Why should I care about CI? I’m in Sales!

Calls, pipelines, meetings, and more calls. This is what sales people do: make calls, make contacts, and build relationships. It seems simple, doesn’t it? So, when a marketing person comes in with charts and diagnostics, what happens? The eyes roll, the hands go back behind the head, and you can almost hear the brain turning off.

Why do you think salespeople don’t care about CI? What have you done to show them of their benefit? Salespeople work primarily in the business of relationships, and on the surface it doesn’t seem as if Competitive Intelligence matters. Therefore, they believe that what they need is to get themselves in front of the right people, and their sales abilities will finish the deal.

Therefore, when someone outside of sales approaches them with statistics and magic quadrants, they don’t see the correlation to their efforts at creating and maintaining their relationships with prospects.

Maybe a different tactic is needed. Maybe it’s time for the market research person to use a little salesmanship to promote CI to those who can use it most. Consider these questions before approaching the sales team:

1. What information can I share that matters in a sales scenario?
2. What can it tell them that impacts their ability to win more opportunities?
3. What can I leave out that isn’t critical to their specific needs?
4. How can I present this information in a way that gets their attention?

Whether we realize it or not, we are all salespeople. We need to position our product in a way that attracts the attention of those we wish to influence. Remember that when you try to sell to the biggest skeptic: your own sales force.

Competitive Intelligence Webinar – Key to Setting Up a Win Loss Program

Yesterday, Ralph Nielsen (Director of Research Operations) and I co-presented a webinar on how to set up a Win Loss program that works. We took the opportunity to talk about best practices, obstacles, unexpected value. If you are thinking about setting up an in-house effort or you work with a 3rd-party vendor for your Win Loss, we gave you a ton to consider.

Also, I have recently spent some time with our great clients talking about how they use Win Loss, to whom they distribute it and where it makes a difference in their companies. I turned the results of this work into a section in the webinar that I refer to as Seven Secrets of Making Your Win Loss Program More Effective. That’s kind of a long title, but it leaves little room for confusion.

If you would like to download the slides alone, you can find them HERE.

If you want to watch the entire webinar with audio and video, you can download that file right HERE.



Over the next few days, I’ll spend some time sharing the ideas from the webinar in the blog.

Also, we appreciate the many people that gave their time and attended. If you watch the presentation and have any questions or comment, let me know. Leave a comment on this blog, email me (cdalley@primary-intel.com) or give me a call (801.838.9600 x5050)

Competitive Intelligence Newsletter – Can Sales People Sell through Change?

This week, we examine the world of sales and the importance of monitoring their performance in the sea of change we call “their world.” Science has shown that many people (sales reps included) have difficulties accepting changes and variation that are common in business life. Primary Intelligence shows a way to head of problems before attitudinal issues hurt the pipeline.

As always, if you would like to a no-cost semi-weekly subscription to the Primary Intelligence Competitive Intelligence Newsletter, send an email to info@primaryintelligence.com with your name and email address. You will receive the next issue.

Cover Story
You Moved My Cheese! How Can I Sell?
By RoxAnne Loosle, Primary Intelligence
A company's desire to reduce sales force turnover and to develop a confident sales force make tracking a company's sales force's attitudes very important. The vocal minority aren't always the best source on which to base sales initiatives or policies...(For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Competitive Intelligence Tip #1 for 2008 - Make Your CI Produce Revenue
Information costs money? Intelligence makes money!” Essentially, any competitive information that a business manager acts on becomes intelligence...(For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
Bloomington Hospital & Healthcare Selects McKesson for Its Information Needs
Originally Published in March 2005.
Bloomington Hospital & Healthcare System's contracts for its health information systems were coming up for renewal, so the organization decided to reevaluate its options. It looked for a solution that could be integrated throughout the entire enterprise...(For more, click here)

A Fortune 100 Company that Understands Competitive Intelligence

Last October, Mike Brose and I presented a webinar titled “The Sad Story of Competitive Intelligence that Didn’t Make a difference.” In short, we talked about how companies spend money on sales, market or competitive intelligence but fail to leverage that intelligence to make a difference. Then, we showed the recipe to gaining more value. The solution is simple: Involve people that can make a difference and show them how the intelligence drives better decisions. Cross-functional teams of executives and senior managers work best.

