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: 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.

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)

SellingPower magazine Review of Primary Intelligence Webinar

SellingPower (the leading source of sales management information) gave Primary Intelligence top billing in its Sales Management Newsletter (Keeping Tabs On the Competition). Heather Baldwin, Contributing Editor, attended our webinar in April and provided a very thorough summary of our philosophy to create impactful competitive intelligence from your most productive information channels; your clients.

Give it a read. Most Sales Managers should recognize opportunities to quickly put simple competitive intelligence initiatives into play.

For more info, check out an early blog on our competitive intelligence, Voice of the Customer Should be Used to Collect Competitive Intelligence

Or, let's chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Win Loss and SellingPower

Last year, SellingPower interviewed me (on behalf of Primary Intelligence) to understand the potential of intelligence in the sales organization. (Click here for the article)

In brief, SellingPower was interested in how an organization can grow sales through competitive intelligence, sales intelligence and, specifically, win loss.

"The power of sales intelligence is driving more and more companies to take a hard look at Win/Loss analysis and what it can do for them. Dalley predicts that within five years, most organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue will have a formal Win/Loss program in place. They’re realizing, Dalley concludes, that while they’ve always relied on feedback from their sales reps, it’s ultimately the prospect’s perception that matters."

Primary Intelligence specializes in producing intelligence to make your company more competitive. We have systems, tools and programs to distribute intelligence and make each individual sales rep more effective.

Read the article (click here if you didn't click on the link above) and let me know what you think of the ROI potential of win loss, Primary Intelligence style... (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Even When You Win, You May Learn Something Critical to your Sales Process

In an recent sales post-mortem review, we found a case of a company that successfully sold additional product into an existing account. The sales opportunity was competitive, but the incumbent won, which was not unexpected. In fact, the client had very good things to say about the incumbent vendor:

What were the primary reasons you selected FlashNet*?
“We selected FlashNet for their New/Existing Account program, the return on investment over a five-year period, their long-standing relationship with our organization, and their commitment to service.

We’ve been working with FlashNet for four years. We’ve had a lot of success with FlashNet taking care of us as a customer, making sure were happy and that the account works smoothly. It’s very easy to work with FlashNet.”

Now, the client spoke well of the competitor. The situation was a close win for the incumbent, and the losing vendor should probably keep its eyes open for opportunities to get its foot back in the door.

But, let’s look at some feedback that the winning vendor discovered about the way its prospects and clients perceive the purchase process. I think that this feedback needs to be understood at the highest levels before it turns into too much friction for incoming clients:

Additional comments (FlashNet):
Overall cost: “The cost per unit that we currently have with FlashNet is fairly low from a market perspective. When we purchased in bulk, we found that in one case it almost increased in cost per unit, which shouldn’t happen. When you see a sticker price on a car, you know that’s for retail. When you say you’re going to buy 40 cars, you shouldn’t be paying more than retail for each one, so I was dissatisfied with that.

“That’s how their sales management works. The salesperson that is assigned to me can only offer us up to a certain level himself. Then that has to go to his sales manager who can only authorize up to, say, $100,000. That means they have to take it to their vice president of sales who can authorize anything at that point. The problem is, when you make a single purchase order of over $500,000 worth of equipment, the salesperson you’ve already negotiated with over a long period of time to give margin to has their hands tied. They can’t make recommendations for the decision and neither can the sales manager.

“So the vice presidents get involved and look at the margins, and because the margins have already been so shrunk, they hold the line. Unfortunately, not only does that represent them poorly, it increases the time for decision making and it doesn’t really help—especially when you’re looking to place a fair and reasonable order for half a million dollar’s worth of equipment. I don’t want to argue about half a percent; give me $5,000. That’s kind of how things work. You expect to see a discount from mark-and-base orders, and that doesn’t happen with FlashNet.”

If the prospects can’t purchase in a way that makes sense to them, some will leave. Fortunately, there was a bunch of goodwill built up in the existing relationship that carried the sale through. But, if loyal clients feel this way, what are the new prospects going to do when they can’t find a satisfactory way to deal with FlashNet?

This is the kind of competitive intelligence that a company should perform on itself to make sure that processes, policies, guidelines, message and all that stuff are up to snuff.

If you need a little help getting these kinds of feedback mechanisms in place or if you want to bounce some ideas off of me, let’s chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600)


*Names changed to maintain confidentiality.

Your Competitive Intelligence - SWOT Analysis

The usual Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat analysis provides information on you and your typical competitors. A typical SWOT is listed below:


My guess is that this data is a good start for most sales people, but not nearly enough. Sales managers and reps need more analysis.

In other words, if a sales organization acts on data, the results need to be delivered in a format that tells them the “so what.” Analysts and researchers need to provide recommendations, analysis and go-forward recommendations.

But, this is a good start that might be a foundation for the type of information your company needs.

What kind of intelligence does your company use in the sales department? What do the sales guys want that make them more effective? Let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-960o x5050)

For VP Sales Only

Some say that knowledge is power. We at Primary Intelligence believe that the right kind of knowledge is exponentially powerful.

An example of our intelligence and feedback we provide is listed below. In this example, our client is Tenscon, a software solutions provider. Now, we have changed the names to maintain confidentiality, but our customer list includes companies such as Microsoft, Avaya, Symantec and EDS are the kinds that tend to do very good work with us.

