Benefits of Using a 3rd-party Vendor for Sales Intelligence Work

Any sales intelligence program is probably better than none, but eventually, you'll want to find ways to increase your effectiveness, productivity and results. At some point, you'll need to consider whether or not a 3rd-party vendor makes sense.

As with all outsourced work, there is a trade off. Internally resources know the company culture and climate. External service providers bring expertise and methodologies that may increase the value of the intelligence initiative. External providers cost money. They will send a bill. You will have to justify expenditures. Internal efforts may be less expensive, but mostly just appear that way. The expense of the intelligence may be spread out over many paychecks, real estate, hard costs and such, but never actually tallied and compared side-by-side with an invoice from a third-party.

Some other points to consider are included below:

Can’t we do this in-house?
Many companies claim to have performed Win Loss research, but further investigation often reveals they have only captured information from their sales representatives. Although this is a very important aspect of Win Loss, such information usually relates to pricing and products only. True Win Loss Analysis not only captures information from your sales representatives, but also from the evaluators, decision makers, approvers, and users in your competitive wins and losses.

Analyzing lost sales opportunities is never a pleasant task, which is why companies tend to focus most of their attention and effort on gathering information about their competitive wins. However, it is a well-known fact that we tend to learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. For this reason, it is critical that a company expend the necessary resources to analyze and completely understand its competitive losses.

What are the benefits of using an independent third-party to capture Win Loss information?
A Win Loss Analysis conducted by an unbiased third party will give you a complete picture of what is taking place in your company’s marketplace. It will also provide you with the means to track and measure the effectiveness of your current and revised marketing strategies and sales processes.


Capturing what took place during the sales cycle of wins and losses can be a labor- intensive, time-consuming and difficult task, especially if you don’t have the appropriate expertise. Furthermore, it may be impossible for an organization to get unbiased, factual information without the help of an experienced third party. Unlike an outside, objective third-party; your in-house researchers will often find buyers unwilling to reveal their real decision criteria for fear the sales manager may attempt to reengage them in the sales process. When this occurs the data upon which you’re making critical decisions may not be accurate.



If I'm missing any pieces of the decision-making puzzle, drop me a line. Let's chat (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Getting the Most out of Win Loss Analysis

What is Win Loss Analysis?
A Win Loss Analysis is a systematic analysis of the new business opportunities for which your sales team (or channel partners) has competed. By implementing a Win Loss Analysis program you’ll be able to obtain reliable, actionable and unbiased feedback about how well your sales team performed in recent competitive opportunities. And, you’ll be able to identify much more, including the best practices of your top performers, your competitive positioning within each opportunity, and how well your products and services were received.

What are the benefits of a Win Loss Analysis?A Win Loss Analysis will reveal the risks and opportunities associated with your sales strategies, your competitors’ strategies and your target markets. You can learn about your marketplace in a way that transcends simply knowing about your own customers. A Win Loss Analysis will also reveal the varied buying habits, challenges and adoption rates of your customers, your competitors’ customers and your mutual prospects.
If you want a clear picture of each individual sales opportunity and the emerging trends across multiple opportunities to help sales professionals win more business, a Win Loss Analysis can do the following:

-Improve individual and company-wide competitive win ratios
-Establish clear Win Loss benchmarks
-Increase sales per employee
-Build successful sales organizations that are always improving
-Discover the reasons for lost opportunities
-Increase your competitive advantage-Enhance your understanding of competitors

By obtaining reliable and unbiased feedback from your recent sales opportunities, sales representatives can refine their techniques, learn how to effectively target a client’s needs, and make appropriate presentations that put your company and products in the best possible light. A Win Loss Analysis will provide you with empirical, yet pragmatic, information to drive your business, products, and marketing decisions toward an improved competitive advantage, increased revenue growth and greater market share.

Which departments within an organization are impacted by a Win Loss Analysis?
Although many people assume the information from a Win Loss Analysis is only for the sales force, we have found that Win Loss will impact every department in your organization. Additionally, key individuals in your organization such as Sales Representatives, Sales Management, Product Development, Marketing and Executive Management will all be able to leverage the actionable information that is captured in a Win Loss Analysis program to make better decisions.

Sales Representatives will better understand the perception of their prospects and what they were really thinking about the representative’s abilities and effectiveness. Sales representatives will also begin to better understand their strengths and weaknesses, the company’s positioning, their competition and the overall marketplace.