(Download the webinar here)
(Related blog postings can be found at: Webinar Wrap-Up: Effective Competitive Intelligence,
How Can You Tell if Competitive Intelligence is Effective?)

Recently, I talked with one of our Fortune 100 clients about their competitive intelligence systems, acceptance and use. Some of the conversation was focused directly on the sales intelligence we provide them. Talking about her organization, my contact stated:

The sales managers that understand how to use intelligence have teams that sell more

The marketing group uses our intelligence to measure their branding efforts and better understand the client.

Those are fairly common bits of feedback.

But, the thing that made me smile was when she said that the legal department uses the intelligence and performance scores to modify T&C and other legal requirements that are in the sales process.

When your legal team wants to know:

A) How they score
B) Where they stand in relation to specific competitors
C) Specific information that they can use to make improvements

… and then monitors their score over time…

You know that you have an intelligence-focused organization.

Just for fun, ask yourself the last time someone outside of marketing asked for intelligence that realistically has the ability to increase sales.

This is just a small bit of the conversation and one example of many of companies using intelligence to beat the competition in the marketplace. If you want to talk about some other ideas, give me a call (Chris, 801-838-9600 x5050, cdalley@primary-intel.com)

The Compartmentalization of Competitive Intelligence in a Company

Over the past couple of weeks, I have spent some time on the phone talking with a number of our current and past clients. What a great experience this has been. I am reminded of the great people that have chosen to work with Primary Intelligence.

The goal of these conversations has been to understand a little bit more about how companies use our intelligence. At Primary Intelligence, we have a strong value proposition and we’re pretty good at communication the message. To us, the true value of what we do is obvious. The list of people in a company that should benefit from our services is well defined. In other words, we’re a simple plug-in solution that solves a set of problems and provides an expected value.

All of which is true to some extent. But, the real fun has been to find out all those little nuances of use, value and such that come into existence within each of our clients’ corporate environments and cultures. We have some very creative clients that are finding bigger and better ways to leverage their intelligence to create more value. We also have a few that are looking forward to a summary of my findings as a “thank you” for their willingness to spend time with me.

Something that is coming out in many of my conversations, however, is the fact that intelligence often has a tendency to be compartmentalized. By this, I mean that there is a tendency for the intelligence to be consumed by a single person or group of people for strategic planning and tactical to-dos, but other departments are often left in the dark regarding the presence of win loss feedback.

Some of the most interesting examples of this compartmentalization occur between sales and marketing. (Can’t we all just get along?) When sales intelligence is purchased by sales, sales operations or sales training, there is often a reluctance to share the data throughout the organization. The intelligence is used by the sales group to accomplish their designs, but marketing, product or corporate executives often do not receive information.

Even more interesting is the reaction from the marketing side. In numerous cases, marketing has told me that they use the win loss data to answer questions about marketing and product. They even put pieces of our intelligence into presentations that are delivered to the executive boardroom. But, when asked about how the sales team uses the intelligence, a long silence happens and then they ask, “What would sales want with this information?”

Personally, I would have thought sales would be eminently interested. But, from some points of view within a company, they can’t see what a sales leader or rep needs to be more successful.

Caveats: We do have plenty of clients that share between sales, marketing, product and others. These phone calls are not a scientific measure. These conversations are as relevant as one-offs on any topic. Some companies use intelligence more effectively than others. Most sales and marketing groups work together to coordinate their intelligence needs. A win loss project doesn’t mean the same thing to every company in every industry.

That said, it is my observation that our clients that create a processes to accept, digest, understand, distribute and act on sales intelligence tend to be leaders in their respective industries. I’m sure that many of these companies have an overall culture that is accustomed to using research, data and intelligence of many types. The fact that they can process our information is the result of a leadership group that expects all leaders to be more fact-based.

What is the takeaway? You might want to look at your company culture and plans for 2008. What types of competitive intelligence are you generating? Does your CI program have ROI potential? How far does it travel and are there any real expectations that the information will be used to make a revenue-enhancing decision (increased sales success, better market positioning, increased competitive strength, faster time to market, etc…)?