The table below shows "Tenscon's" competitive advantage against 4 competitors (again, names have been changed to maintain confidentiality, but the results are real).

The results show some competitive advantages in the company and sales, but the product has some significant weaknesses against Sistemic and Howein Partners:

Overall, Tenscon had generally higher performance ratings than the competition, especially in the company and service drivers. However, several ratings for the sales team were lower than those of the competition as a whole, indicating that some improvement in these areas may be needed.

An analysis of the responses from clients yields the following key findings concerning Tenscon’s performance:

-Tenscon was seen as a strong and solid company, but was not generally seen as an innovator. As a senior vice president from Dillent explained, “I don’t think they showed as much innovation in their solution. I think they took a much more conservative approach, a much more introverted approach rather than an innovative approach.” The CIO from ABC Aerolineas echoed this sentiment by saying, “We have some applications that we expected to be technologically advanced, but what they offered us was delayed during the delivery process. By this I mean that some applications were not as innovative as we expected them to be.”

-Some clients were concerned that Tenscon was not offering a unified solution, but rather a set of pre-packaged offerings. For instance, a respondent from ABC Aerolineas said that the initial Tenscon team did “have a real understanding of our model, and they just trying to sell us stand-alone systems. This was the idea. The idea was a cost-effective strategy, and people from Tenscon did not understand our model, our strategy, the market, or our needs. They just about systems and stand-alone processes.” A representative from Flentic Crendall explained, “One of
complexities of [Tenscon] is it is five separate businesses that have been swept into one company. It’s trying get them to work as one company with one approach. don’t think that there was a perfect solution.”

-While a majority (66 percent) of clients believed that Tenscon put the right people in front of them, there were some concerns that decision makers were not involved in the negotiation process. A vice president at JNPD expressed this sentiment, saying, “As some of these things escalate, or we run across impasses, there might be opportunities in the future that if we were
able to talk directly to the true decision makers, then it might expedite the process.” A senior vice president from Fiserv also said, “It took a while to get the right representatives from the healthcare side and from the financial side [of Tenscon] to be on our team.”

-Understanding the clients’ needs and business requirements was a theme throughout the interviews, and an area where respondents believed Tenscon could improve. Tenscon’s ratings in this area were slightly lower than the average for other bidding companies, indicating an area of advantage for Tenscon’s competitors. As the CIO of Coles Meyer explained, “Sometimes I was worried [that they gave] affirmative answers without really understanding what the issues were. At
times I felt they didn’t understand how big and complicated the work was going to be. ‘Let’s make the sale and then afterwards worry about how we are going to deliver it.’ There was a lack of business and delivery knowledge with the up front sales team. With other vendors we don’t experience that.”

If you have any ideas of how to make these data come to life in your organization, drop me a line. (801.838.9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Tactical Sales Intelligence - Creating Competitive Advantages for Sales Teams

For a sales rep who deals in the tactical world, an objective measurement of strengths and weaknesses may be the difference between winning and losing a deal.

At Primary Intelligence we provide a view into the prospects’ perception of your sales efforts. We measure their perception of the sales team, company performance and product fit. These three areas are almost always considered in complex sales.

In a more transactional setting, we find that product and sales performance are the most important.

Recently, we completed a competitive intelligence analysis for a client and found that they had a number of competitive strengths. Their list of competitive weaknesses was relatively short, which was no surprise considering their prominent market position.


However, if there was an area of concern, it was in the performance of the sales team. There were a number of areas where, compared to the competition, their scores did not measure up.

Presentations, Subject Matter Knowledge and Understanding Business Requirements are all areas of some concern. The recommendation to the sales group was to improve the presentation style and delivery. Additionally, the sales team should spend a little more time practicing their listening and understanding skills. If they were to listen better to requirements, the presentations would probably improve as they became more targeted to the specific needs of the prospect.

Again, these are tactical improvements that need to be addressed right now to level the playing field. These are not strategic recommendations. For more insight on the data needed to make strategic plans at the executive level, see my other blog regarding impact-based competitive intelligence.

Do you see something in the data here that I’m missing? Let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Skills + Knowledge = Power

I read a sales newsletter by Shamus Brown. He sends a topic each day, which is pretty ambitious if he is writing all of his content himself.

On March 21st, he wrote about The 3 Biggest Assets of Your Sales Career

He lists Selling Skills, Industry Knowledge and Customer Contacts. I wouldn't dare argue with the value of any of those 3.

I would expand on the second point, Industry Knowledge. There are so many facets to this idea and you can't rely on yourself to explore them all. I mean, if you spent your time collecting all of the data that could be categorized as "useful for gaining an advantage, when would you sell?

Value selling makes the most sense to me. Identify a pain that is causing grief (or a benefit that would be VERY significant) and show the solution. Make your clients/prospects repeat back to you the benefit to be gained and the consequence of not using your solution.

And, if you really want to move ahead, make sure that your organization supports you with additional marketing data to tell you precisely how you can most effectively differentiate yourself.

If you are serious about improving your effectiveness, don't forget the benefit of intelligence.

(Primary Intelligence would be happy to help you)