Growing your Sales Skills with Feedback from Prospects

Over the past couple of months, I have spent a good deal of time speaking with our clients (past and present) about their use of our services. For those not familiar with Primary Intelligence, we are a company that produces Win Loss analysis, a specific form of research based on your company’s recent sales opportunities.

One of the reasons for the calls with our clients is to understand how they assimilate our data into their processes to be more effective. While we have many notions (based on assumptions) of how our clients should be able to find value in our services, it has been fascinating to “observe” how they are putting this program to work, either as a standalone or holistic sales intelligence program.

When I finish this exercise, I’ll create a Sales Intelligence best practice report. Not only will in include best practices, it will also include some outlying innovations create by our base. If you would like to receive a copy of this, please send me a message (Chris, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

In many of our most successful implementations, the sales group is in charge of the Win Loss program. While this might seem like a natural thing, Marketing and Competitive Intelligence departments are also interested in Win Loss for their own purposes.

Those that are most committed to using research and client feedback to make improvements have implemented regular debriefs with the sales rep and their manager. These meetings do not have to be long and they certainly are not meant to devalue the efforts of anyone in the deal. Instead, the sales operations or sales training representative uses the client feedback to illustrate the real needs of prospects, talk about trends that are emerging from deals all over the company and reinforce specific skills that have been trained in the company.

In these cases, sales reps are becoming more effective. And, interestingly, the more engaged the sales rep gets with the feedback, the more willing they seem to be to offer up more of their opportunities for review. Once they see Win Loss for what it is (building, training and improvement) rather than a witch hunt, the entire tone changes.

Whether your company looks to 3rd-parties to deliver this feedback or maintains the program internally, I recommend that the client feedback be presented to the sales reps in a form that is as unfiltered as possible. Sales reps want to be more productive. If their efforts with prospects can show them how to be more successful in the future, why wouldn’t they get behind this type of effort?