What can you do to gain one more champion of your competitive intelligence efforts? Can you reach out to another department and make a friend? Can you find others within your company that are willing to receive your data? How willing are you to listen to other research performed by other departments in your company?

Personally, I believe that the good intelligence should rise above the clutter to the top and it should be used as often as possible, as long as it is relevant, to strengthen the company. Otherwise, the overall value is marginalized.

Progress starts with one person trying to make something a little better. Are you the person to break down some of the compartmentalization of your company?

Using Win Loss to Win Back Business (After they have experienced the competition)

During our most recent webinar (hosted on 10/25/2007 and available for download here), Ron Sathoff and I talked about three of the biggest benefits of Win Loss. One of those points was the ability to win back business that was previously lost to a competitor.

At Primary Intelligence, we emphasize competitive intelligence that will help your sales, marketing and business development organizations create more revenue, strengthen competitive positioning and refine value propositions to be more effective than your competitors. Our goal is to provide your company with increased revenue through your sales and marketing efforts.

How do we do this? Primarily, we use Win Loss studies to measure competitive performance during some of the most valuable times; namely, when your company, product and sales performance are being compared with your direct competitors. We also take the opportunity to ask about the key loyalty drivers based on their current experience with their new vendor.

Using these data, combined with additional client satisfaction questions based on their current experience, Primary Intelligence provides a win-back index that helps prioritize sales and account management efforts with your lost deals long before their current vendor starts to worry about retention.

Imagine begin able to target your competitors’ defectors before the competitors can develop retention strategies.

One of our current health insurance clients said that using this system, they were able to win back 7 of 30 losses within 12 months of the initial loss. What would a 23% win back rate do for your company’s top line revenue?

If you have any questions, experiences or thoughts, let me know. I’d enjoy talking with you to understand how you achieve these same types of results. (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)

Competitive Intelligence Newsletter

In this issue, we attempt to cross the chasm between Sales and Marketing, make Competitive Intelligence part of your current VOC programs and show how a major technology deal was won.

Cover Story
The Bridge Between Sales and Marketing - Sales Intelligence
By Mike Brose, Primary Intelligence Inc.The conflict between sales and marketing is an age-old story that will probably never end. The misunderstanding between the two departments is often based on pride rather than collaboration and results. At its core, Marketing is more effective when its efforts bring qualified prospects to the sales organization. Sales wants nothing more than to close business... (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Competitive Intelligence from Clients - What Should I Ask?
If you want to win more business, you have to take it from the competition. I know that's obvious, but generating competitive intelligence that actually helps you compete more effectively is a surprising low priority of too many companies (For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
How HP Canada Won a $10 Million Contract with Carleton University
Originally Published in June 2005.
To ensure that it could meet the needs of its students and research programs, Carleton University decided to upgrade its network infrastructure. From a list of 10 initial responses, the short list was narrowed to HP Canada and... (For more, click here)

Webinar Wrapup - Does Your Sales Team Have Heart

Yesterday, Adam Dunford (VP Product Development) and I presented an answer to that very question through our webinar. The idea is that the performance of the sales team, how they think and feel about their products, services, and management team clearly impacts their efforts, success, and $$$. It is common sense that if the sales team is demoralized, win rates and pipelines are bound to suffer.


In response to that idea, Primary Intelligence has developed a product called Sales Confidence Index. The following description will help you understand the purpose of this system:

• Consumer Confidence Index - The Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) is defined as the degree of optimism on the state of the economy that consumers are expressing through their activities of savings and spending Economists closely track consumer confidence because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of all U.S. economic activity.

• Sales Confidence Index - Companies closely track salesperson confidence because sales team efforts account for the economic activity of the firm. The confidence of the salesperson, loyalty, his or her competitiveness, confidence in the strategic direction, value delivery, and innovativeness measures the sales person’s outlook over the next six months.

If you would like to watch a reply of the webinar, the recorded version is available here. If you’re willing to watch that demo, talk to me about the possibility of the offer extended at the end of the presentation. (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)

Primary Intelligence Competitive Intelligence Newsletter – 6/12/07

We’re receiving good feedback on our newsletter. It is our hope to cover topics that will help companies sell more. Now.

The most recent issue is posted below. If you like the information, please forward it to a friend. That would be the biggest compliment of our work.

