Obstacles to an Effective Win Loss Program

Win Loss research is a very strong part of a complete voice of the customer system. Not only does it provide a first view into the hoops that prospects go through to do business with you, it also uncovers many hidden issues such as:

Competitive intelligence on positioning in the marketplace
Initial perceptions of your company’s ability to meet the market’s needs
Why companies do business with you in the first place
Processes that need to be modified to make it easier for companies to do business with you.

However, Win Loss is not a simple research project to start; at least not compared with other research projects such as client satisfaction, market needs and the like. There are some obstacles that are unique to Win Loss that have to be addressed if this research tool is to provide you with all of its potential value:

• Sample issues
• Pushback from sales
• Confidentiality concerns
• Unrealistic expectations
• Poor communication

By far, the biggest problem is sample (In other words, finding the opportunities to study so that you can call and interview). Without these opportunities, it is impossible to reach out to your recent sales engagements and gather the necessary information.

Why are these so difficult to gather? Two reasons: 1) Sales won’t give them up and 2) Sales is too disorganized to give them up.

Either way, the problem can only be solved if sales is involved and acting as a wiling participant.

You’ll note that the second obstacle is also based on sales. If sales thinks that Win Loss is a witch hunt, or even suspects that they will be evaluated based on the information in the Win Loss program, the sales reps will make it very difficult for you to get their sales history information?

“How can this be?” you ask. “We use an enterprise-wide CRM/SFA tool. The information is in there and we should be able to pull it anytime.”

This would be a logical thing to say. But, it doesn’t hold true. An SFA system only holds what the sales reps put in there and if they don’t mark their opportunities as losses, you won’t have anything to research. You’d be surprised at how long a sales rep can work on a sales opportunity before reporting it as a loss if they think that such an action would be detrimental.

So, to solve the first two points above (sample issues and getting sales on board), you have to design your Win Loss program from the ground up as providing value to the sales reps without being a form of discovery or punishment.

If sales is on board, Win Loss runs 100% more effectively. If sales doesn’t know about the program, you will only have moderate success. If sales is against the program, you won’t get anything done at all.

And that would be a shame, considering the immense amount of sales and competitive intelligence that an effective Win Loss program can produce.

If you have any thoughts, questions or comments, let me know (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Does Business Have the Right Structure to Use Competitive Intelligence?

In the last post, I talked about the military and the reason that their intelligence organization generally is able to provide effective intelligence. In brief, professional, trained intelligence personnel support officers and field personnel with a sophisticated intelligence system.

The attention to intelligence is driven by the fact that lives are on the line. Understanding strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, centers of gravity, etc… are not just “nice to know.”

As mentioned in the last blog, the military places so much emphasis on intelligence that it has its own department, outside of field operations. There are field agents and intelligence officers. The different intelligence ranks have access to every rank of fighting personnel.

It’s not all rosy and perfect, but one would be hard pressed to find another organization that matches the emphasis and effectiveness of intelligence in the military.

How does your business compare?

If you are like most, your company has invested in intelligence, but has not made a commitment to intelligence-based decisions. Communication is not as organized as it might be and the flow of information is not consistent.

A significant problem in business competitive intelligence is the fact that the intelligence staff usually resides somewhere in company other than near the decision makers. Now, for the sake of honesty, I’ll say that I have been very impressed with some of the corporate strategy groups with whom I have been associated and I am encouraged by the access which they are granted to the executive level. But these cases are far too rare.

If your business structure buries analysts and competitive intelligence professionals deep in the world of marketing, the likelihood of necessary intelligence making a difference in the company is very low.


What do you do about this?

Do you have it in your power to start an organizational change? Does your direct report have the ability to start the process?

Can you boil your intelligence down to a summary with recommendations that might be appreciated by a higher-level manager? What are your potential means of moving information to different people?

Who is your internal client? Who request intelligence? Who funds the intelligence? What do they want to know? How often do they want to know? What tangible benefits has your company realized through the use of your intelligence?

Start to formulate answers to these questions. Do so with the goal of convincing the next people up the org chart to give more visibility to your company’s competitive intelligence efforts. Show them what CI has to offer and how much is being lost with the current amount of emphasis.

These are the same techniques that 3rd-party vendors have to use to stay in business and they will work to some degree for you.

Thoughts? Let me know. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Effective Competitive Intelligence - Problem 4: Communication

In my last post, I started talking again about effective competitive intelligence. Again, my definition of effectiveness is:

– Strengthen your company’s position
• How is our value proposition perceived?
• What is the competition doing?
• Which industry-wide best practices will truly apply?
– Discover new markets
• What is possible with new technologies?
• Where should we steer the company?
– Develop new products/services/solutions
• What problems do our clients experience that we can address?

One of the biggest complaints of Competitive Intelligence generators and users alike is the fact that intelligence, information and knowledge in general is lost in the shuffle. In fact, according to an Accenture study:

53% of obtained information is worthless

31% say that it Competitive Intelligence is hard to get at

57% have to go to numerous sources to compile necessary intelligence

45% can’t find information on other departments’ activities

42% accidentally use the wrong information once per week

40% say other parts of the company won’t share information

59% say there is poor distribution of information

Many of these problems are the result of poor corporate communication.


In summary, we find that intelligence suffers from the fact that organized distribution channels don’t exist (If a tree falls in the woods…).

If you have created a quality library of information, its value is compromised by the fact that people:

Don’t know it exists

Can’t read it

Don’t like the way it is distributed

This same topic was addressed in our recent webinar which can be downloaded HERE.

How do you solve this problem?

1. Start with intelligence that means something to others.
2. Speak with a loud voice and be available to others in decision-making posts
3. Find internal champions
4. Determine that the intelligence will be received and reviewed

You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned anything about content management systems or other technologies. Before you can install software to distribute intelligence, you have to create a hunger for it and establish communication channels that work. Otherwise, you’re likely to spend quite a bit of money on software that will lie dormant most of the time.

If you have a success story with overcoming the communication barrier, drop me a note. I’m always interested in examples of success, no matter how small they may seem (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Webinar Wrap-up: Effective Competitive Intelligence

Last Thursday, Mike Brose and I hosted a webinar called, “The Sad Story of Intelligence that Didn’t Make a Difference.” That is a fairly lengthy title and I’ll work on being more concise in the future.

But I digress…

Over time, we have seen many organizations that spend money on intelligence initiatives. Those initiatives might be market, sales or competitive intelligence. Most every company conducts some form of intelligence gathering. Whether primary or secondary, the intelligence is deemed important enough to have an effect on the success of the business.

However, we have also observed that many companies spend resources on the gathering of intelligence but have very little commitment to the use of that information. Rarely will a business spend so much money with so little regard for the potential return on investment. I take that back. Advertising seems to often fall into that category. But, that’s not the topic…

The topic of the webinar was based on helping companies make more effective use of the intelligence at hand. We expressed that we were not so concerned with the source or topic of the intelligence. Instead, we suggested how any type of intelligence might display more potential simply by making sure that it would be acted upon.

If you would like to download a copy of the presentation, please click HERE


And, if you would like a summary, delivered in person, or would like to subscribe to our webinar notifications, send me an email and I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

You Couldn’t Make Competitive Intelligence So Irrelevant if You Tried

If your idea of effective competitive intelligence is gathering a bit of information, consolidating that information into a brief doc (perhaps on an attractive company letterhead) and sending that doc off to a distribution list, please stop reading. Go back to your cube, surf some more web sites and live a happy life.

Pardon me if I’m a little grumpy today, but I have just finished reviewing a company’s CI efforts and have added one more company to the pile of “irrelevant competitive intelligence efforts.”

What do I mean by irrelevant? In this case, the marketing department employs a few “analysts” to gather CI on a few competitors, market conditions and industry developments. These people put a little personal spin on the data and then launch their reports and briefs into different corporate branches through email, an intranet and their SFA tool.

(Yes, there is disdain in my description, but it wouldn’t matter if they increased the quality of their personnel or budget to gather more information.)

The problem here is that the CI program is not making any difference at all in their ability to be more competitive. The data that is collected is better than nothing, but even if it is read, nobody acts on it, provides feedback or seems to value it at any important level of the company.

The intelligence has to make a difference somewhere in the company or the program is simply a money sink that exists because “other companies have a CI department.”

I suppose that there are all kinds of people out there, but I, for one, would be bored out of my skull if I didn’t think my efforts were making a positive difference in the company. If I found myself in that situation, I would do everything I could to change the situation. To be clear, this isn’t a matter of personal ego. Instead, I want to leverage our competitive intelligence efforts to create as much benefit as possible.

