Podcast: Sales Intelligence + Sales Team = Big Success

Recently, Dave Stein (CEO of ES Research Group) interviewed our CEO, Ken Allred on the affects of sales intelligence: competitive intelligence that can be brought to bear on all aspects of the sales process. His goal was to understand how Primary Intelligence uses intelligence to increase sales close rates.

As Mr. Stein’s company focuses on the evaluation of sales training and enhancement companies. His reports detail the performance of key players like Miller Heiman, The Complex Sale, The TAS Group and dozens of others. His goal is to help companies that want to sell more find the right resources to meet their needs.

To this end, Mr. Stein took time to understand how the right kinds of intelligence can be leveraged to provide:

Competitive advantages

Increased visibility into your company’s performance

Identification of your competitors’ movements

The audio program is 25 minutes long and can be downloaded here.

If your responsibilities include sales management, sales training, competitive intelligence or marketing, this podcast is well worth your time.

And, if you feel like you’re not sure where you stand in relation to the competition, you’ll find usable insights and take-aways you can use today.

10 Ways to Become a Better Sales Person

Welcome to the New Year.


Hopefully, you have been able to keep your resolutions for 3 days so far. If one of you resolutions was to improve your sales results in 2008, Jim Klein, a sales training professional, offers the following:

Being a better salesperson is more than learning new skills and techniques. Here are my top ten ways to become a better salesperson:


1. Smile and Walk Tall
Changing your physiology is a great way to feel better about everything going around you.


I want you to try an experiment. I want you to think and act as if you are totally depressed. Come on do this with me. Stand up and act like you're totally depressed. Notice how you are standing. Your shoulders are slumped. Your head is down. Your face is sad and your breathing is shallow.


Feels pretty awful doesn't it?


Okay, Now I want you to imagine a time when you felt on top of the world, when everything was going your way, you couldn't lose. How are you standing? Your shoulders are back, head is up, your breathing is deep and you've got a big smile on your face.


Feel the difference?


2. Surround Yourself with People Who Support You
One of the most important steps you can take in your life is to build relationships with people who genuinely care about you and will support you as you go through life.


I'm talking about people who will love you during hard times and celebrate with you during the good times. People who will be painfully honest and compassionately sympathetic. People who will make you laugh and motivate you and encourage you to be that person you were meant to be.

3. Read Positive Books at Least 15 Minutes Every Day
There's a wealth of information that has been written for you to absorb. What goes in your mind is what will come out. So fill it with good, positive information and good, positive things will happen in your life.


I suggest you start your own library. Go buy a bookshelf and set a goal to fill it with books you've read. Set up an account at Amazon or Barnes and Noble and invest in your education.


The UPS truck shows up regularly at my house with deliveries from Amazon.


If you don't want to buy them, get a library card. There free!


What books should you read? Start with Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.


4. Post Your Goals and Read Them Twice a Day
Post your goals where you'll see them at different times during your day. Put them on the bathroom mirror, in your car, your office, near your computer. Write them on a 3 x 5 card and pull out the card every chance you get and read them.


Make two specific times when you take them out and read them. One is first thing in the morning before you do anything else. This will start your day focused on your goals and their achievement.


The second is right before you go to bed. This practice will give your subconscious mind something positive to work on during the night.


5. Be Grateful For The Little Things
Find time every day to be grateful for all you have. We all have something we can be grateful for. Some of these are little things that we take for granted like our health, our home, our friends, the food in the refrigerator. Focusing on what you're grateful for will bring more of it in to your life.


I'm grateful every day when I wake up and my feet hit the floor.


6. Spend Time Doing What Matter Most
We waste too much time on things that bring little enjoyment into our lives. It's time to spend our time doing the things that matter most.


Have dinner with your family. Attend your child's play or baseball game. Help an elderly person cross the street. Take a walk and enjoy the view.


Some things are more important than money, status, power and prestige. Invest some of your time into those activities and see if it doesn't change the way you feel.


7. Treat Stumbling Blocks as Stepping Stones
So what if you didn't make that big sale, your girlfriend left you, your boss chewed you out or you made a big mistake?


Your life isn't over. So keep your eyes on your goals.


What did you do right? What did you learn? How can you use this to make yourself better or stronger? What will you do different the next time?


Use it as a stepping stone to take you to the next level.


I've had some of my biggest periods of growth after major setbacks.


8. Help others to succeed
When you're gone, nobody will be talking about how much money you made or how many awards you won, they will be talking about the lives you touched and the difference you made.


Success is so sweet when you can share your knowledge and caring with others. Give of yourself. It will make the people you touch feel good and I know how it will make you feel.


