Sales Intelligence: Post-implementation Analysis and Client Loyalty

Your new client just finished an install of your product, service or solution. They are ramping up on understanding how to gain the ROI that was promised during the sales pitch.

Or, in a different company, they chose your competitor’s product. Your former prospect is trying to figure out what they have purchased and whether it will actually function as promised.

In either case, it is imperative that you gather feedback from the prospect to understand how they feel about their new vendor and the odds that they will stick with you or defect from the competitor. This type of loyalty information will help you understand where problem areas may exist with your current client base and with those of your competitors. In the end, if you can keep 10% more clients in the fold, your revenues and profitability have increased significantly. And, if you can steal away 10% more of your competitors’ defectors, you have gained market share at their expense.

So, after a lost sales attempt, how well could you say how pleased your former prospect is with their vendor selection?

Benefits
Post-implementation analysis will uncover discrepancies between your competitors’ sales messages and the reality of their solution. Arming your sales professionals with this knowledge will provide them with ammunition to direct the prospects’ questions during reference calls.



Marketing
Asking these questions of both your lost prospects and newly won clients will help solidify your position as an industry leader. With this intelligence, you will be able to identify and fix areas where your company falls short versus the client’s expectations. You will also be able to identify problem areas in the competition’s execution. Never underestimate the power of this type of intelligence.

Sales
While sales should not be a mudslinging contest, sales professionals are always on the lookout for information that will help destabilize the faith a prospect may have in a competitor. Sometimes, a prospect needs a little coaching on the types of questions to ask the competitor’s references. These tidbits can be a great benefit.

Recommendations

Be willing to listen to the feedback from your clients and prospects about your company’s ability to deliver according to the expectations set during the sales process

Develop an executive champion that will make improvements based on this feedback.

Review the objectivity of a Primary Intelligence Win Loss Analysis opportunity analysis and determine the relevance to current strategic objectives.

Sales Reps and Management: Should You Listen to Your Prospects?

Listen, listen, listen. Is there a more basic sales skill? If you don’t understand your prospect, how can you possibly solve their need?

Of course, you can’t stop listening. If you turn off the voice of your prospect, you are committing sales suicide. Not very productive in my book.

But, is the voice of your prospect telling you everything you need to know? Practitioners of analytics would tell you, “No.” In fact, there are many examples of people saying one thing, but feeling another. In research, the following example illustrates this point:

“There is much evidence to indicate that responses on importance scales can be affected by other factors that distort the accuracy of the response, i.e., the need to please, social demands, cognitive dissonance, and generic importance among others. In the entertainment industry, for example, television viewers using such scales will continually rate the value of news and information above sex or escapism. However, would anyone wish to predict, based upon these data, whether the ratings of the program Seinfeld will be lower than those of The PBS News Hour? Thus, there is a much deeper level of insight to be gained from deriving the information from the respondents’ answers rather than taking them at face value."

So, how does this apply to sales? Perhaps in the one-to-one relationship building, listening directly to the client is the only avenue for information. But, when the collective voices of your clients speak, take a little time to couple their actions with their words to determine your sales performance areas that really matter.

The quadrant below shows how actual data from our win loss studies has plotted on stated importance and derived importance:

Legend
• Stated importance is plotted on the Y-axis; it represents the average importance rating given by respondents for each influencer’s characteristic or attribute.
• Derived importance is plotted on the X-axis; it is obtained by assessing the company’s performance in each influencer and determining (through proprietary modeling techniques) the impact that each influencer had on the sales outcome. The higher the derived importance, the more impact that influencer has on the overall sales win ratio.

• Upper left quadrant—“Declared important”: This quadrant consists of items that are stated to be important, but which ultimately have little correlation to a respondent’s decision-making process.
• Upper right quadrant—“Key influencers”: This quadrant reflects attributes that the respondent both states as being important and which prove to be highly influential at a derived level.
• Lower right quadrant—“Hidden opportunities”: This quadrant consists of attributes that the respondent cannot readily identify at a stated level, but which do impact overall satisfaction at a derived level.
• Lower left quadrant—“Limited impact”: Attributes in this quadrant have both low stated importance and little influence on overall satisfaction.

Now, one caveat is in order here. Some performance areas may be ranked high in stated importance, but will be low in derived importance. This doesn’t mean that a company can cut back efforts in the areas of stated importance. They still have an effect on the sales process. When an attribute has a high stated importance, the data are saying that this is a performance area that can’t be neglected without adversely altering the win loss ratio, but significant improvement may not provide actual gains in the win loss ratio.

