Competitive Intelligence Newsletter – Feedback Helps You Win Business

In this issue, we explore how listening (both to the client’s needs and feedback on your sales performance) increases your sales success. And, if you listen closely enough, you might even find out what the competition is doing. That kind of bonus can get you some great recognition.

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Cover Story
Stop Talking! – How Listening Sells More
By Scott Bishop, Primary Intelligence
An account manager approaches you with a request from a current client. It seems the client has big plans for expansion, but they need a new system to help them accomplish their plans and, as their current vendor, they want your company to propose something to meet their needs. You immediately jump into preparing a proposal... (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Where are the Innovators in Competitive Intelligence?
I sure do wish that the innovators in Competitive Intelligence were publishing more thoughts and creating more dialogue in the blog community. Of course, SCIP does their part to produce articles and thought leadership, but too few practitioners are participating in the blog world... (For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
Xcel Beats Larger Competitors for Metrofuser’s Business
Originally Published in April 2005.
Metrofuser wanted to replace its business operations software with a system that would be easier to adjust and customize to meet its specific needs and evaluated solutions from Best Software, Xcel Software, and Microsoft Business Solutions. Metrofuser was leaning toward buying the Microsoft Great Plains solution until Xcel stepped in... (For more, click here)

Sales Intelligence - Misalignment between You and Your Prospect

The greatest chance of sales success for your company is to propose a solution that clearly matches the needs of your prospect. In a perfect world, the only thing that would matter would be the product, service or solution your company offers. But often, the sales process hits a snag.

Where you thought an opportunity was headed down the right path, suddenly, it is stalled, or worse… you are informed that your role in the sales process has ended. This is a reality of sales, but do you ever really get the feedback you need to understand what happened and why? How well is your sales management able to identify when something unusual happens during the sales process to help or hinder your chances of success?

Benefits
For an organization to succeed, intensely managing service quality is absolutely essential. It is only through customer alignment that the organization is on track toward a single, shared vision of customer focus and customer value—a vision that energizes people and the organization to accomplish extraordinary things. The point at which your company ceases to show tight alignment with the prospect during the sales process is likely to be accompanied by the sound of a door closing.

Marketing
Alignment is one of the most important goals of marketing. When marketing can show how the company’s solutions parallel the needs of the prospect, lead generation efforts will function more efficiently, competitive forces will be weakened and commoditization avoided.

Sales
Sales professionals often know when they have lost a sales opportunity, but they rarely receive consistent, straightforward feedback telling them where their effort weakened and the competition surged ahead. Feedback on the moment of truth will help increase the likelihood of a positive result in a similar future situation.



Recommendations

Provide new clients and lost prospects the opportunity to discuss the event horizon of the opportunity.

Be ready to listen without defending misunderstood messages.

Primary Intelligence typically includes this question line in its Win Loss Analysis solution.

Perhaps, we should chat about a process that would help you find answers to this type of question. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

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)

What is the ROI of sales intelligence?

According to CSO Insights, Sales Intelligence may provide as much as an 8% gain in sales, according to over a thousand sales managers. (See post of Wednesday, 6/13/07, for substantiating info.)

What does this mean in dollars?

“For the sake of discussion, let’s consider the performance of a mythical sales rep who has a $2M annual quota, selling deals that average $100K each. To close 20 forecast deals, a rep with a 47% win rate needs to have 43 deals in his or her pipeline. If the win rate on those pipeline deals could be increased to 55%, that rep would close at least 23 of those 43 opportunities. Multiplying those 3 extra deals by $100K each, the rep’s revenue would increase by $300K – and improvement any CSO would crave.” (Dickie, Jim and Barry Trailer, Proactive Sales Intelligence: The New Requirements for Getting Into the Game, CSO Insights (2007), page 5)

Take that increase across the board. If you could increase your pipeline output by 7% using the same resources, what would that mean to your company? Your sales reps? Your bonus?

If these results are interesting, you may want to speak with Primary Intelligence. Sales Intelligence is what we do. And, if you use the best Sales Intelligence possible, you’re likely to increase sales output by more than 7%.

The report can be downloaded from CSO Insights here. Registration is required. The registration form can be accessed here.

If you would like more information, please let me know. I enjoy the chance to chat about these topics. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Webinar: Does Your Sales Team Have Heart?