Sales Managers will get data on the key issues that are hampering their over all sales efforts. Hard data on what your competitors are doing right, what you’re doing wrong or not doing, and data on how the market perceives you. This information will help sales managers to refocus, redeploy, and retrain where it’s most important.

Product Development can now begin to understand more about where a solution or product may be lacking against their competitors and what features and functionality are most important to the prospects in the pipeline.

Marketing will receive direct feedback from their audience as to what is working and what isn’t working. They’ll learn which marketing tools have the most impact with whom and which are not worth the investment of time and money.

Executive Management will now get actionable intelligence on every aspect of the entire sales process. They’ll learn about new players in their markets and gain insight into current market trends.

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)

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)

Win Loss Makes Selling Easier

If you found a surefire way to make your company grow, you would have to consider the ROI potential of the program, initiative, solution, right?

Well, I did a little digging today with a couple of clients to find recent ROI success stories. The results were surprising. I’ll share a couple of experiences here:

“We did a round of win loss analysis with Primary Intelligence. The process included interviews with our newly won accounts and lost prospects from the past 6 months. Primary Intelligence provided us with individual opportunity profiles for each sales engagement.

“After we (sales leadership) received the profiles, we identified the 10 biggest losses (based on opportunity size). We reviewed the feedback, needs and perceptions that caused the prospect to choose our competitor. Then, we created a plan to reengage each of those 10 lost prospects. Since this was our first attempt at a formal post-sales reengagement, we didn’t have any expectations of success. We just wanted to see what was possible.

“So far, based on the intelligence we received, we have won 3 of those 10 losses. These were multi-million dollar accounts that potentially stretch out over long-term
contracts.

“This is just one way we are using our Sales Intelligence provided by Primary Intelligence. The ROI potential of this sales intelligence is mind-boggling.”

A second client of Primary Intelligence described their ROI experience in this manner:

“When we perform win loss analysis with Primary Intelligence, we provide PI with a list of our recent wins and losses. These sales opportunities are pulled from our SFA and are based on the best information that our sales reps have.

“Primary Intelligence calls through the list of opportunities, setting up appointments for interviews and weeding out opportunities that don’t qualify for analysis. While engaged in this activity, PI regularly finds a few opportunities that were categorized by our company as losses, but are still in consideration. These opportunities may be lukewarm to very warm, but they are not dead.

“PI immediately calls us to let us know when they have discovered a ‘nugget,’ or a potential opportunity that needs immediate attention. We send that information directly back to the sales rep and our conversion rates in these instances is surprisingly high.

“We more than pay for our entire sales intelligence effort based on these nuggets alone. The strategic and tactical data we use to create new business is actually just frosting on the cake after you consider the revenue that PI creates for us.”

Primary Intelligence provides data and consulting to help companies in over 45 industries create strategic and tactical improvement. Our work extends from the executive boardroom to sales, marketing and product leadership and down to each individual sales rep. We have a methodology to improve the performance of the most key departments in your company.

If you would like to know a little more about these experiences or specific information about the companies that have achieved these results, call me. (801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

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)

Why Win Loss Will be the Most Powerful Competitive Intelligence You can Find

Experts agree on the following reasons:

1-You still really don’t know why you win and why you lose
2-The bottom half of your sales group still can’t make quota and you don’t know what they are doing differently than the top 20%
3-Your competitors are changing tactics regularly, just like you. How else will you find out what they are saying and doing?
4-Individual opportunity reviews will show you exactly what the prospect thought. (And really. You only care what the prospect thinks.)
5-The biggest, most successful companies in the world are doing win loss regularly
6-You won’t land in jail after doing some stupid espionage competitive intelligence thing.
7-Your competitors are studying you right now with their own win loss program
8-If you learn to use win loss data, you can apply that knowledge and process to account retention, which could make a HUGE difference in your revenues
9-Your executive board expects the sale group to increase market share and revenues.
10-You don’t win 100% of the time.

Now, you have to do a formal win loss process. This means that you don’t spend time interviewing the sales reps or pulling some statistical data from your SFA tool. You have to interview your new clients and prospects and listen to what they have to say.

Some of them will tell you that your baby is ugly. Some of them will have a complete misperception of your products, services or sales pitch. None of that matters. If there was a misperception and you lost the deal, it is your fault. The only way to fix the problem is to identify it in the first place.

And, after dozens of thousands of interviews, Primary Intelligence is the unquestioned leader in win loss research, post-sales analysis and sales optimization.

Let’s talk about how win loss analysis can benefit your company right now and into the future (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)