Enough of the rant. On Friday, I’ll describe an environment that makes exceptional use of Competitive, Market and Sales intelligence.

And if you want to chat about these thoughts, please leave me a post, call me (801-838-9600 x5050) or email me (cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Why Doesn't Competitive Intelligence Flow to Sales?

It has been my observation that most companies perform some type of competitive intelligence. In fact, most have several, if not dozens, of programs. Each research initiative is built to produce information upon which decisions may be based.

It has also been my observation that the production of intelligence is almost always handled by the marketing department, which makes sense. Of course, I am painting in broad strokes, but if you can accept that most analysts, competitive intelligence specialists and market research groups fit under the marketing umbrella, we should all agree on this point.

In fact, in one of our Primary Intelligence internal studies, 89% of companies said that they have a formal competitive intelligence program in place. This is higher than the 78% that have a customer sat program and the 65% that conduct account retention analysis.

But, when we ask the sales reps about the availability and use of competitive intelligence in their jobs, only 56% of sales managers claim competitive intelligence as one of their tools. A higher percentage of sales reps (68%) say that they use competitive intelligence to sell. But, I don’t know the percentage of intelligence that comes from marketing vs. self-generated intelligence. Sales reps and account managers can be very resourceful when it comes to preparing to do their job.

All this seems to beg the question… why isn’t sales organizing competitive intelligence initiatives more often? Why don’t sales managers use competitive intelligence to position more effectively? Why doesn’t the sales department work more closely with marketing?

It is my experience that there is more than one obstacle. But, the most important fact is that the intelligence is delivered in chunks that sales doesn’t want to eat. This fact seems to outweigh the type of intelligence available or any other obstacles that might exist between sales and marketing.

Another important fact to consider is that the competitive intelligence is often commissioned by management and executives, which means that the intelligence is not designed from the outset to satisfy sales nor answer questions relevant to sales.

Both of these problems can be overcome through tighter communication between sales and marketing. Odds are that current intelligence initiatives can be reworked to include a few tidbits for the sales group. Furthermore, marketing can study the current information sources used by sales and mimic those sources to deliver bits and pieces (or full meals) straight to the sales reps.

If the intelligence can make a sales rep 10% more effective (and current evidence suggests that 10% is a conservative figure), how much revenue does your company stand to gain by improving the intelligence communication process? What opportunity is being lost today by not doing so?

Let’s talk about the possibilities and what they mean to you. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Producing ROI from your Competitive Intelligence - "How To:

If you have every spent any time talking with me about Competitive Intelligence, you know that I am a big proponent of intelligence programs that produce revenue. So many companies launch an intelligence program with the intention of "understanding the competitive landscape" but, this is hardly a focused goal.

Over time, the intelligence program expands (bloats) to include as many intelligence categories as possible. Soon, the company hires a "librarian" and implements content management systems just to keep all of the information organized. Corporate personnel are happy because they can ask just about any question and get an answer. CI personnel are happy because they have a job that keeps them busy and security for the future.

But, my argument has always centered on, "Why do the work if you can't justify the ROI?" In other words, Competitive Intelligence has to be a driving force for strategic corporate planning. The Competitive Intelligence group should be able to tell the executives, "At a high degree of confidence, if we do 'X' in market 'Y', we would expect a 10% increase in market share and revenues."

This is so much better than knowing "how many square feet are in our competitors' new warehouse in Cedar Rapids" or "what color is our competitor's intranet login page?"

How do you determine ROI criteria for your Competitive Intelligence? I'll give you some suggestions:

1) Top-line Revenue
–Will this intelligence create new revenue opportunities?
–Will we take away sales from the competition?
–Will our existing accounts stay longer and be more profitable?
2) Bottom-line
–Can we be more efficient or learn best practices?
–Are there better ways to manage our processes?
3) Application
–How easily will we be able to act on these data?

If your CI efforts match up well with these criteria, you are probably pretty advanced. If your initiatives serve other purposes, they may still be valid, but ROI probably isn't your goal. If you need some help determining the ROI potential of your efforts, talk to Primary Intelligence. We're here to help.

And, if you don't know what the purpose of your CI initiatives are, you need to start asking. Or, looking for another job. If you can't show potential return on your efforts, you run the risk of becoming as valuable as your data; interesting, but worthless.

Please, add to the ROI criteria list. Post a comment or call me (801.838.9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)