The sad part is when people come to the end of their lives and think about all the things they wish they'd done.


9. Reward yourself
When you sell that big account or reach a goal you set, reward yourself. Go buy something you've always wanted, take a trip, go out for an expensive dinner. Do something nice for you. You deserve it.


10. Tomorrow is a New Day
No matter what happened today, good or bad. You can go to sleep tonight knowing that tomorrow the slate is wiped clean. You get a fresh new 24 hours to accomplish any thing you want.

Article Source: ArticleYard

The Essential Qualities Of Successful Sales Leadership

Any sales leader knows that leadership is a combination of science, art and skill. Jonathan Farrington published some thoughts on the idea of sales leadership (and probably, leadership in general) and I found his insights… insightful.

While the concepts certainly aren’t new, it always seem to find simple reminders of powerful concepts to be interesting and valuable.

Mr. Farrington lists the six most essential qualities as:

1. Enthusiasm
2. Courage
3. Self Confidence
4. Integrity
5. Interest
6. Humor

Personally, I enjoyed his thoughts on integrity to one’s self, the company, superiors and associates and the requirements that places on the individual to uphold that integrity:

“A leader keeps promises. They keep their promises to their associates as meticulously as those made to their superiors. They keep promises made to themselves, which are the hardest to keep and failure in this is the easiest to rationalise. They can keep all these promises because they never commit themselves rashly; but always within the limits of reality and their present capabilities in terms of personal ability. Part of this matter of integrity is certainly, unquestioned loyalty to their organisation - to its reputation as well as their own. Also they must have loyalty to their products and to their associates and loyalty to their industry.”

If you have any alternate ideas on leadership, post a comment and let me know.

Why Do Sales Teams LOSE? – Lack of Responsiveness (7-10)

As mentioned, I’m going to present reasons why companies win and lose sales deals. These reasons were outlined by Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, in a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

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?” Each of these points were taken from a library of thousands of win loss sales debriefs and compiled into performance rankings.

7. Take your time responding to requests.

One of the surprises of this study’s findings was the fact that many of the criteria associated with Strategic Account Managers (SAMs) (such as responsiveness, the relationship with the account team and presentation) showed negative gaps. From these findings, it appears as if the best account managers often go unnoticed, whereas any negative behavior in the sales process is remembered by the potential customer. Nowhere is this more evident than in responsiveness. Very few respondents mentioned the responsiveness of the SAM as a reason for selecting a supplier. Problems with responsiveness, however, were noticed and mentioned as a primary reason for eliminating a supplier from the evaluation process. An example of how to create a negative impression was provided by a respondent, who explained:

“[Company 1] was slow in getting around to pricing. The people that put on the presentation basically said, ’We will have to get back to you on that,’ and they never got back to us on that. It seemed very lethargic about getting back to us and getting us figures. It was like it was saying, ‘Let us go back and sharpen our pencils some more and take another two or three weeks.’”

The issue of responsiveness seems to be like a car engine: you don’t notice how it is performing until something goes wrong. A lack of responsiveness could quickly erode any sort of relationship that has been carefully built, regardless of other factors. Customers want to receive value sooner rather than later, and if the customer experiences responsiveness problems during the evaluation process, it can indicate that there may be problems with the supplier later in the relationship.

Why Do Sales Teams Win? – Let your past success lead to future success (3-10)

As mentioned, I’m going to present reasons why companies win and lose sales deals. These reasons were outlined by Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, in a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

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?” Each of these points were taken from a library of thousands of win loss sales debriefs and compiled into performance rankings.

3. Let your past success lead to future success.

Strong relationships and successful partnerships not only lead to future sales with the customers themselves; they also serve as the foundation for accounts with other customers. Whether it is through word-of-mouth, seeing what other companies in the industry were using or by checking with reference companies that had been provided by the supplier, many respondents mentioned that the knowledge that a product was being utilized successfully in other locations was a factor in their decision to select a supplier.

References were the deciding point in several of the interviews. In one case, a supplier was chosen because of the references it provided, even though its product was significantly more expensive than its competitor’s offering:

“We narrowed it down to [Company 1] and [Company 2], and their products were almost identical. What separated [Company 1] and [Company 2] were customer support issues. Every [supplier] that we considered on the short list gave us references, and then we went out and found install sites on our own. [Company 2]’s references, including the ones that they provided to us, were terrible.”

In another example, a respondent used references as a way of obtaining direct comparisons of competing suppliers. In this case, the references were especially powerful because they came from organizations that had experience with each of the competitors:

“[Company 1]’s references were extremely strong. One reference company had actually worked with [Company 2] previously and within the previous year had moved over, so it was a good company to talk to about the two competing suppliers, and be able to really compare apples to apples.”

