Sales Intelligence - Competitive Positioning

Especially in B2B sales, most companies that sell products, services or solutions have to compete against other vendors to gain a new client. Everyone in the deal works to differentiate themselves. Not only do you need to know how to position your product in the prospect’s company. You should also know how to anticipate the messages provided by competitive vendors in order to give your efforts the best chance. In your sales opportunities, how well are you able to identify what the competition says to position itself specifically against you?

Benefits
Differentiation: the first step in avoiding the curse of commoditization. Your company seeks to demonstrate value propositions that help move price further down the decision chain, but that’s not all. Proper positioning of your company and offering provide an advantage over the competition. Just remember that each of your competitors has the same goal. Knowing how each competitor positions itself against you reveals strategic direction, differentiation, and their perception of the current “hot buttons.”

Marketing
Gauge the effectiveness of your message versus the competition’s. Watch for changes in their positioning over time while monitoring the effectiveness of your value proposition. Understanding how your prospects react to your message and that of the competition provides an immediate tactical advantage.

Sales
What is the word on the street about you and the competition? With intelligence geared toward revealing the positioning of your competition, you gain the upper hand. Use this knowledge to beat the competition to the punch and steal their thunder. Know how to weaken their position before they arrive to the opportunity.

Recommendations

1. Use primary research methods to communicate with prospects
2. Prospects may not think like marketers or business intelligence specialists. Make sure to ask specific questions
3. “When [competitor] demonstrated its [feature], what did it say to justify the ROI?”
4. “What kind of emphasis did [competitor] put on its new [solution]?”
5. Engage Primary Intelligence to work with recent prospects to uncover the real message. A third-party vendor can usually approach this topic more easily than your company.

Let me know if I can help. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Sales Intelligence - Competitive Positioning

Especially in B2B sales, most companies that sell products, services or solutions have to compete against other vendors to gain a new client. Everyone in the deal works to differentiate themselves. Not only do you need to know how to position your product in the prospect’s company. You should also know how to anticipate the messages provided by competitive vendors in order to give your efforts the best chance. In your sales opportunities, how well are you able to identify what the competition says to position itself specifically against you?

Benefits
Differentiation: the first step in avoiding the curse of commoditization. Your company seeks to demonstrate value propositions that help move price further down the decision chain, but that’s not all. Proper positioning of your company and offering provide an advantage over the competition. Just remember that each of your competitors has the same goal. Knowing how each competitor positions itself against you reveals strategic direction, differentiation, and their perception of the current “hot buttons.”

Marketing
Gauge the effectiveness of your message versus the competition’s. Watch for changes in their positioning over time while monitoring the effectiveness of your value proposition. Understanding how your prospects react to your message and that of the competition provides an immediate tactical advantage.

Sales
What is the word on the street about you and the competition? With intelligence geared toward revealing the positioning of your competition, you gain the upper hand. Use this knowledge to beat the competition to the punch and steal their thunder. Know how to weaken their position before they arrive to the opportunity.

Recommendations

1. Use primary research methods to communicate with prospects
2. Prospects may not think like marketers or business intelligence specialists. Make sure to ask specific questions
3. “When [competitor] demonstrated its [feature], what did it say to justify the ROI?”
4. “What kind of emphasis did [competitor] put on its new [solution]?”
5. Engage Primary Intelligence to work with recent prospects to uncover the real message. A third-party vendor can usually approach this topic more easily than your company.

Let me know if I can help. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Sales Intelligence - What Problem are You Expected to Solve?

As a sales professional, your solution is only as valuable as the problem it solves. In a given opportunity, how well are you personally able to identify the business need that prompted them to shop for a new or replacement coverage plan?

Benefits
Addressing the cores needs and values of potential clients has a direct impact on sales success. It’s one thing for a client to face a choice between a group of competitors and quite another if one of the options is presented with an understanding of her core needs. This approach gives sales people a definite competitive advantage.

Marketing
Individually or in aggregate, do you understand what the prospect wants? Marketing organizations that do their homework on this point outperform those that don’t by presenting a solution that helps to define the need.

Sales
The sales organization tends to live squarely in the middle of understanding needs. Sales organizations that don’t practice this part of their craft flounder, failing to understand the need before attempting to provide a “square peg in round hole” solution. Understanding why similar companies decided to evaluate vendors helps sales professionals with context for future discussions.

Recommendations

Use post-decision interviews with recent opportunities that entered the pipeline to understand what your prospects want and what they are not receiving.

