How will Sales Intelligence make me more effective?

After all of the preliminaries are in process (introductions, relationship, etc…), you will have to answer the following questions in order to do business:

• Who is the prospect?
• What does the prospect value?
• How can we provide a solution?
• Is there a pain or problem that needs to be fixed?
• What can the competition do to solve that same problem or pain?
• Where does our company usually rate vs. the usual suspects… er… competitors?
• How does [company] like to buy?
• How have they approached other purchase like this in the past?
• What is [prospect]’s market like?
• Why are you the best choice? (If you don’t know now, you’ll find out later why you weren’t)
• Should you even be in this deal at all or would your time be better spent somewhere else?

All of these questions have very valuable answers. The answers may come from a number of sources, but they exist.

More importantly, sales is growing more sophisticated every day. Sales Operations, Sales Support and Marketing in some companies are pushing this information directly to the sales reps in “just-in-time” systems to ensure that sales teams run as effectively as possible.

How does your company approach the problem of trying to really, truly, deeply understand your prospects and current clients? If you are like 70-80% of the companies out there, you probably are just getting started at some level. In my estimation, only 5-10% of the businesses in the United States are what I would consider to be “cutting edge” in their practices. And their results are proof that their systems are working.

If you have a success story, let’s chat. I appreciate talking to advanced practitioners of Sales and Competitive Intelligence. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)