“The first sale has to occur in the sales rep’s heart.”

This statement has always been true, but often it is difficult to get an accurate measurement of your sales team’s attitudes and their level of confidence in your company, your products, your competition, and their own abilities.

Primary Intelligence would like to invite you to a Webinar explaining the Sales Confidence Index (SCI), a Web-based metric that can be used to analyze your sales team’s level of engagement and provide insight into the areas that will help you create and maintain a dedicated, confident, and effective sales force.

Through this presentation, Primary Intelligence will show you how you can use SCI to:

• Pinpoint the most important confidence and attitude factors in your sales force
• Measure and monitor your sales reps’ level of engagement before the performers defect to the competition
• Identify areas of risk and opportunity before they become critical issues in your sales channels
• Ascertain your sales channels’ knowledge and outlook about your competitors
• Develop better-informed strategies for improving sales and training programs
• Monitor the impact of company initiatives, programs and policies

Date: Thursday, June 21
Time 2 PM EST (11 AM PST)
Duration: 1 Hour
Cost: Free

To register, click here: https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/727867237

Those that will most benefit from this discussion include:

• Sales VPs
• Sales Directors and Managers
• Regional sales leaders
• Business development leadersCEOs/CFOs/CSOs

Sales Feedback for Sales Execs

Sales leaders are always in a quest to win more business for the company. Some sales leaders even turn to statistics and research to determine best practices. The most successful implementation of these programs often brings consistency in the best practices to the middle and lower parts of the sales achievement pile. You don’t always have to make the eagles fly higher. It is often better to figure out how to get the sparrows and crows up where the eagles fly.

One of the most effective pieces of information is the answer to “Why do we win and why do we lose?” Many companies don’t yet know this answer objectively. Some are starting. In my experience at Primary Intelligence, very few have been scientific about this.

The best place to start to answer this question is to understand what went right/wrong in your most recent sales opportunities. There are many ways to gather this info. I’ll discuss a couple.

After the sales deal is done and you have won or lost, who do you turn to for feedback on the actual sale? Many say that they do a post mortem review with the sales rep or team involved in the deal and this is a good start, but let me tell you why this is a system that is bound to fail from the start.

1. Sales guys are naturally going to take credit for the wins. It is stereotypical, but sales reps are likely to take a substantial amount of credit for bringing in business. I can understand that fact, but the result of this exercise is not likely to produce a program that will help elevate the middle of your sales pack. There is only so much you can do with the message, “I won because I’m good!”

2. Sales guys are likely to deflect the blame for losses. “We were beat on price” or “the deal got fouled up when the owner’s brother came in with a different provider.” Again, you have to have a pretty strong self-perception to be successful in sales and taking the blame for deals gone bad does not help you much at all.

3. Sales guys may not know what went wrong. After all, if they knew exactly what the prospect wanted from the beginning, they would have been able to perform better or get out of the wrong deal earlier.

4. In the end, it doesn’t matter what the sales rep or team says. The only perception that matters is that of the prospect. I don’t care what the sales rep says nearly as much as what the prospect perceived throughout the sales engagement.

Personally, I recommend that you spend all of your energy gathering the feedback from the lost prospect or won client. If you want to know why companies select you or walk to a competitor, that’s the only information that really matters.

If you have successfully implemented a win loss post-sales analysis, let me know. And, if you would like to see a very nice compliment from one of our clients, check out my other blog here.

Talk to me about your thoughts. Post a comment or give me a call (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)

Why are Sales People so Stupid (or are they)?

I recently read a blog posting from last year by Scott Santucci where he talks to marketers about their perception of sales people in general. It starts like this:

"Come on, admit it.

"It’s what you think, isn’t it?

"If I had a dollar for every time I heard “our sales people lack the skills
or ability to (insert any of the following: cross-sell, sell higher, sell to
value, get ahead of the RFP)” I would be a very rich person. But is this really
the problem?"

Then, he goes on to point out how sales people don't live in the simple world that many marketers might assume. Just trying to manage sales messaging and collateral can be much more complex than might be assumed at first:

"Assuming your company has 10 products that all can be sold by your sales force, lets try to determine how much information a sales person must process and manage on any given account they are pursing.

