The 4th of July holiday is the time of year when Americans pause to give thought to the freedoms our forefathers treasured and were willing to fight to secure. Oppression was and is a powerful motivator.
Since 1993 I’ve railed against traditional selling approaches. In the last decade buyers have leveled the playing field in starting to dictate how they want to be treated. I regret to say most vendors have failed to align with this changing landscape.
Win loss analysis is not the only form of buyer analysis. Another one occurs long after the sale. Customer experience interviews focus more on the product and solution than on the buying process and provide insights on key capabilities, missing capabilities, and ideal market profiles.
Customer experience touchpoints should occur immediately after the initial implementation of your solution and again periodically throughout the life of the solution’s use. A common practice is to engage with customers every six months to measure their satisfaction and identify areas for improvement in product, support, and training.
During its research, Primary Intelligence discovered four unexpected benefits from Customer Experience programs:
In the dog eat dog world of pharmaceuticals, winning or losing your renewal contract has heavy ramifications. Knowing your customers’ experience and the key decision drivers that keep them coming back is critical when playing at this level, as the competition is fierce, and loyalty is in no way guaranteed.
Knowing your customers’ experience and the key decision drivers that keep them coming back is critical when playing at this level, as the competition is fierce, and loyalty is in no way guaranteed.
We helped a major pharmaceutical company that needed to win that fight come hell or high water. All suspense aside, you already know by the title of this post that they were successful in exploring the voice of their customer to win the deal.
By incorporating a customer experience program, our client successfully renewed a billion dollar contract. Here’s how we helped them do it.
If you pare down to the simplest method, calculating your sales win rate is the number of pursuits you win to the number you lose. So if you are involved in 100 sales engagements and you win 40 of them, you have a 40 percent win rate.
However, where do you draw the line as to what constitutes an engaged sales deal? You could look at every lead provided to the sales team or you could choose to include only the deals that get past a certain stage in the sales process.
Some organizations only count leads that are “sales ready” as true opportunities.
“Sales Ready” is when the prospective buyer Read more →
Win loss analysis is a branch of market research focused on understanding why companies win or lose new business opportunities. By implementing a win loss program, you can obtain reliable, actionable, and unbiased feedback about how well your sales team performed in recent competitive opportunities. You can identify the best practices of your top performers, your competitive positioning within each opportunity, how well your solutions were received, and much more.
We spoke with a customer who did not to choose our client’s solution following an extensive evaluation. The main reason for this loss was that the customer had no confidence in our client’s ability to deliver a solution based on the fact that the client did not fully understand its customer’s business needs. This was represented by the ratings for sales performance, solution features, and company drivers.
One of the reasons that our client did not adequately understand the customer’s business needs was that the sales team didn’t take the time to ask the right questions. This was evidenced by the client presentation and the shallow responses to customer questions when asked about solution capabilities. Our client’s implementation plan was also questioned as being “really quick” compared to other vendors, another indication of our client’s lack of understanding of the customer’s business needs.
Competitive intelligence is sometimes referred to as a game of chess, with each side trying to think as far ahead as possible about their opponents’ moves and countermoves. Sun Tzu is frequently invoked as a model for competitive intelligence students when observing, learning from, and out-maneuvering a competitive nemesis. Similarly, armies and generals are typically revered by those in the competitive intelligence community, their battle plans, flanking techniques, and other maneuvers analyzed and copied.
But what happens when the market you’re studying is moving quickly, with competitors frequently entering and exiting the playing field? Perhaps you’re not even sure if a firm is a competitor — could they also be considered a partner? Or at least part of a loose affiliation that could be helpful to your firm in the future?
In order to think like the customer, salespeople need to talk less about product features and talk more about real life situations to which customers can relate. In CustomerCentric Selling, we call this a usage scenario. Usage scenarios work when selling any product or service to any business or consumer. Over the years, we’ve worked with a wide range of companies in a variety of industries spanning the gamut from retail banks and companies offering credit card sales to merchants, overnight delivery services, and temporary housing providers.
All benefited from this approach, even in cases where the offering was just one in a crowded field of entries. In fact, our experience suggests that in situations where the offering is perceived as a commodity – that is, interchangeable with the competition – the most powerful differentiator is the buyer’s conversation with the salesperson.
Can you imagine going into a strategy session not knowing the growth projections for your market, your product or your industry?
Can you conceive of not knowing your share of the market compared to the market share of your competitors?
Arming yourself with this strategic quantitative data is critical to understanding how to grow your market presence, how to sell more products and services and how to win more customers.