Using the same audience, find out why they include BCBS on their initial vendor list. What are the signals that BCBS send that create a general level of interest in the marketplace.

Be cautious of relying too heavily on sales professionals, agents or brokers for this information. Their attention is usually focused more on the middle and endgame than these initial sales stages.

If you can't consistently answer this question about all of your accounts, consider Win Loss Analysis from Primary Intelligence to create a consistent flow of information. Let me know if I can help. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Sales Cycle Length – What Does Competitive Intelligence Tell You?

In a recent study we conducted for a regional medical plan provider, Primary Intelligence evaluated a large number of recent won and lost sales opportunities. These opportunities represented accounts in which the regional provider had competed directly against a competitor for new business.

The opportunities broke out as 50% wins and 50% losses for our client. However, this is not necessarily representative of the actual win rate for this client. This ratio was created in order to populate predictive analytics algorithms used by Primary Intelligence to help companies increase their win rates.

Outside of the predictive analytics, Primary Intelligence also attempts to glean additional information about the sales cycle. In today’s post, we’ll look at the sales cycle length and determine if anything can be learned.

Primary Intelligence interviewed the decision-makers within the prospects’ companies. The people that talked to Primary Intelligence were those that played a prominent role in the evaluation and decision to purchase from our client or competitor. In every one of these cases, the prospect purchased health care solutions, whether from our client or the competition.

The respondents were asked about the amount of time required to make a decision, from initial needs requirements to contract. In this case, The decision time for respondents selecting Regional Medical’s* plans is very short, with 87.5 percent making their decision to purchase Regional Medical within two months (see chart 6). If the prospect chooses a competitor’s solution, that decision is made within the same time frame 75 percent of the time.

(*Company name changed to provide anonymity)

A couple of lessons can be learned:

1- For this client, get out of most every opportunity that lasts longer than 3 months. Very few opportunities are won after 3 months.
2- Sales management should watch the sales rep’s pipelines. If the sales rep is holding on to opportunities too long, they are not working the most productive leads.
3- On average, the longer the opportunity lasts, the higher the likelihood that the competition will win.

The chart presented above shows a very short sales cycle. Many of our clients in various industries are more likely to see data over a 6 month or 12 month sales cycle (or even longer in some cases).

The actual sales cycle length is irrelevant. The fact is that you need to know the sweet spots of your sales cycle timeline. There is no guarantee that all prospects will behave like the peaks and valleys in the chart above, but it is important to note when decisions are made and where you should push harder and when you should pull back.

If sales is a numbers game (and it is), learning to maximize the odds in your favor is one of the most efficient ways of making your sales efforts more effective.

If you need a view into this kind of data, let me know. I can help. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence: Analytics Show You How to Sell More

If your company uses market information to make decisions, you are almost certain to be familiar with the “Of these items, how important was…” or “Which of these would you consider to be first, second and third most important?” These questions result in a measurement of stated importance, or those things that are easily identified and verbalized as important.

While these data are easy to generate and generally seem reasonable at face value, there is evidence to show that decisions based solely on stated importance are subject to important limitations. Those areas of your company’s performance that are identified as most important often do not correlate well, if at all, with purchase decisions. Which means that your company can act on those performance areas identified as most important and yet, no measurable improvement be made from those efforts. In most companies, that is defined as poor ROI or “a waste of money.”

For example, through your research, you may identify a performance area with a relatively low performance score and might initially trigger discussion regarding ways to improve the performance. However, you wouldn’t want to do much about it if it had a low correlation to overall increases in market share. For instance, let’s consider this principle in a Win Loss setting. Suppose we had created an interview and included the measurement of professionalism of a sales force against a prospect’s likelihood of choosing a vendor. Whether the performance rating against the competition was positive or negative, it would be difficult for an executive to understand the impact that professionalism actually has on the company’s sales win ratio. It would be impossible to know how much a change in performance would affect that win ratio. If it turns out that the correlation to the sales win rate is high, the decision to put emphasis on increasing professionalism would be very easy and relatively risk-free. If the correlation were low, resources could be assigned to improve other parts of the sales process.

There is much evidence to indicate that responses on importance scales can be affected by other factors that distort the accuracy of the response, for example the need to please, social demands, cognitive dissonance, and generic importance, among others. In the entertainment industry, for example, television viewers using such scales will continually rate the value of news and information above sex or escapism. However, would anyone wish to predict, based upon these data, whether the ratings of the program Seinfeld will be lower than those of The PBS News Hour? Thus, there is a much deeper level of insight to be gained from deriving the information from the respondents’ answers rather than taking them at face value.

