelligence in the sales organization. (Click here for the article)

In brief, SellingPower was interested in how an organization can grow sales through competitive intelligence, sales intelligence and, specifically, win loss.

"The power of sales intelligence is driving more and more companies to take a hard look at Win/Loss analysis and what it can do for them. Dalley predicts that within five years, most organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue will have a formal Win/Loss program in place. They’re realizing, Dalley concludes, that while they’ve always relied on feedback from their sales reps, it’s ultimately the prospect’s perception that matters."

Primary Intelligence specializes in producing intelligence to make your company more competitive. We have systems, tools and programs to distribute intelligence and make each individual sales rep more effective.

Read the article (click here if you didn't click on the link above) and let me know what you think of the ROI potential of win loss, Primary Intelligence style... (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Why Win Loss Will be the Most Powerful Competitive Intelligence You can Find

Experts agree on the following reasons:

1-You still really don’t know why you win and why you lose
2-The bottom half of your sales group still can’t make quota and you don’t know what they are doing differently than the top 20%
3-Your competitors are changing tactics regularly, just like you. How else will you find out what they are saying and doing?
4-Individual opportunity reviews will show you exactly what the prospect thought. (And really. You only care what the prospect thinks.)
5-The biggest, most successful companies in the world are doing win loss regularly
6-You won’t land in jail after doing some stupid espionage competitive intelligence thing.
7-Your competitors are studying you right now with their own win loss program
8-If you learn to use win loss data, you can apply that knowledge and process to account retention, which could make a HUGE difference in your revenues
9-Your executive board expects the sale group to increase market share and revenues.
10-You don’t win 100% of the time.

Now, you have to do a formal win loss process. This means that you don’t spend time interviewing the sales reps or pulling some statistical data from your SFA tool. You have to interview your new clients and prospects and listen to what they have to say.

Some of them will tell you that your baby is ugly. Some of them will have a complete misperception of your products, services or sales pitch. None of that matters. If there was a misperception and you lost the deal, it is your fault. The only way to fix the problem is to identify it in the first place.

And, after dozens of thousands of interviews, Primary Intelligence is the unquestioned leader in win loss research, post-sales analysis and sales optimization.

Let’s talk about how win loss analysis can benefit your company right now and into the future (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)

Same Vision Insurance Plan, Different Model

It was easy for our client to go into the sales opportunity. They were pitching a comprehensive vision plan to a multi-billion dollar computer systems vendor. They had the right people. They said the right things. They had a price advantage of six figures.

But, (based on this opportunity review by Primary Intelligence) it wasn’t enough to knock out the incumbent:

What were the primary reasons you did not select VisionPlan?
“Network disruption was the primary reason. The business model for VisionPlan is strategically different than the business model for RIGHTEYE. RIGHTEYE’s model relies on incorporating individual, independent ophthalmologists and optometrists across the nation. VisionPlan utilizes chains like Optical Mart. When we did a network comparison between the physicians within the respective zip codes of our employees, the disruption was more than 80 percent. That would mean, if I were currently a patient of Dr. Jones and we selected VisionPlan, Dr. Jones may not be a part of the VisionPlan network. The cost model was very compelling, but we weren’t willing to disrupt 28,000 people and their family members to save a couple hundred thousand dollars.”

Was this a case of not having the right service, communicating poorly or staying in deal too long when the chances of winning were too slim?

What do you think? (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)

Clients are Not Stuck in Today

If you have ever had to worry about this quarter’s numbers (and what sales rep hasn’t), it is easy to lose sight of the long-term picture. But, I guarantee that the client has very little interest in the next 90 days. They are talking to you with a year, two or five in mind.

In the example below, our client, Trilight, lost a deal, even though they were comparable in most every way. Primary Intelligence learned the reason why:

What were the primary reasons you did not select Trilight?

“Actually, the decision came down to the very end. Everything seemed to be very similar. We felt, and this was a team decision, that Manifesto had the depth and breadth to do the job. We thought that our account exec at Trilight was phenomenal. We knew she could get the job done, but we weren't sure about the actual corporation or the company. With Manifesto, we were more impressed with the company than the account execs. There wasn't a point of improvement or anything at that point.”

What were the primary reasons you selected Manifesto?

“They presented to us differently. We went to on-site visits at Trilight and at Manifesto. When we went to BI, the difference was we saw more of what they could do for us. We toured their buildings and stuff, but it was more than that. They brought representatives for each department into the room to present. They would come in and do their key element and then leave. At Trilight, we walked around and we saw a lot, but Kelly answered all the questions for the most part, not the so-called experts in that area.

“Manifesto’s method was more appealing because we could see that there was a team of other people to do the work. Our account executive at Trilight, Kelly, was wonderful. She knew everything from front to back, but if Kelly ever left, we didn't know what would happen. Could the other people do the work? We knew she could; she's been there since the start of her career and she's grown up there, but we didn't know, if she decided to leave the company, that they could do as good of a job as she did.”

While Trilight had equivalent services and a good relationship, they lost because the sales experience did not convince the client that they would have adequate resources to service them over the long haul.

Moral of the story: Think long-term with your prospects. You can talk about the price they will pay today, but it is better to show how valuable you will be to them over years of service.

