Podcast: Competitive Intelligence + Sales Team = Big Success

Recently, Dave Stein (CEO of ES Research Group) interviewed our CEO, Ken Allred on the affects of sales intelligence: competitive intelligence that can be brought to bear on all aspects of the sales process. His goal was to understand how Primary Intelligence uses intelligence to increase sales close rates.

As Mr. Stein’s company focuses on the evaluation of sales training and enhancement companies. His reports detail the performance of key players like Miller Heiman, The Complex Sale, The TAS Group and dozens of others. His goal is to help companies that want to sell more find the right resources to meet their needs.

To this end, Mr. Stein took time to understand how the right kinds of intelligence can be leveraged to provide:

Competitive advantages

Increased visibility into your company’s performance

Identification of your competitors’ movements

The audio program is 25 minutes long and can be downloaded here.

If your responsibilities include sales management, sales training, competitive intelligence or marketing, this podcast is well worth your time.

And, if you feel like you’re not sure where you stand in relation to the competition, you’ll find usable insights and take-aways you can use today.

Need a CI Consultant to Achieve Business Improvement? Think Primary Intelligence

Yeah. The subject line sounds like a commercial, but that is nearly unavoidable if I want to tell you about specific ways we’re providing high-value services to our clients. Some people over time have seen Primary Intelligence as a solid 3rd-party research group, capable of producing high-quality CI. We love our clients and appreciate their support.

The other group of our clients sees us as a full-service consultancy to effect positive revenue change within their organization. They have grown to appreciate our consultative, hand-on approach at multiple locations within their company. Starting with on-site kickoff meetings, personal consultations with stakeholders to explain and evangelize the endgame and training programs based on world-class competitive intelligence efforts and analytics, our clients are converting information into action plans that produce results. (Man. Even as a marketer, I nearly choked on my hyperbole. But, you have to know about these things. Remember, I’m only telling you these things because you need to know.)

The truth of the matter is that everyone needs some extra help sometime to produce the desired results. We specialize in providing that 3rd-party opinion. Combine our expertise in competitive intelligence with a consultative program that brings strategic changes to life and you have much more than a pretty report that gathers dust on executives' desks.

Deliverables for consulting solutions include:
1. One or two-day onsite workshops
2. Remote maintenance workshops
3. A block of time that can be used to consult with PI’s consultants
4. Identification and assessment of sales opportunities, competitive opportunities and customer opportunities (workshop content)
5. Work sessions on real-world opportunities
6. Mapping sales intelligence and competitive intelligence to sales processes and methodologies
7. Enhancements to current sales processes and methodologies
8. Sales and/or Management plan development
9. Sales plan/Management plan roll-out
10. Sales plan/Management plan monitoring

Customer Benefits
Primary Intelligence’s customers can expect the following benefits from PI’s consulting solutions:
1. Specific improvements to current sales processes and methodologies
2. Greater ROI on current research initiatives
3. Greater adoption of competitive intelligence and sales intelligence initiatives within organization
4. Enhance your organization’s competitive advantages in your target markets
5. Improve sales performance and effectiveness of sales channels
6. Ensure win ratio improvements and enhance revenue growth
7. Greater visibility of key competitive and sales intelligence initiatives

If you need a little extra information on the topic, give me a call. I’m not sales. I can tell it like it is. (801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Analytics in Competitive Intelligence: Stated Importance vs. Derived Importance

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)

Analytics and Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence has always seemed much more of an art than a science. But, leading companies (Wal-Mart, Amazon, Dell, Harrah’s, Marriott, Honda, MCI, Yahoo and the New England Patriots) have learned that swinging the exercise back toward science yields great dividends.

In many of these cases, these companies are using analytics to measure their own performance, systems, processes and personnel. For example:

“One analytics competitor that’s at the top of its game is Marriott International. Over the past 20 years, the corporation has honed to a science its system for establishing the optimal price for guest rooms (the key analytics process in hotels, known as revenue management). Today, its ambitions are far grander. Through its Total Hotel Optimization program, Marriott has expanded its quantitative expertise to areas such as conference facilities and catering, and made related tools available overt the Internet to property revenue managers and hotel owners. It has developed systems to optimize offerings to frequent customers and assess the likelihood of those customers’ defecting to competitors…. The company has even created a revenue opportunity model, which computes actual revenue as a percentage of the optimum rates that could have been charged. That figure has grown from 83% to 91% as Marriott’s revenue-management analytics has taken root throughout the enterprise. The word is out among property owners and franchisees: If you want to squeeze the most revenue from your inventory, Marriott’s approach is the ticket.” (Davenport, Thomas H. (2006), “Competing on Analytics”, Harvard Business Review, page 3)

Many of these companies are starting by turning their measurements and analytics on themselves. But, watch closely as analytics begin to be turned toward outside influences, including competitors.