The quadrant below shows how actual data from our win loss studies has plotted on stated importance and derived importance:

Legend
• Stated importance is plotted on the Y-axis; it represents the average importance rating given by respondents for each influencer’s characteristic or attribute.
• Derived importance is plotted on the X-axis; it is obtained by assessing the company’s performance in each influencer and determining (through proprietary modeling techniques) the impact that each influencer had on the sales outcome. The higher the derived importance, the more impact that influencer has on the overall sales win ratio.

• Upper left quadrant—“Declared important”: This quadrant consists of items that are stated to be important, but which ultimately have little correlation to a respondent’s decision-making process.
• Upper right quadrant—“Key influencers”: This quadrant reflects attributes that the respondent both states as being important and which prove to be highly influential at a derived level.
• Lower right quadrant—“Hidden opportunities”: This quadrant consists of attributes that the respondent cannot readily identify at a stated level, but which do impact overall satisfaction at a derived level.
• Lower left quadrant—“Limited impact”: Attributes in this quadrant have both low stated importance and little influence on overall satisfaction.

Now, one caveat is in order here. Some performance areas may be ranked high in stated importance, but will be low in derived importance. This doesn’t mean that a company can cut back efforts in the areas of stated importance. They still have an effect on the sales process. When an attribute has a high stated importance, the data are saying that this is a performance area that can’t be neglected without adversely altering the win loss ratio, but significant improvement may not provide actual gains in the win loss ratio.

In the end, using the most sophisticated analytics tools to determine the key influencers will eventually provide the greatest strategic decision-making ability for your company. In so many cases, this approach has improved company performance so much more than “gut feeling,” reactive competitive intelligence programs, and stated importance measurements.

This is where Primary Intelligence makes its living; providing powerful predictive analytics to our clients in order to grow their market share. Perhaps, we should discuss how this might work for you. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

PI Competitive Intelligence Newsletter

This edition features ideas on gathering competitive intelligence from some of the most fertile ground, your client and prospects. And, don’t forget to comment on the blog. Where does competitive intelligence go in your company?

To subscribe to the newsletter, click HERE or use the subscribe option on any of the newsletter pages (accessible by clicking on the links below)

Cover Story
Your Prospects Are Talking. Are You Listening?
By Mark Larson, Primary Intelligence
What's ironic is that a prospect is generally the easiest source of information about a company's products or direction. Consider this idea: the people most willing to help with anything are those that will generally benefit the most for providing feedback. (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Where does your Competitive Intelligence Go?
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 more, click here)

The A-List Archive
Straightforward Pricing Helps Siebel Win Contract with Terry Hinge & Hardware
Originally Published in January 2005.
With its recent growth through acquisitions and development of new divisions, Terry Hinge & Hardware needed to standardize and integrate its sources of sales information. The President/COO explained that the Company originally evaluated Salesforce.com, Siebel, and Caritor, but eliminated the latter because evaluators believed the vendor did not have enough. (For more, click here)

Upcoming Webinar - Making Competitive Intelligence Effective

Just wanted to let you know that I will co-host a webinar on September 27 with one of my associates, Mike Brose. The webinar will be conducted at 2PM ET (11AM PT) and is free of charge.

A summary of the webinar follows:

While information provides the fuel for strategic direction, how often does yesterday's "can't miss" competitive intelligence initiative get lost in the shuffle of today's realities?

Overall, too many sales, competitive, and market intelligence initiatives are judged ineffective due to the fact that the intelligence is never used to increase sales, gain a competitive advantage, or capitalize on a new market opportunity.

Primary Intelligence would like to invite you to a presentation that will show:

-Why competitive intelligence is often under-utilized
-How to generate findings that actually makes a difference
-How to start with the end in mind
-Different methods to ensure that the intelligence will provide a guiding beacon.

Those that will benefit include:
-Marketing leaders
-Market research managers
-Market and Industry analysts
-Sales leaders
-Corporate leadership positions (CEO, CMO, CSO)

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/976829978

Date: September 27, 2007
Time: 2PM ET, 1PM CT, Noon MT, 11AM PT

Sales Reps and Management: Should You Listen to Your Prospects?

Listen, listen, listen. Is there a more basic sales skill? If you don’t understand your prospect, how can you possibly solve their need?

Of course, you can’t stop listening. If you turn off the voice of your prospect, you are committing sales suicide. Not very productive in my book.

But, is the voice of your prospect telling you everything you need to know? Practitioners of analytics would tell you, “No.” In fact, there are many examples of people saying one thing, but feeling another. In research, the following example illustrates this point:

“There is much evidence to indicate that responses on importance scales can be affected by other factors that distort the accuracy of the response, i.e., the need to please, social demands, cognitive dissonance, and generic importance among others. In the entertainment industry, for example, television viewers using such scales will continually rate the value of news and information above sex or escapism. However, would anyone wish to predict, based upon these data, whether the ratings of the program Seinfeld will be lower than those of The PBS News Hour? Thus, there is a much deeper level of insight to be gained from deriving the information from the respondents’ answers rather than taking them at face value."

So, how does this apply to sales? Perhaps in the one-to-one relationship building, listening directly to the client is the only avenue for information. But, when the collective voices of your clients speak, take a little time to couple their actions with their words to determine your sales performance areas that really matter.

The quadrant below shows how actual data from our win loss studies has plotted on stated importance and derived importance:

Legend
• Stated importance is plotted on the Y-axis; it represents the average importance rating given by respondents for each influencer’s characteristic or attribute.
• Derived importance is plotted on the X-axis; it is obtained by assessing the company’s performance in each influencer and determining (through proprietary modeling techniques) the impact that each influencer had on the sales outcome. The higher the derived importance, the more impact that influencer has on the overall sales win ratio.

• Upper left quadrant—“Declared important”: This quadrant consists of items that are stated to be important, but which ultimately have little correlation to a respondent’s decision-making process.
• Upper right quadrant—“Key influencers”: This quadrant reflects attributes that the respondent both states as being important and which prove to be highly influential at a derived level.
• Lower right quadrant—“Hidden opportunities”: This quadrant consists of attributes that the respondent cannot readily identify at a stated level, but which do impact overall satisfaction at a derived level.
• Lower left quadrant—“Limited impact”: Attributes in this quadrant have both low stated importance and little influence on overall satisfaction.

Now, one caveat is in order here. Some performance areas may be ranked high in stated importance, but will be low in derived importance. This doesn’t mean that a company can cut back efforts in the areas of stated importance. They still have an effect on the sales process. When an attribute has a high stated importance, the data are saying that this is a performance area that can’t be neglected without adversely altering the win loss ratio, but significant improvement may not provide actual gains in the win loss ratio.

In the end, using the most sophisticated analytics tools to determine the key influencers will eventually provide the greatest strategic decision-making ability for your company. In so many cases, this approach has improved company performance so much more than “gut feeling,” reactive competitive intelligence programs, and stated importance measurements.

This is where Primary Intelligence makes its living; providing powerful predictive analytics to our clients in order to grow their market share. Perhaps, we should discuss how this might work for you. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Sales Intelligence that Works Better Than Employee Satisfaction Surveys

In my last post, I described a tool that help predict pipeline traffic and quota attainment through the use of sales rep generated data. The tool is called Sales Confidence Index (SCI) and it functions under the premise that “The first sale that has to occur is in the heart of the sales rep.”

A 10 minute interview with your sales group will provide you with a clear view into their collective strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to address the most important training areas right now. Over time, you track the progress of your sales groups, evolving and adapting to changes in your marketplace and company.

Of course, the results can be broken down by subgroups, geography, etc…

Because Primary Intelligence is an objective third party gathering this information and presenting the responses in a way that preserves anonymity, you can be assured that you will receive data that is more candid and honest than what you would receive through anecdotal evidence or brainstorming sessions.

A precise leading indicator of future sales success
Primary Intelligence’s SCI Web-based application provides index scores on 19 key factors that influence your sales team’s confidence and performance. These scores, and the metrics derived from them, give you precise indicators of future risk and opportunity—allowing you to allocate your resources, time, money, and training to those areas that will give you the greatest return on investment. This analysis gives you a three- to six-month window to make any necessary changes before potential risks become actual issues that will negatively impact your sales efforts.



Monitor the pulse of your sales channels, direct and indirect
Primary Intelligence’s Sales Confidence Index is the only technology solution that gives you a comprehensive understanding of your sales team’s level of engagement. Through SCI’s customizable dashboard, you can rapidly progress from taking a general “temperature reading” of your sales team’s morale to tracking and trending their confidence in 55 discrete areas—giving you the information to tailor your training and sales initiatives to those areas that will have the greatest impact on your bottom line.

