Sales Operations People Are My Heroes

Over the past few weeks, I have spent a lot of (high quality) time speaking with our clients to understand how they use Win Loss intelligence to power their Competitive Intelligence programs and enhance their sales efforts.

It turns out that those companies that have the most effective systems that marry up sales, marketing, competitive intelligence and sales intelligence also have a very strong champion or a great team in the Sales Operations or Sales Training department.

In other words, these companies are selling more effectively than their competitors because they know how to collect the right kind of information, interpret it correctly and give the sales team marching orders based on those observations.

We work with many companies that run their Win Loss program out of Marketing, Analyst, or even Sales Leadership positions. However, in most cases, there are obstacles to making the most of the intelligence programs. I’ll describe some of my observations below:

Marketing – The marketing team generally seems interested in brand, value proposition, marketing messages and measuring the results of their other marketing efforts. To them, Win Loss is a part of a voice of the customer program (which isn’t a bad thing at all) or a one-time project to measure. But, I find that most of these marketers don’t pass along information to the sales group. In some cases, they don’t know how to make the information palatable to sales. Surprisingly, many of the marketers don’t think that sales would be interested.

Sales – Sales leaders do a better job of evangelizing their Win Loss programs to the sale reps, but they don’t usually spread the intelligence around to anyone else, which is a shame. There is so much quality information in a Win Loss program for so many departments that pigeon-holing the information in one department for one purpose marginalizes the value significantly.

Analysts – These groups can be proactive about the distribution of the competitive intelligence in Win Loss. However, analysts seem to be too far away from the corporate decision-makers to be able to give the intelligence a strong voice.

While sales operations may be different from company to company, talking to them made me think that they stand the best chance of bridging the sales/marketing gap. These people can think like sales and understands what the reps need. However, they also seem to have a mind for information and can interpret research results in a way that sales will understand.

Even better, the sales operations people are likely to be able to act on this information and take it to the next level of action. They can see where sales may need additional training and prescribe it. They may see that a marketing idea is not working and help to correct that. They can listen to the needs of sales, understand what marketing can do and facilitate the necessary transactions.

So, if you are wondering how to make an intelligence program (Competitive, Sales or Market) work more effectively in sales, make sure you have the Sales Operations people on board. This is likely the best step you can take to ensure success.

Why Do Sales Teams LOSE? – Rely solely on face-to-face interactions (9-10)

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.

9. Rely solely on face-to-face interactions.

In the movie “Jerry Maguire,” a sports agent is referred to as the “King of the house calls. Master of the living room.” It seems that many sales representatives see themselves in this same light, assured that they can make the sale as soon as they can get some “face time” with the customer. However, you can’t be a master of the living room if you don’t get invited into the house, and according to many of the respondents, the most common invitation that gets lost is the RFP. The complexity of a strategic account requires a well-thought-out plan, and many customers determined the organizational skills of a supplier by the proposals that it submitted. By treating the RFP as a mere hoop that must be jumped through, account managers damaged their chances of success.

Some of the responses indicated that problems in response to an RFP were a sign that the supplier did not understand the situation or the project requirements, that the supplier did not have experience creating proposals or, as one respondent explained, that the supplier was trying to hide something:

“When we issued the RFP, [Company 1] was the only one that declined to offer pricing. It presented a nice package, but declined to give us this information. When I saw the pricing, after I threatened to reject them out of hand, I understood why it didn’t want to give it to me.”

In cases like these, the account managers would have to work extremely hard to rebuild the confidence and trust that was lost due to poorly constructed responses. Personal interactions are important. You cannot build a strong relationship without them. The opportunity for a personal interaction may never occur, however, unless you have built a strong case for why the customer should consider meeting with you in the first place.

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.

Competitive Intelligence and Decision Cycles

How long has a prospect been in your pipeline? What are the odds that your company will make the sale after time has elapsed and is the likelihood increasing? And, do you even know how long it takes the average prospect in a given industry to make a decision? Your CRM/SFA doesn’t really tell you. You only know from the point that you are engaged; not the actual moment that the evaluation begins.

Benefits
How does a prospect make a decision? Do different industries or company segments take different amounts of time to come to a conclusion? How does your company decide when to maintain an engagement or withdraw from a low probability opportunity? The answer to these questions can save your sales department large sums by identifying those opportunities that are likely to move to decision vs. eternal shoppers.