Primary Intelligence is already at this point; using Win Loss and Account Retention data to power analytics. The result of these calculations is a clear and efficient path to increasing win and renewal rates at very high levels of confidence.

You can start to put these practices into place right now. Many companies perform some levels of segmentation or other analytics of revenue sources. Over the next couple of entries, I’ll address specific areas where analytics should be applied.

And, if you’re interested in this kind of stuff, let’s chat. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Life on the Prarie - The Best Ranchers Protect the Herd

At the risk of alluding to your client base as cattle, let’s consider the experience of a successful rancher. A small part of his year is spent on increasing the herd (birthing calves). Most of his time is spent nurturing, caring, feeding and protecting the herd from dangers. He builds fences, renders aid, steers the herd to the greenest pastures and fights to keep wolves, poachers and other predators away from his livestock. This herd of cattle is his life. He doesn’t have the luxury of a safety net or fallback plan.



A business has a great deal in common with the rancher. You work hard to bring in a few new accounts every year. But, if you are like most businesses, 75%+ of the value of your business exists in your current accounts.

Your competitors (either other ranchers or wolves) know the value of your accounts and want them for their own. They are fighting hard to get inside your fences. They may even dress up in funny little cow suits so as not to spook the herd and possibly even fool the rancher.

This is the reason why you have to focus a substantial amount of your competitive intelligence on maintaining your accounts.

There are two very important sources of competitive intelligence that need to be mined in the client lifecycle:

1-During the normal course of business (e.g. during the execution of the project or fulfillment of the contract)
2-Post renewal-defection (after the company chooses to renew its engagement or defect to a competitor or otherwise)

Your current client list interacts very frequently with your competition. Even the most satisfied accounts listen to your competitors. Occasionally, they reach out to discover new developments in the marketplace.

A big benefit of your current client base is that they are generally friendly to you and willing to provide quality information about your competitors. Usually, all you have to do is ask. They will talk.

They can tell you new development and tactics. They can tell you how you stack up in many different areas vs. various competitors. They will tell you what you will need to do to maintain competitive advantages in the marketplace against specific companies.

And, you can quantify competitive performance scores in order to perform statistical analysis and predictive analytics. With these tools, you can build very strong fences to keep the herd intact.

Keep riding cowboys (and cowgirls…). If you want some ideas on how to implement Competitive Intelligence among your current accounts, talk to me. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence in the 21st Century – Moving Past the SWOT with Predictive Analytics

In my last post, I said that a SWOT analysis leaves a strategic decision-maker with a problem. You may be able to identify some competitive weaknesses (compared with a specific competitor or in the marketplace in general), but you don’t have any way of gauging what would happen to your market share if the weaknesses were improved.

And, you can’t tell whether continuing to improve the strengths would provide a bigger competitive benefit to your company’s efforts.

So, if a competitive intelligence professional spends all of their time studying the market and the end results is a list of strengths and weaknesses (with no predictive analytics or direction), how much value does that person provide?

I guess that I should be clear that a SWOT analysis is not useless. There is tactical value in a SWOT. You can figure out what to say today with a SWOT, but you can’t make strategic decisions based on a SWOT. There is still too much guesswork.

So what? Replace the SWOT with Impact-based Competitive Intelligence. For instance, Primary Intelligence does this all the time. To determine competitive strengths and weaknesses, we:

1-Interview recent wins and losses where your company competed head-to-head with specific competitors.
2-Measure your competitive performance in 20-30 specific decision influencers
3-Determine strengths and weaknesses (Not the gap score in the table below. Positive gaps indicate weaknesses. Negative gaps indicate strengths)
4-Use predictive analytics to determine the influencers that, it improved, would result in the greatest increases in market share. (Impact column, explained below)

Impact identifies your expected improvement in market share. For instance, in this example (a real-world example taken from one of our clients), if you were to improve your company’s performance in Product Knowledge by one point (In other words, if you improved the 7.7 rating to an 8.7), you would expect your win rate and market share to increase by the impact score of 5.7% (at the 90% confidence level).

And, Product Knowledge is already a competitive strength. Overall, you outperform the competition by 5% in this area. The key may be to make this competitive advantage more consistent throughout the company.

In other words, there are influencers that would provide 2x, 3x and 4x the results of others if improvement were made in those specific areas. This could result in gains of millions or billions of unexpected dollars, based on some potentially simple improvements in the right areas.

This approach takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. No espionage required. And, yet, the company makes the biggest gains in increasing its client base.

Now, this approach does not satisfy all Competitive Intelligence needs, but it sure does take the OPPORTUNITY column of the SWOT table to a completely different level.

I am happy to talk about this approach with you. Let me know what you think about how this would fit your organization. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)