If you have a thought, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Moving Intelligence through the Sales Force

“80% of the CI needed in an organization is resident in the heads of the salesforce at any give time.”

Makes me wonder why systems for moving the tribal wisdom through the organization are so few and far between.

But, if you believe the statement above and you want your entire sales organization to benefit from on-time delivery of the best intelligence and experience possible, you should look at streetsmarts, a product by Involve Technology:

1-The first step in the process is to search for advice in the existing content. Of course, the content library builds over time and the relevance of the information (according to users) becomes more refined.

2-The search results are displayed in a logical layout, just as they would be on the most searchable pages on the web

3-Results are displayed with a link, summary, date and other information that will provide a user with the ability to determine relevance or potential to help

a. Trophy (best practice) – This is given to a piece of advice if the advice has received positive ratings by a majority of users.
b. New – When a piece of advice is newer than the pre-established time limit
c. Fire (hot topic) – if the information has generated a lot of interest and readership, it is designated as a hot topic
d. By – The author can be referenced. The link takes the user to a profile that includes background and contact information
e. Usefulness score – Shows (with stars) how useful the information has been ranked over time. Also, shows the number of reviewers

This is just scratching the surface of their technology. Involve Technology has built in a number of different incentive systems and other knowledge bases to ensure the highest possible usage, both of readers and content generators.

Primary Intelligence thinks this tool is great because it allows us channel through which to put the intelligence generated by live prospects and customers. With streetsmarts, sales reps have nearly every piece of competitive intelligence and advantage at their fingertips. And, news of competitor tactics are spread throughout the organization in minutes.

If you have interest, give me a call. I can help you understand how the combination of technology and intelligence can improve your competitive success rate by up to 20% within a few months. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Sales People Need Competitive Intelligence

In some recent studies from Primary Intelligence, we have asked representatives from various industries and company sizes "Who has access to the competitive intelligence data?"

For the most part, Competitive Intelligence is distributed to executives and marketing managers. Sales receives the information to a lesser degree.


From our observations:

-Execs receive the data. Generally, they are sponsoring the research

-Point of the lance (Sales Reps) are not being included

-Indicates a predominance of strategic intelligence over tactical intelligence?

From my point of view, I think that it is an interesting phenomenon that the sales reps are not receiving the competitive intelligence as often as other departments. If they are front line, I would want to push out a little more information to them and help them be more competitive. If I were a sales rep, I would ask for more of this information.

I am curious about your experience with the executive group. What do they ask for the most? And, in your experience, do they use the information you provide? My experience is that many CI initiatives are reactionary ("Why did we lose that deal?!?!? When did [competitor] start selling widgets to compete with ours?!?!?!") By the time the Competitive Intelligence has been compiled, so much time has passed that the data can't be used.

If you had competitive intelligence, would you use it? If you asked for competitive intelligence from the marketing department, would they produce it for you?
Think about the competitive knowledge that would provide a competitive advantage. Write it down. Ask for it.

And, call Primary Intelligence. We provide the intelligence that helps sales people sell more. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Why You Should Do Win Loss with Your Clients

Yesterday, I was interviewed by an intern who is studying at the University of Rochester. She was representing a company that wants to do win loss analysis in an effort to make itself more competitive “in the trenches.”

She told me that her client’s inclination was to simply use their CRM tool to administer and interview to the sales reps after they close a deal as a win or loss. The idea was that the company could ask the sales reps why they won or lost, compile some quick data and learn how to move forward. She wanted to know why our services at Primary Intelligence would provide extra value over the CRM system.

I was very happy to provide an answer.

Our experience at Primary Intelligence has shown us that the only perception that really matters is the one that evaluates the vendors and writes the checks. We have conducted dozens of thousands of post-purchase interviews, based on deal sizes from a thousand dollars up to hundreds of millions. The one thing that we have learned is that the customer is always right and that sales reps don't have the whole story, no matter how good the relationship is.

I’m not saying that the sales reps are full of hot air or that their perception is not valuable, but if you want to increase your win rate, market share and overall sales performance, you have to look to the opinions and perceptions of the prospects. And, there are limitations to their knowledge of a deal. Even if the rep knows everything about his interactions with the prospect, he likely doesn't know much at all about the competitions' pitch, value proposition or relationship with that same prospect.

Some of our clients have asked us to interview both the sales rep and the prospect. They want a 360 degree review of the sales opportunity. There is wisdom in this approach, but the exercise has to be approached very strategically.

In a couple of cases, our clients wanted to measure their performance on 1 to 10 scales. They asked the same questions of the prospects and sales reps. In the end, our client learned that the sales force has a different perspective than the prospect; individually and collectively.

Hardly earth shattering and fairly useless information.

Our smarter clients use a completely different tool called Sales Confidence Index to measure the engagement level and efficacy of the sales team. This is not done on a deal-by-deal basis, but rather is taken periodically as an overall measurement of the sales force.

The purpose of win loss is to:

a) Understand today’s performance in competitive sales situations
b) Leverage this information to create a plan for win rate improvement

And, the you can ask sales reps all day long any question you like, but you’ll never approach the effectiveness of a few expertly-administered interviews with your clients and prospects.

I’m here to talk about these ideas. Reach out and let me know how I can help (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)