These cases illuminate the role of references in a well-developed account strategy. They not only provided examples of satisfied customers and successful relationships; in cases where they were chosen judiciously, they demonstrated industry expertise and experience, and provided objective, third-party comparisons of the competing offerings.

Because of the importance of references, it is vital that account strategies include a carefully designed system for developing and using references. A solid reference program allows a supplier to produce powerful, compelling and current references whenever requested, and prevents the problems that will come with “crossing your fingers” and hoping that your reference will give you a good recommendation.

Why Do Sales Teams Win? – Think Relationship (2-10)

As mentioned, I’m going to present reasons why companies win and lose sales deals. These reasons were outlined by Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, in a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

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?” Each of these points were taken from a library of thousands of win loss sales debriefs and compiled into performance rankings.

2. Focus on the relationship, not the sale.

The heart of strategic account management is developing a strong connection between your company and the customer. By definition, a strategic account is designed to be a long-lasting partnership that is mutually beneficial to both parties. The importance of this relationship can be measured in terms of repeat purchases and customer loyalty. The data confirms the importance of a good relationship: prior experience with a supplier was the second most often cited reason for selection and was mentioned significantly more often in cases where the company was selected as the winning supplier.

While some of these cases of repeat sales were due to organizational inertia, or the unwillingness to change suppliers because it was prohibitively difficult or expensive, many of the comments made by respondents indicated that the repeat business was due to the relationship that had developed between the supplier and the customer. The liaison between the two, of course, was the account manager, and those who made it their job to keep in constant communication had the edge over those who only communicated during new opportunities for sales. As one respondent explained, it was important that the SAM cared about all aspects of the relationship:

“[Company 1]’s support is awesome. We have nothing but wonderful comments for the sales representative. I e-mail or call anybody and it always gets back to the sales representative and I get a call from him to make sure it was all done correctly. It gives me peace of mind.”

One aspect of the respondent’s descriptions of their relationships with suppliers that stood out was the importance of the relationship during difficult times. For example, one respondent explained why her company had created lasting relationships with two suppliers:

“We had built up a very good relationship with both agencies over the years. We have been through a couple of years of tough economic times. Both of these agencies have stuck with us. They have been through good times with us, and will stick around for the next round of good times in the near future. It would be very difficult for any other agencies to take our business away from those two.”

By maintaining the relationship, even when the customer was not be able to give as much business to the supplier as it had in the past, the SAMs were able to create a strong bond that makes it difficult for competitors to win future business opportunities with the customer. The main point of these examples is that corporations do not buy from corporations; people buy from people. As the face of the company, all the interactions with account managers, from the first meeting to the last, set the tone for the entire business relationship.

Why Do Sales Teams Win Deals? Reason 1of 10

Over the next few posts, I’m going to present reasons why companies win and lose sales deals. These reasons were outlined by Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, in a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

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?”

Let’s get started.

By way of background, 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.

1. Let your product speak for itself.

A product’s features and functionality had the largest positive gap, indicating that respondents were much more likely to mention product features positively, and that product features were more likely to have a positive influence than a negative one. It is therefore advantageous to point out a product’s strengths to a potential customer

Specific features of a product are especially important because the customer will often be concerned about the product’s ability to meet the precise needs of multiple users and locations, as well as the product’s ability to integrate with other systems already in place. It is therefore vital that customers are not only informed about the product’s specifications, but that they have also been shown how those specifications are translated to the reality of the company’s business needs.

One way that Strategic Account Managers (SAMs) have accomplished this is through the use of product-oriented presentations and demonstrations. When used in conjunction with technical materials, these demonstrations helped to make the product features and functionality more comprehensible, and showed that the SAM was not overstating the product’s capabilities. Most importantly, they helped to make the customer feel more comfortable that the product would meet their needs and that their staff would have the ability to use it effectively. For example, one respondent explained that the evaluation team was not confident about its first choice of product until the SAM could organize a demonstration of features and functionality for them:

“We had a demonstration, and that reassured me that we were making the right decision. For one thing, the whole layout of the computer screens was superior. There were just a lot of little things. It reassured me that we were making the right decision.”

By allaying any fears the customer may have had about the product, the SAM in this situation helped boost the customer’s confidence in both the sale and the business relationship. Customers today actively seek solutions that can create value for the organization in the shortest period of time. As a result, account managers need to do whatever they can to prove that their offering will work in the actual usage situation.

Sales Intelligence: Why Do We Win? Why Do We Lose?