Sales Confidence Index, as a key component of your sales intelligence efforts, provides your organization with the objective data you need to make informed decisions about how to enable your sales team to be more confident and generate greater revenue.

If you're ready to have a predictor of sales success, maybe you should take a 2 month test drive of the tool. It may make a ton of difference. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Can You Predict Quota Attainment with Sales-populated Analytics?

Experienced executives know that the difference between success and failure rests squarely on the quality of the people representing the company. Even if you have a superior product and strong sales processes, if your sales team is not engaged or lacks confidence (in themselves, in the product, or in the company), achieving your goals will be an uphill battle. It becomes even more complicated and challenging if you employ a multi-channel sales strategy to reach your revenue objectives.

Confident sales teams, on the other hand, are not only motivated to win, but will find new ways to make your company a success. Primary Intelligence’s Sales Confidence Index (SCI) provides your organization with crucial information about your sales channels’ level of confidence, providing you with best practices that you can use to improve performance, and identifying the root causes for why your team isn’t as confident or engaged as they should be.

Many companies have strong marketing research or PR programs in place to help gauge how they and their solutions are seen by prospective customers. However, many of these companies neglect to analyze the other side of the relationship: how they are seen by the people representing the business. By maintaining an external focus, these companies are ignoring an important truth:

If your sales team has doubts, your customers will as well.

In fact, there is a direct correlation between the confidence of your sales team and your sales performance. If your sales confidence drops, and nothing is done to correct the situation, within three to six months your organization’s win ratio will suffer as a result. On the other hand, a jump in your sales confidence will create measurable results in a matter of quarters. This makes sales confidence a powerful leading indicator of your company’s success.


To get an accurate measurement of your sales team’s confidence, you must examine four basic drivers: your team’s confidence in themselves, their confidence in the company, their confidence in the product, and their confidence in their ability to compete with the competition. Using a concise, confidential online interview, Primary Intelligence measures the key influencers of your sales team’s confidence in the areas of knowledge, passion, and performance.

The SCI tool then presents the findings to you through customizable, easy to understand metrics that let you track how the most important drivers of confidence are trending over time. The information that SCI provides will allow you and your sales executives to learn:

What sales initiatives are helping your sales force the most?

What resources does your sales team need to be more effective?

What does your sales force see as the largest obstacles preventing their success?

Which competitors pose the biggest threat?

How are your products perceived and presented by your channel partners?

What improvements in your products and services would your sales channels like to see?

Scores from Primary Intelligence's proprietary tools demonstrate in a very readable fashion where the sales team is headed, collectively and in individual units.

For more information, let's chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

The Impact of Competitive Intelligence in Sales

If you knew that making a 10% increase in a particular area of your sales performance would have a very high likelihood of increasing sales by a predictable amount, what would that data be worth?

Today’s analytics make this question a reality. Predictive Analytics are an area of Competitive Intelligence that is increasing the productivity of sales organizations. For instance, take the example below. Information was gathered from recent sales wins and losses. Primary Intelligence’s proprietary analytics were used to determine an impact score. The impact score indicates the expected increase in win rate based on a 10% increase in performance.



The greatest advantage the impact scores provide is the ability to prioritize performance enhancement programs. And, the fact that the scores are cumulative means that the increase in win rate, market share and revenues can be very large; often with relatively small efforts.

Analytics should be an essential part of everyone’s CI program. At least, I think so. If you have thoughts, leave me a comment, send and email or call (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Use Competitive Intelligence to Determine Positioning in Sales and Marketing

In a standard win loss project, one of the exercises we at Primary Intelligence perform during the interview process is to allow the respondent (a recent decision-maker that evaluated our client) rank the top three company, product and sales performance areas. The result is often a chart that looks like the one below:

Quickly, our client was able to see how to rework the sales message to be more effective. They changed their talk from customization and implementation to technology, functionality and integration. They used those topics to build the value proposition and outmaneuver the competition on cost.

It should be noted that, in this case, our client was one of the higher-end vendors. If they addressed price in the first sentence, they rarely made it to value.

Interestingly, Technology was rarely rated as the #1 criteria, but it was the second most mentioned criteria in the list overall.

Do you have this kind of visibility into your sales and marketing messages? If not, let’s do a couple of post-sales analyses free for you. Give me a call and let’s set something up. (Chris, 801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)