In the end, using the most sophisticated analytics tools to determine the key influencers will eventually provide the greatest strategic decision-making ability for your company. In so many cases, this approach has improved company performance so much more than “gut feeling,” reactive competitive intelligence programs, and stated importance measurements.

This is where Primary Intelligence makes its living; providing powerful predictive analytics to our clients in order to grow their market share. Perhaps, we should discuss how this might work for you. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Should You Always be Closing?

In a recent interview conducted with a current customer of our client, we found the following feedback about the ongoing relationship with the sales team:

“Each time they talk with a different person in my company, it always seems like they are trying to sell something else. You always get that sales aspect even though we've already passed that point. I would like them to be more personable and conversational, and deal with the reason we called the meeting. Let’s talk more about what we are trying to do as a company. If I don’t have any needs right now, don’t push me. When I do have a need, you’ll be the first one I call.”

While selling skills are always important, this example tells me that one must take care to be a trusted resource first, sales rep second.
Just a little lesson learned from feedback gathered

If You Were Dating Your Prospect, Would You Make it to First Base?

As a practitioner of sales intelligence consulting, we at Primary Intelligence have the opportunity to observe the mentality (individual and collective) of the sales professionals that work for our clients.

In our experience, much time is spent trying to understand the company’s product, value proposition, sales strategy and competitive forces. And, this use of time is beneficial and productive.

However, knowing the prospects (individually and collectively) has proven to be the most important success indicator in successful selling of business solutions. You have to build a relationship, starting at acquaintances, moving through trusted friends and into a marriage of client/vendor.

How do relationships blossom? Think about how you have worked this question in your life. When you met a person with whom you wanted to become more intimately acquainted, did you spend time studying their house, friends, other available men/women in the area? Perhaps.

But, you probably spent more time listening to that person, understanding what is important to them, figuring out their point of view and matching those ideas with yours. And, the attention you paid to that person was probably rewarded with some form of reciprocation.

If you want prospects to let you into their world and take you seriously, CSO Insights offers a list of 10 questions that a prospect is asking of a vendor:

1. Do you know me?
2. Do we have a past?
3. Do you know my internal ecosystem?
4. Do you know my company?
5. Do you know my marketplace?
6. Do you know my competitors?
7. Do you have any special value-add?
8. Do you know why you are the best choice?
9. Do you know how I can justify the purchase?
10. Do you know what is changing as we work together?

I’ll guarantee you that the answers to these questions are much more meaningful than knowing who YOUR competitors are and tactics to sell against them.

Relationships really tend to take off when you start paying attention to the one in whom you are interested more than any external factor. It works in personal relationships. It works in business relationships. And, if you are planning a marriage of your company to theirs, you probably should spend the time and effort on the right things. External factors play a role, but you have to put the right amount of priority on everything.

Spend some time evaluating your ability to answer these questions about your key prospects. Think about how these answers might have changed over time for your key accounts. Are you more or less able to answer these questions now than you were 6 months ago?

And, if you have thoughts about these points, let me know. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence Newsletter - Living Inside the Prospect's Head

The newsletter is out again. We would enjoy feedback. If you want to subscribe, simply use the subscription option on the individual article pages (accessed by clicking on each of the links below)

Cover Story
Experts Corner: Living Inside the Prospect's Head
By Glen Remy, Primary Intelligence Inc.
Memo to sales: Company X is strongly in the market for our product. Their current contract with Competitor Y will expire in four months and they are highly likely to evaluate alternate programs. Their biggest unmet needs are integration with current programs, individual configurability... (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Competitive Intelligence and Too Much Data!
In a recent study by Advertising Age, middle managers aired their opinions about the effectiveness of Competitive Intelligence and identified specific problems that cause intelligence in general to be ignored. (For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
3rd-party Review of Keane's Sale into Alliance Hospital
Originally Published in December 2004.Alliance Hospital, a small, physician-run facility in Odessa, Texas, needed to replace its inadequate information and billing system. Because the hospital was losing revenue, and because it did not have a large IT staff, Alliance sought a solution that would meet its needs while still being quick and easy to implement.(For more, click here)

How will Sales Intelligence make me more effective?

After all of the preliminaries are in process (introductions, relationship, etc…), you will have to answer the following questions in order to do business:

• Who is the prospect?
• What does the prospect value?
• How can we provide a solution?
• Is there a pain or problem that needs to be fixed?
• What can the competition do to solve that same problem or pain?
• Where does our company usually rate vs. the usual suspects… er… competitors?
• How does [company] like to buy?
• How have they approached other purchase like this in the past?
• What is [prospect]’s market like?
• Why are you the best choice? (If you don’t know now, you’ll find out later why you weren’t)
• Should you even be in this deal at all or would your time be better spent somewhere else?