•10 products
•5 key value propositions for each product (50 different value propositions)
•Messages must be delivered to 5 different client stakeholders (250 different messages)
•Each value propositions has a set of 5 questions to uncover and they are different from stakeholder to stakeholder (the degree of difference is not important) – 1250 different messages
•Each value proposition has one competitive knockoff per competitor and you have 4 key competitors (50 different value propositions x 4 competitors = 200 +1250 = 1,450 different messages)
•Each product has a minimum of 5 different collateral pieces that exist about various aspects of the product (5 collateral pieces X 10 products = 50 different collateral pieces to locate, which equals 1,500 different information elements to manage)
•Each stakeholder has a set of 5 personal goals and 5 business goals that must be matched with their corresponding value propositions (5 personal goals + 5 business goals X 5 stakeholders = 50 unique goals + 1,500 information elements = 1,550 information elements.

"So, in this scenario, a salesperson is asked to manage over 1,500 different forms of information for each account they deal with."

So, what is the takeaway? Mr. Santucci suggests that marketing needs to better understand what the sales team is up against. Marketing should produce tools that will help simplify (rather than complicate) the sales process.

Personally, I think that marketing and sales need tighter integration. Put some marketing people in the sales department for a couple of weeks. Let them attempt to use the tools and messages that sound so good in marketing's ivory towers. When they return, they will probably have a better appreciation for the needed materials. They might also want to return occasionally to sales as a source of inspiration.

And, don't let the sales team off the hook. Let them spend a little time in marketing. Some cross-pollination and discussion will do them good, too.

In the end, both teams have to work hand in hand. It's all about selling. And, if anyone in sales or marketing forgets that, big obstacles are looming on the horizon.

Happy selling, and let me know what you think. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050, www.primary-intel.com)

The Stronger Company Loses (Part 2)

Continuing the thought from yesterday, a German manufacturer of automobiles was re-evaluating its IT support provider. During the sales process, it evaluated two providers and rated the newcomer more favorably than the incumbent in company-related criteria.

Below, you will see the quantitative ratings for both teams as related to SOLUTION and SALES TEAM:

In the next post, I'll provide some of the comments that were the cruz of this deal. But, in the meantime, post a comment letting me know who you think won this deal based on the performance comparison in the charts above.

The Stronger Company Loses?

In a recent evaluation, a prominent German automobile manufacturer evaluated two technology vendors for support services. They had an existing vendor, but intentionally execute shorter contracts to force themselves to re-evaluate relationships regularly.

When the client invited Right Tech, Corp to the table, they were excited to introduce new blood. Their current vendor had grown stale and they made the following observations:

“SoftCommerce needs to bring more innovation, new services, and new technologies into their services. They need more innovations… That was why we brought Right Tech, Corp in. We thought there would be more innovation on their side.”

Based on a side-by-side evaluation of the companies’ performance, It appeared that the incumbent might be in trouble. Right Tech, Corp, stacked up nicely with SoftCommerce and had significant advantages in Size, Technology Reputation and Future Direction.



But, Right Tech, Corp never had the chance to show their innovative ability. Tomorrow, we’ll review the solution performance for clues.

Do You Really Understand?

In sales, is there a more basic principle than listening to the client? And, yet, time, money and effort are wasted by ignoring the entire message and moving straight to the sales rep's agenda.

Which is a shame, because prospects usually know what they are looking for. Give them a chance and they will tell you.

Especially in B2B sales, the politics between evaluator and decision-maker are sensitive and must be accounted for. In the following example, Primary Intelligence interviewed a prospect to find out what happened in the deal. In this case, the sales rep didn't understand the deal:

Respondent: “Rapier Software was more interested, in my way of thinking, in selling a product than they were my needs. They were very elusive about a cost and then they wanted to meet with the city manager… So in order to sell us, they wanted to sell the payroll management, something for our risk management director and all sorts of things. It was really a total turn off. I was surprised the city manager didn’t get up and walk out. He was very glad that was the end our business with them.”

Primary Intelligence: “You rated Rapier a four (on a 1-10 scale) as far as understanding your business needs. What did they need to do to earn a higher rating or to show you their ability to understand your business needs?”

Respondent: “Well, I think it’s all the same thing. If they’re interested in my business needs, they need to focus on that and not the other departments. If they want my business, they need to give me what I need.”

You have been here before. What would you take away from this feedback? Was this the fault of the sales rep, or was this customer a poor fit from the start?

Let me know what you think.