A little while back, Ron Sathoff, a colleague of mine, wrote a great article for SAMA magazine called “Five Ways to Bolster Your Strategic Account Strategy, and Five Ways to Sabotage it.” (The article is available for download HERE)

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.

(Enough advertisement… for the moment)

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.

Competitive Intelligence Newsletter: Double Your Money: Win Back Lost Sales…

In this week’s cover story, Mike Brose talks about the double benefit of winning back accounts that were never yours. And, don’t forget to download our recent webinar: Three Benefits of Win Loss You Can’t Ignore

Cover Story
Double Your Money: Win Back Lost Sales with Intelligence
By Mike Brose, Primary Intelligence
Too often, companies are willing to wave "goodbye" to lost prospects, hoping that, "Someday, they'll give us another shot." In essence, the effort that was put into selling is dismissed. Rare is the company that has a formal win back program. But these companies have learned very clearly just how profitable those programs can be... (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Why is Competitive Intelligence Not Effective?
In short, does your company make changes to increase revenues and profitability based on your intelligence efforts? Based on our experience, if you are like most companies, the effect of your intelligence efforts are minimized and, often, substantially... (For more, click here)

The A-List
iLinc Wins Pfizer Contract with Mixture of Technology, Content and Customer Focus
Originally Published in December 2004.
Executives at Pfizer's Global Learning and Development Group wanted to upgrade its training and assessment tools for its pharmaceutical sales personnel. The three short-list vendors were required to submit proposals, which were evaluated by DeLosa and a team of Pfizer personnel from strategic services and healthcare systems training. Although the proposals were intended to be the main element of the evaluation process... (For more, click here)

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.

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)

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 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)

Upcoming Webinar - The Sad Story of Intelligence that Never Made a Difference

Just wanted to let you know that I will co-host a webinar next week with one of my associates, Mike Brose. A summary of the webinar them 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/162321711

If you have any questions, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Do You Ask Your Sales Reps Why They Lose? Why?

A typical practice in sales organization is the post-sale debrief or "post mortem." This may occur in many different ways, ranging from a small questionnaire that is administered through the SFA when an opportunity is marked as a win or loss. Or, it may occur in person, between sales rep and manager.

But, why are you asking the sales rep why the client decided for or against the proposed solution? The sales rep wasn’t a decision-maker; only a facilitator. The decision-maker is sitting in the prospect’s office, with a head filled with the details that created a favorable/negative outcome based on your sales efforts.

In my experience, the only real opinion that matters is the one from the person that signed the check.

I’m not saying that sales reps don’t know anything. On the contrary, they know what they did and how they perceived the reaction to their presentations, responsiveness, relationship building, etc… But, that’s not enough for a department to make the most effective, consistent improvements.

If you are serious about improving your company’s sales performance, reach out and consistently talk to the prospects, post-decision.

I have heard of some companies that interview both the prospect and sales rep. What do they find out? Mostly, that their sales reps don’t see the situation in the same way as the prospects. At worst, it’s a case of “He said, she said,” which doesn’t really solve much either.

Talk to your prospects and clients. They will be the most effective voice for helping you sell the deals in the pipeline. If you don’t have time, hire Primary Intelligence. This is what we do. You won’t find any other company that has conducted more post-sales interviews. We interpret data and create improvement programs. (Shameless plug, but that’s life)

I have some ideas about the types of performance-enhancing questions to ask. Also, I can help you see how to gather competitive intelligence at the same time. Let me know how I can help. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence - A Quantitative Evaluation of Your Sales Team's Performance

Every sales manager uses a grading system of some type for individual sales reps and the collective sales team. One of the most interesting measurements we have found is based on feedback from outside the organization. At Primary Intelligence, we let the prospects tell you how you are doing as a company. If the measurements are gathered consistently from enough sales opportunities, we have the ability to show you the strengths and weaknesses of your sales team in up to 30 different performance areas.

The table below shows a sample report from an actual client. The measurements are based on 30 opportunities where our client won and 30 where the prospect chose a competing vendor. (Click on the image below to enlarge)


It is important to note that these measurements are most effective for planning changes to tactics. Strategic insight would be better displayed through Primary Intelligence’s predictive analytics. You can email me about the analytics or read back through some older posts for more info.

Anyway, when reviewing scores like those above, the positives are your current competitive strengths and the negatives represent your overall weaknesses.

As a VP of sales, I would use this competitive/sales intelligence to show that overall, we need to emphasize our industry experience. I would also recommend that the company implement a program that helps sales reps understand the business of their prospects. These are both fairly simple to solve, require very little money, and have nothing to do with price.

Primary Intelligence could also bring some training to the table to develop the improvement plans and increase sales team effectiveness in these two areas of sales performance weakness.

Do you know what your prospects think of your performance? Maybe, it is time to ask. We can help you. We’ll show you how to do it and we’ll provide an end-to-end solution if you need one. I can give you details (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Can You Predict Your Future Win Rate? (Part 2 of 2)

In my last post, I said that a SWOT analysis leaves a strategic decision-maker with a problem. You may be able to identify some competitive weaknesses (compared with a specific competitor or in the marketplace in general), but you don’t have any way of gauging what would happen to your market share if the weaknesses were improved.

And, you can’t tell whether continuing to improve the strengths would provide a bigger competitive benefit to your company’s efforts.

So, if a competitive intelligence professional spends all of their time studying the market and the end results is a list of strengths and weaknesses (with no predictive analytics or direction), how much value does that person provide?

I guess that I should be clear that a SWOT analysis is not useless. There is tactical value in a SWOT. You can figure out what to say today with a SWOT, but you can’t make strategic decisions based on a SWOT. There is still too much guesswork.

So what? Replace the SWOT with Impact-based Competitive Intelligence. For instance, Primary Intelligence does this all the time. To determine competitive strengths and weaknesses, we:

1-Interview recent wins and losses where your company competed head-to-head with specific competitors.
2-Measure your competitive performance in 20-30 specific decision influencers
3-Determine strengths and weaknesses (Not the gap score in the table below. Positive gaps indicate weaknesses. Negative gaps indicate strengths)
4-Use predictive analytics to determine the influencers that, it improved, would result in the greatest increases in market share. (Impact column, explained below)

Impact identifies your expected improvement in market share. For instance, in this example (a real-world example taken from one of our clients), if you were to improve your company’s performance in Product Knowledge by one point (In other words, if you improved the 7.7 rating to an 8.7), you would expect your win rate and market share to increase by the impact score of 5.7% (at the 90% confidence level).

And, Product Knowledge is already a competitive strength. Overall, you outperform the competition by 5% in this area. The key may be to make this competitive advantage more consistent throughout the company.

In other words, there are influencers that would provide 2x, 3x and 4x the results of others if improvement were made in those specific areas. This could result in gains of millions or billions of unexpected dollars, based on some potentially simple improvements in the right areas.

This approach takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. No espionage required. And, yet, the company makes the biggest gains in increasing its client base.

Now, this approach does not satisfy all Competitive Intelligence needs, but it sure does take the OPPORTUNITY column of the SWOT table to a completely different level.

I am happy to talk about this approach with you. Let me know what you think about how this would fit your organization. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Can You Predict Your Future Win Rate? (Part 1 of 2)

A very typical request we receive at Primary Intelligence is for a SWOT analysis. Our clients want to know the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats presented by a competitor or group of competitors in a marketplace.

Of course, this SWOT analysis has a place, but its value is more tactical than strategic. Sales guys should have access to a SWOT, but I don’t know that executives should make decisions based off of this kind of information.

The problem that I see with the SWOT analysis is the fact that a company will know where its current strengths and weaknesses may be, but doesn’t have any insight into the areas of change that will bring about the biggest improvement in win rates, market share and defeating the competition.

Below, you will see an example of a Strength/Weakness evaluation based on data from recent sales opportunities. Half of the data come from new business that was won and the other 50% come from opportunities that were lost to competitors: (click on the image to see a bigger version)

The data are sorted from biggest negative competitive gap (weakness) at the top to the biggest positive competitive gap (strength) at the bottom. The scores are based on a 1-10 scale where 1 is Poor and 10 is excellent.

If you were to make strategic changes in your company based on the data in this table, you would probably look at the weaknesses and evaluate the most effective ways to close the competitive gap.

But, would this make a difference? What would happen if you were to increase your performance in Overall Solution Cost or Understanding Needs by ten percent? (A 10% improvement would mean that you increase your score of 8.1 to 9.1) How much would your win rate increase? Would making improvements in your weaknesses correlate with a stronger competitive preference, or would you be pulling the wrong levers and pouring time and money down the drain?

Traditional intelligence looks at Strengths and Weaknesses
• Should you “fix” weaknesses or accentuate strengths?
• Strength/Weaknesses don’t always correlate with decision making.
• Where is your opportunity to increase win rates and market share?

In my experience, efforts to improve the biggest weaknesses rarely result in an overall improvement in market share and competitive sales wins. In other words, odds are good that most companies are wasting time and money by using SWOTs for strategic planning.

In my next post, I’ll show you a new way to prioritize your strategic plans, based on a more intelligent form of Competitive Intelligence and performance evaluation.

If you need more info on this topic, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)