All of these questions have very valuable answers. The answers may come from a number of sources, but they exist.

More importantly, sales is growing more sophisticated every day. Sales Operations, Sales Support and Marketing in some companies are pushing this information directly to the sales reps in “just-in-time” systems to ensure that sales teams run as effectively as possible.

How does your company approach the problem of trying to really, truly, deeply understand your prospects and current clients? If you are like 70-80% of the companies out there, you probably are just getting started at some level. In my estimation, only 5-10% of the businesses in the United States are what I would consider to be “cutting edge” in their practices. And their results are proof that their systems are working.

If you have a success story, let’s chat. I appreciate talking to advanced practitioners of Sales and Competitive Intelligence. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Know Your Prospect and Sell More

Primary Intelligence has recently introduced a new product called Target Prospecting. Our goal is to provide our clients with the strongest chance to win business and outmaneuver the competition.

It’s the salesperson who has the clearest understanding of an opportunity who has the greatest advantage. Imagine speaking with a prospect, already knowing their specific needs and having a clear understanding of what it will take to win the sale – while your competition is still struggling to determine the best person to talk to.

The key issue brought to us by our Target Prospecting clients is simple: they have a list of potential customers they want to reach out to, but they don’t know anything about those prospects. Going to the Web and grabbing demographic information on the company may tell you whether or not they are in your “sweet spot,” but it doesn’t tell you anything about what they are looking to buy, how they make their decisions, or what their unique needs may be. Without this information, our clients’ sales teams were going in cold, wasting valuable time simply trying to get a sense of the opportunity, oftentimes finding out that it wasn’t even a good fit for their solutions.

Primary Intelligence’s Target Prospecting does all this initial groundwork for our clients. All they have to do is provide us with their “wish list” of prospects and, using our proprietary methodologies, we will conduct in-depth interviews with these potential customers to gain a better understanding of their plans, their needs, and what they are looking for in a product or provider.

With Primary Intelligence’s Target Prospecting, our clients now have the information they need to understand the opportunity as they enter it, and can address prospects’ unique needs. Specifically, from the prospect interview profiles, our clients learn:

• What features/functions are most important in the minds of their prospects
• When their prospects will be looking to buy
• The nuances of their prospects’ decision making processes
• Which competitors their prospects have used, and which ones they are considering
• The factors that might lead their prospects to change vendors
• The products and services their prospects are looking to implement

With the information they’ve gained, our clients have not only been able to qualify and prioritize their prospective customers; they have been able to strategize the way they approach individual prospects, giving them a much greater chance of winning these accounts.

Download a SAMPLE or talk to me. I can tell you more. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Clients are Not Stuck in Today

If you have ever had to worry about this quarter’s numbers (and what sales rep hasn’t), it is easy to lose sight of the long-term picture. But, I guarantee that the client has very little interest in the next 90 days. They are talking to you with a year, two or five in mind.

In the example below, our client, Trilight, lost a deal, even though they were comparable in most every way. Primary Intelligence learned the reason why:

What were the primary reasons you did not select Trilight?

“Actually, the decision came down to the very end. Everything seemed to be very similar. We felt, and this was a team decision, that Manifesto had the depth and breadth to do the job. We thought that our account exec at Trilight was phenomenal. We knew she could get the job done, but we weren't sure about the actual corporation or the company. With Manifesto, we were more impressed with the company than the account execs. There wasn't a point of improvement or anything at that point.”

What were the primary reasons you selected Manifesto?

“They presented to us differently. We went to on-site visits at Trilight and at Manifesto. When we went to BI, the difference was we saw more of what they could do for us. We toured their buildings and stuff, but it was more than that. They brought representatives for each department into the room to present. They would come in and do their key element and then leave. At Trilight, we walked around and we saw a lot, but Kelly answered all the questions for the most part, not the so-called experts in that area.

“Manifesto’s method was more appealing because we could see that there was a team of other people to do the work. Our account executive at Trilight, Kelly, was wonderful. She knew everything from front to back, but if Kelly ever left, we didn't know what would happen. Could the other people do the work? We knew she could; she's been there since the start of her career and she's grown up there, but we didn't know, if she decided to leave the company, that they could do as good of a job as she did.”

While Trilight had equivalent services and a good relationship, they lost because the sales experience did not convince the client that they would have adequate resources to service them over the long haul.

Moral of the story: Think long-term with your prospects. You can talk about the price they will pay today, but it is better to show how valuable you will be to them over years of service.

If you have a thought, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Why You Should Do Win Loss with Your Clients

Yesterday, I was interviewed by an intern who is studying at the University of Rochester. She was representing a company that wants to do win loss analysis in an effort to make itself more competitive “in the trenches.”

She told me that her client’s inclination was to simply use their CRM tool to administer and interview to the sales reps after they close a deal as a win or loss. The idea was that the company could ask the sales reps why they won or lost, compile some quick data and learn how to move forward. She wanted to know why our services at Primary Intelligence would provide extra value over the CRM system.

I was very happy to provide an answer.

Our experience at Primary Intelligence has shown us that the only perception that really matters is the one that evaluates the vendors and writes the checks. We have conducted dozens of thousands of post-purchase interviews, based on deal sizes from a thousand dollars up to hundreds of millions. The one thing that we have learned is that the customer is always right and that sales reps don't have the whole story, no matter how good the relationship is.

I’m not saying that the sales reps are full of hot air or that their perception is not valuable, but if you want to increase your win rate, market share and overall sales performance, you have to look to the opinions and perceptions of the prospects. And, there are limitations to their knowledge of a deal. Even if the rep knows everything about his interactions with the prospect, he likely doesn't know much at all about the competitions' pitch, value proposition or relationship with that same prospect.

Some of our clients have asked us to interview both the sales rep and the prospect. They want a 360 degree review of the sales opportunity. There is wisdom in this approach, but the exercise has to be approached very strategically.

In a couple of cases, our clients wanted to measure their performance on 1 to 10 scales. They asked the same questions of the prospects and sales reps. In the end, our client learned that the sales force has a different perspective than the prospect; individually and collectively.

Hardly earth shattering and fairly useless information.

Our smarter clients use a completely different tool called Sales Confidence Index to measure the engagement level and efficacy of the sales team. This is not done on a deal-by-deal basis, but rather is taken periodically as an overall measurement of the sales force.

The purpose of win loss is to:

a) Understand today’s performance in competitive sales situations
b) Leverage this information to create a plan for win rate improvement

And, the you can ask sales reps all day long any question you like, but you’ll never approach the effectiveness of a few expertly-administered interviews with your clients and prospects.

I’m here to talk about these ideas. Reach out and let me know how I can help (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

You Got a Check. Did You Really Win?

In last week’s post, I gave an example of a company that won a deal, but learned something very important about its pricing structure.

Below, I’m going to share a little more about the deal. After reviewing this information, tell me if you think this company is winning business or not.

“They don’t demonstrate their products. I have never met a representative from FlashNet* in person, and that has a lot to do with my rating. They have never shown up. They are definitely not getting the share of business that they could get because of it. I can guarantee it. “I’ll give you an example: we bought a 20 TB storage area network. 10 TB is currently installed, and were looking at upgrading it. They’re in the storage networking business, so they wouldn’t come see us; they were not even in the list of potential vendors because of that reason. It’s that simple.

“Lunch meetings do make business. They have never visited us. I’ll give you an example: I probably spend about $1 million to $2 million in Cisco equipment a year. Last year, I only spent about $60,000 with FlashNet; this year, I probably spent about $200,000 with them. For the last four years, they have only had a small portion of my overall Cisco business, and when you look at it from an enterprise perspective—for example, we just spent $20 million on a new clinical information system—out of $20 million, FlashNet received no money from that project. We have a budget of $30 million, and FlashNet received just $60,000 of that. It’s because they will not fly anybody out here.

“They don’t have a presence out here, and that’s unfortunate for them. They are a good vendor; it’s unfortunate that they will not come out to meet their customers.”

*Name changed to maintain confidentiality

The fact of the matter is that FlashNet got a check and sold some stuff, but they received less than 1% of the total budget and 0% of a project where they had a potentially strong solution. FlashNet is probably getting a little money just because it is an incumbent in some part of the client's business.

This is probably not a unique case. How many times is FlashNet losing because of a short-sighted decision not to travel and visit? There may be logistical reasons, but this client is located in a suburb of Portland, Oregon; hardly the backwaters of the B2B sales world. Last I checked, Portland has an airport and rental car services.

Do you think that FlashNet will make any changes to its processes based on the information above? I hope so. I hope this information goes to the executive level rather than being shelved with all of the other dusty reports. I’ll probably never know. But, if I were an exec, this is the kind of intelligence I would need.

I would stop high-fiving the sales guy for winning $60K and start asking questions about why we’re not taking $5M.

If you feel differently, or if I’m missing something, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

And, if you want this type of intelligence on your new customers and lost prospects, Primary Intelligence does this kind of stuff every day.