Marketing
With a constant flux of prospects in a dynamic marketplace, it is difficult to remember that each prospect begins with the end in mind. To each company, the buying process is a discreet event that needs to be completed to solve a specific problem. If Marketing can shed light on this aspect of the buying process, your company can work to more effectively meet the evaluation needs of different companies in various industries.

Sales
The advantages are twofold: First, knowing the window of time when an opportunity is likely to close in your favor helps to identify when the pipeline is too full of non-producing fluff. Second, with this type of information, you can identify key events in the sales process that correlate with positive decisions.

Recommendations

Communicate with prospects to determine their start/end points in the buying process

The prospect may have engaged your company later in the sales cycle. Data from your CRM/SFA may not be accurate enough to show evaluation cycles.

Talk to Primary Intelligence. Our Win Loss Analysis and Account Retention solutions typically demonstrate where the key decision points occur in different industry and company size segments.

Competitive Intelligence: Analytics Show You How to Sell More

If your company uses market information to make decisions, you are almost certain to be familiar with the “Of these items, how important was…” or “Which of these would you consider to be first, second and third most important?” These questions result in a measurement of stated importance, or those things that are easily identified and verbalized as important.

While these data are easy to generate and generally seem reasonable at face value, there is evidence to show that decisions based solely on stated importance are subject to important limitations. Those areas of your company’s performance that are identified as most important often do not correlate well, if at all, with purchase decisions. Which means that your company can act on those performance areas identified as most important and yet, no measurable improvement be made from those efforts. In most companies, that is defined as poor ROI or “a waste of money.”

For example, through your research, you may identify a performance area with a relatively low performance score and might initially trigger discussion regarding ways to improve the performance. However, you wouldn’t want to do much about it if it had a low correlation to overall increases in market share. For instance, let’s consider this principle in a Win Loss setting. Suppose we had created an interview and included the measurement of professionalism of a sales force against a prospect’s likelihood of choosing a vendor. Whether the performance rating against the competition was positive or negative, it would be difficult for an executive to understand the impact that professionalism actually has on the company’s sales win ratio. It would be impossible to know how much a change in performance would affect that win ratio. If it turns out that the correlation to the sales win rate is high, the decision to put emphasis on increasing professionalism would be very easy and relatively risk-free. If the correlation were low, resources could be assigned to improve other parts of the sales process.

There is much evidence to indicate that responses on importance scales can be affected by other factors that distort the accuracy of the response, for example 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.

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)

Use Competitive Intelligence to Determine Positioning in Sales and Marketing

In a standard win loss project, one of the exercises we at Primary Intelligence perform during the interview process is to allow the respondent (a recent decision-maker that evaluated our client) rank the top three company, product and sales performance areas. The result is often a chart that looks like the one below:

Quickly, our client was able to see how to rework the sales message to be more effective. They changed their talk from customization and implementation to technology, functionality and integration. They used those topics to build the value proposition and outmaneuver the competition on cost.

It should be noted that, in this case, our client was one of the higher-end vendors. If they addressed price in the first sentence, they rarely made it to value.

Interestingly, Technology was rarely rated as the #1 criteria, but it was the second most mentioned criteria in the list overall.

Do you have this kind of visibility into your sales and marketing messages? If not, let’s do a couple of post-sales analyses free for you. Give me a call and let’s set something up. (Chris, 801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Does Salesforce Provide Useful Sales Intelligence?

The question is interesting to consider. Does Salesforce provide useful sales intelligence? Does salesforce provide useful competitive intelligence? What can a sales professional learn from their interaction with Salesforce.com that will help him sell more effectively today and tomorrow?

As a Salesforce client, each member of our sales department is in and out of SF.com constantly. As a small company, we have had very good success at maintaining high levels of cooperation and our SF.com database is full of data.

Just like anyone else, we can slice, dice, segment, sub-segment, identify, plan, track and forecast. And, we have looked in the AppExchange for solutions to make our usage more effective.

But, I don't feel like our SFA makes us more effective in our selling. I mean, SF.com is a tool that tracks a lot of stuff, but doesn't improve our selling efforts, discover new markets or understand the competitive landscape much better.

And, I'm not really that disappointed about the whole situation, since SF.com is meant to be a powerful organizer of data, but not much else.

I want a solution that tells me how I can win a higher percentage of the upcoming deals in my pipeline. I want to be able to see when competitors are picking up speed and when we are increasing our competitive strength. I want a system that tells me where groups of sales reps might benefit from specific training.