But equally important Read more →
Many people have unusual thoughts about selling. I wanted to share two strange views people have shared with me:
1. One person’s definition of selling was: “Saying yes to buyers until you have to say no.”
2. Another offered the advice: “Never confuse the sell with the install.”
The message from both was the same and reflects a belief that sellers should say whatever is necessary to get the business and sort things out after getting the order. Certainly following this approach doesn’t make a positive buying experience a likely outcome.
In my experience, there are times when by saying “no” sellers can establish credibility with buyers. In some cases, they can improve their relationship. I wanted to share some examples.
Chances are, you’ve been invited to attend many conferences this year. And with good reason. Conferences are an extraordinary tool, with numerous benefits for attendees.
See, amazing things tend to happen when like-minded individuals come together to focus on something of importance. It’s why you can find countless gatherings, dedicated to just about anything.
So, with all the conference options available, why is Primary Intelligence Outcomes 2017 the one you should attend?
As sellers become competent they start to recognize the difference between sales activity and progress. When first going on quota virtually every seller is busy. Many are overwhelmed as they try to perform activities they’ve never done before. Over time most sellers start to understand what activities move opportunities forward. This understanding allows them to be productively busy. Competent sellers recognize buyers that will just waste their time, situations with low probabilities of success, situations where they can’t gain access to decision makers, etc.
In my experience writing proposals Read more →
Writing the winning responses to RFPs is always your goal. As part of the selling process, we know you have spent hours researching a business, contacting various key players to understand the business needs, and discussing options so you can write a response to the RFP that delivers the most impact. Of course, the response should demonstrate why your solution is the best available option. Nonetheless, bids or responses to proposals should be treated as a selling tool. Here’s why.
Is it better to have a scripted sales presentation or a tailored one? The guiding principle in any sales process should be listening to your buyer and tailoring your sales presentations to meet your buyer’s unique business needs.
Then again, having a template for your presentation is helpful because you don’t have time to reinvent the wheel every time you need to present to a new prospect. Just plug and play, copy and paste. Makes sense, right?
I’m a big proponent of discovering the potential value to your prospect of acquiring and utilizing your products and services. One of our core concepts is: People make emotional decisions for logical reasons.
The potential value to a company of changing how they operate can often be the logic they need in order to help them make a purchase or subscription decision.However, I have some concerns about existing “ROI tools” and how they are used by salespeople in the sales process.
Here are a few things to consider about ROI tools and calculators:
At our recent Outcomes 2016 Conference, I attended the roundtable discussion on the topic “Obtaining Sales Team Buy-In.” A Win Loss program is far more successful when the sales team is fully supportive of the program’s goals and processes. But how do we get them there? I suggested to the group that we talk about a win loss program as another sales enablement tool. Our CEO Ken Allred had just explained in the General Session that he started Primary Intelligence to “help salespeople sell more.”
Sometimes when you compete for business, you’re up against the incumbent. You may think the incumbent has the upper hand because they can easily leverage their experience and relationships with the buyer into another sale.
Above everything else, the incumbent has the advantage of engaging with your prospect daily. They most likely have priceless knowledge about that prospect such as their business needs, solutions used, financial/budget issues, leadership changes, and the company road map.
There’s also the issue of inertia: staying the course is typically the path of least resistance, while changing vendors usually triggers planning, due diligence, and buy-in from a myriad of groups throughout the organization.
Convincing a prospect that you offer the best solution and should make the changeover to your product or service may appear to be a challenging task. Nonetheless, there are ways to win prospects over and beat the incumbent.
While claiming to be “customer-centric,” most vendors have an inward-looking focus on products and services they offer. This focus is passed onto B and C salespeople when they attend training on offerings in hopes of improving their ability to sell them. The end result can make these sellers virtual wind-up toys when they get in front of buyers. One of the phrases uttered in these organizations is that part of a seller’s job is educating buyers. It’s hard to express how strongly I disagree with that statement.
When trying to get to the end of sales cycles, sellers always seem to be in a hurry. In stark contrast, buyers frequently drag their feet before making decisions to spend money. Consider how often close dates slip for opportunities in the forecast. This discrepancy in decision time frames can cause sellers to close prematurely, offer discounts to accelerate decisions and pressure buyers. In extreme situations, deals can be lost. It often comes down to the seller’s or vendor’s agenda of needing to book orders at month, quarter or year-end.
Access some of the best sales and marketing experts at Outcomes 2016! Primary Intelligence’s conference is the place to connect with our program consultants and partners, sharpen your skills, and explore new best practices.
What happens when experienced, highly-skilled experts get together? Ideas get shared, challenges are discussed, new strategies are explored, and outcomes become real. And that’s what our conference is all about.
Join us at Outcomes 2016 to find the expertise that can help solve your most complex challenges and discover new proven solutions for your business needs.
We’re thrilled to have five of our partners who will be sharing their sales and marketing wisdom at Outcomes 2016:
