Sales Intelligence and Competitive Performance Comparisons

It is no secret that your competition wants the sales as badly as you do. Sometimes, they may want a particular account even more than you. They are going to put forth their best effort, just as you would expect your team to do the same.

In the end, the prospect has to decipher substance from fluff and make a decision. What are the factors in play? Nearly everything. Whether conscious or subconscious, the prospect is evaluating dozens of dimensions of combinations of influencers and decision-making drivers. These might include:

Company
Financial Viability
Industry experience
Reputation
Company Size

Product
Overall solution cost
Ease of use
Scalability
Solution flexibility
Complete solution set
Functionality
Integration
Turnaround time

Sales
Demonstration
Existing Relationship
Integrity
Product knowledge
Responsiveness
Sales relationship (relationship with the sales team)
Presentation
Professionalism
Understanding needs (grasp of business)


The prospect is spending a ton of time evaluating your performance and that of the competitors in each of these dimensions, again, whether or not they recognize it consciously.

How well are you able to identify the prospects’ perception of your company and the competition in each of the following performance areas?

Benefits
A great company is one that is willing to accept the brutal facts. Individually or in aggregate, how does your company perform versus the competition in the most essential performance areas? The answers to these questions, coupled with analytics to show the areas of greatest impact and highest ROI, will provide your company with sustainable competitive advantages.

Marketing
You can’t improve that which you don’t measure. Convert your reports of competitive strengths and weaknesses from anecdotal to reliable measurements. Predictive analytics provide the illumination necessary to make the best use of the data.

Sales
Measurements of sales performance will provide quantitative data to sales management. Future training will be focused more directly on the current problems and identified strengths can be emphasized. Most importantly, the performance of the “eagles” can be measured and, with proper help, broadcasted to lower performing sales professionals.

Recommendations

Measure your performance scores and competitive gaps over time to track changes in competitive advantage.

Employ analytics to determine areas of highest impact on your future market share.

Create lists to measure company, solution, and sales performance.

Primary Intelligence offers both win loss and account retention services to measure your company’s performance in high-impact areas.

…not to mention predictive analytics that add ROI projections to all of these measurements.