I want intelligence that can be used to increase the overall effectiveness of my company's sales effort. And I don't see that in SF.com.

Now, if you know us (Primary Intelligence), you probably can figure out how I solve my problems. However, I would appreciate any suggestions or ideas from you on how you answer these questions.

Let me know. Post a reply or contact me at 801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com. I would like to know what you think.

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)

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 Intelligence, More than Ever

According to the CSO Insights report “Proactive Sales Intelligence: The New Requirements for Getting Into the Game,”

-The number of reps achieving quota is down
-Converting initial conversations into presentations is down
-Lead gen is tossing more leads in the hopper, but the conversion rate is dropping.

Why?

Buyers are bypassing the information stage of the game. Websites and available information are taking the initial stages upon themselves. The buying process has evolved. The buy cycle is starting much earlier than the sell cycle.

So, how does a company get into more sales opportunities and move them through to the presentation?

Turns out that sales intelligence may provide a benefit. According to CSO Insights:

“Firms that excel at Sales Intelligence not only get into the game more often
than their less-effective counterparts, they also win the game more often.” (Dickie, Jim and Barry Trailer, Proactive Sales Intelligence: The New Requirements for Getting Into the Game, CSO Insights (2007), page 3)

To demonstrate this point, CSO Insights found that the availability of Sales Intelligence seemed to measurably improve win rates of forecast deals:

Easy access to SI – 55.1% win rate
Limited access to SI – 49.2% win rate
Difficult/No access – 47.1%

If you do the math, sales reps can be substantially more effective across the board if Sales Intelligence is provided.

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)

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)

The Infinitely Small Nuances of Sales Meetings

In a recent sales opportunity interviewed by Primary Intelligence, we found that a point as small as the introduction process should not be discounted. (For more on this sales opportunity, please see my post from 5/9/2007

Do you have any comments regarding the vendors’ in-person presentations?
“They were very good. It was a very tough decision. The presentations when they came in here were just fine; when we went into their facilities, things were just set up differently.

“At Trilight, we went in and we sat and chatted, but we also walked around more and met the person that we would be working with in each area there. It was like a round robin tour. At Manifesto, we did do a tour of their facility, but all of the meeting basically took place in one room. We could ask questions of the experts and they would come and go. Sometimes when you're walking around it's hard to focus because there's so much going on.

“When we did the tour with Trilight, we knew where we were going, but I don't think we realized what was coming next. When we were at Manifesto, we had an agenda, and we went through it. In hindsight, Trilight’s way seems to be a little more efficient, with Tracy answering all the questions, but I think that's where the team got the feeling that Tracy had all the knowledge, not her team.”

The most important thing here is that Trilight had information that would have told them that a sit-down meeting would be more beneficial, but the value of that information was discounted to the point that they made the wrong decision. Ultimately, this mistake essentially cost them a very large bit of business.

If you want to know the right moves to make, you need to talk to Primary Intelligence. Helping sales teams sell more is what we do. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Sales People Need Competitive Intelligence

In some recent studies from Primary Intelligence, we have asked representatives from various industries and company sizes "Who has access to the competitive intelligence data?"

For the most part, Competitive Intelligence is distributed to executives and marketing managers. Sales receives the information to a lesser degree.


From our observations:

-Execs receive the data. Generally, they are sponsoring the research

-Point of the lance (Sales Reps) are not being included

-Indicates a predominance of strategic intelligence over tactical intelligence?

From my point of view, I think that it is an interesting phenomenon that the sales reps are not receiving the competitive intelligence as often as other departments. If they are front line, I would want to push out a little more information to them and help them be more competitive. If I were a sales rep, I would ask for more of this information.

I am curious about your experience with the executive group. What do they ask for the most? And, in your experience, do they use the information you provide? My experience is that many CI initiatives are reactionary ("Why did we lose that deal?!?!? When did [competitor] start selling widgets to compete with ours?!?!?!") By the time the Competitive Intelligence has been compiled, so much time has passed that the data can't be used.

If you had competitive intelligence, would you use it? If you asked for competitive intelligence from the marketing department, would they produce it for you?
Think about the competitive knowledge that would provide a competitive advantage. Write it down. Ask for it.

And, call Primary Intelligence. We provide the intelligence that helps sales people sell more. (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.

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)

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.