This article was written to help answer the ultimate sales question, “How can we win a lot more deals?” In order to find the answer, Ron started by addressing the questions, “Why do we win and why do we lose?”
Primary Intelligence, a company that specializes in competitive intelligence, sales intelligence and win loss analysis, is in the unique place of having answered the question dozens of thousands of times for hundreds of companies. At heart, our goal is to help companies increase their sales success. This might happen by discovering new markets, improving sales rep performance or showing where company improvement must take place.
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The foundation of intelligence that we have built over the past ten years provided Ron with the ability to distill these reasons into the 5 of each (winners and losers). Over the next few posts, I’ll look at each of the ten reasons and provide additional information where possible.
If you have to answer these same questions, stick with me and see what you can learn.
As an introduction, I’ll provide a little bit of numeric information to get whet your appetite.
As part of our win loss interviews, respondents were asked for the primary reasons why they did or did not select the supplier. Ron coded and tabulated the open-ended responses, analyzing them for performance gaps, or areas where a response was more prevalent in one situation (selection or elimination) than in the other. This was done in order to determine which criteria had the largest impact for selection or elimination. The criteria with the largest gaps are presented in the table below. Positive gaps indicate that a criterion was mentioned more often as a reason for selection, and a negative gap indicates that a criterion was mentioned more often as a reason for elimination.
For example, industry usage had a positive gap of 2.8%. This indicates that respondents were slightly more likely to mention product features as a reason for selection than they were as a reason for not selecting a supplier. The largest gaps indicate where there are opportunities to stand out in areas that are most noticed by the customer, as well as areas where doing the wrong thing will have a significant impact on your chance for success.
Over the next few posts, we’ll flesh out each of these ideas until they make lots of sense. If don’t right, you’ll have a much better view of how your company can make improvements with current resources.
Stick with me. I’ll make it worth it.
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