Competitive Intelligence and Decision Cycles

How long has a prospect been in your pipeline? What are the odds that your company will make the sale after time has elapsed and is the likelihood increasing? And, do you even know how long it takes the average prospect in a given industry to make a decision? Your CRM/SFA doesn’t really tell you. You only know from the point that you are engaged; not the actual moment that the evaluation begins.

Benefits
How does a prospect make a decision? Do different industries or company segments take different amounts of time to come to a conclusion? How does your company decide when to maintain an engagement or withdraw from a low probability opportunity? The answer to these questions can save your sales department large sums by identifying those opportunities that are likely to move to decision vs. eternal shoppers.

Marketing
With a constant flux of prospects in a dynamic marketplace, it is difficult to remember that each prospect begins with the end in mind. To each company, the buying process is a discreet event that needs to be completed to solve a specific problem. If Marketing can shed light on this aspect of the buying process, your company can work to more effectively meet the evaluation needs of different companies in various industries.

Sales
The advantages are twofold: First, knowing the window of time when an opportunity is likely to close in your favor helps to identify when the pipeline is too full of non-producing fluff. Second, with this type of information, you can identify key events in the sales process that correlate with positive decisions.

Recommendations

Communicate with prospects to determine their start/end points in the buying process

The prospect may have engaged your company later in the sales cycle. Data from your CRM/SFA may not be accurate enough to show evaluation cycles.

Talk to Primary Intelligence. Our Win Loss Analysis and Account Retention solutions typically demonstrate where the key decision points occur in different industry and company size segments.