If you would like to be added to our subscription list, send me an email and I'll make sure you are added for the next edition (cdalley@primary-intel.com)

Cover Story
Sales Teams: Making "Second Half Adjustments" to Win the 2007 Sales Game
By Tony Randall, Primary Intelligence Inc.These "dog days of summer" are actually more important than many sales teams may realize. Sure, we all want to take a break and head to the beach or the mountains to get recharged. And we will. But lest we forget that while you may be ignoring your current clients or targeted prospects, someone out there may be courting them in your absence. So, how do we prepare for that all important second half push. (For more, click here)

BlogCentral
Voice of the Customer Should Be Used to Collect Competitive Intelligence
You would be very surprised by how much your clients actually do know about your competitors. They may have purchased from you, but they have evaluated many other vendors over time... (For more, click here)

The A-List Archive
Why Did Overstock.com Choose Oracle over IBM?
Originally Published in 2004.
Executives at Overstock.com, an online retailer of discount and closeout merchandise, wanted to create a “data strategy” for the Company that would guide its future solution purchases. Vice President of Technology Shawn Schwegman said that Overstock.com did not look at any marketing materials and considered only the technology that potential vendors could provide. The Company evaluated IBM, MySQL (an open-source database solution), and Oracle.(For more, click here)


If you have feedback or comments, let me know. I am interested to know what you think about our publication. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

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)

Competitive Intelligence before the Competition Arrives

Have you ever seen a grateful sales rep or account manager? Of course, they all smile if you buy something. They can't help it. It's just their nature.

But, what about sales teams from your own company? What can you give them that would put a smile on their face and a bounce in their step? Well, they'll appreciate anything you can do to help them sell more effectively. Give them a sale and you'll have a best friend for life. They might even take you to lunch, but don't count on it.

Unfortunately, you may not be on the front lines. You might not have a rolodex of potential clients. You may be busy with a ton of other stuff. And, if you really wanted to sell, you would have joined the sales or account management teams long ago.

(What to do, what to do, what to do…)

You might consider a Target Prospecting profile from Primary Intelligence. This new intelligence service, introduced this month, has the potential to increase your sales team’s effectiveness exponentially by providing a road map to a sale.

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

Think of the benefits of being able to talk to the client about their needs in their language and understanding most of the necessary maneuvers before the first prospecting contact is made.

This isn’t lead generation. This is Prospect Needs Identification and the ROI has proven to be huge for our clients.

With this information, provided to your company only, your sales reps and account managers will know the lay of the land before the competition decides to engage. How surprised will the competition be when they arrive at the prospect’s doorstep, only to find that your company has set up camp in the living room? While they’re still trying to figure out who to talk to, you’ll be speaking the prospect’s language.

In the words of my 13 year old daughter, “It’s like, so totally rad.”

For more information, or a sample report, check out our website or give me a call. I’ll be happy to answer any questions. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)

Getting the Most out of Win Loss Analsysis

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.

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)

The ROI of Win Loss Analysis (Primary Intelligence Style)

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)

What's in a Win?

Yesterday, I was working with Chad Sly, reviewing a proof of concept trial with a client that had purchased win loss analysis from Primary Intelligence.

To be more accurate, they purchased loss analysis. In other words, they weren’t interested in measuring won opportunities; only lost deals.

I can understand that. I can respect that. Your instinct tells you that you are going to learn more from your losses than your wins. You might think that you are in a better position to talk to your wins later and find out the story of what happened. These are true statements.

But, I’d like to toss out a couple of reasons that you ought to apply your same, rigorous study of sales opportunities to your wins, too:

1-Knowing why you lose is interesting. Knowing why you win is just as valuable. If you don’t thoroughly understand your winning value proposition, how can you make the necessary changes in the less certain opportunities?

2-Benchmarking of successful data. If you want to make improvement, you have to understand where you are starting. Get a benchmark of your performance across the board (and not just in losses) or you will have a skewed benchmark that doesn’t really reflect current performance. (BTW, Primary Intelligence believes that measurements in 20-30 individual performance areas make the best sales
reviews)

3-Interpretation of comparative data. If you see that your sales team is weak in certain skills during losses, how will you know if they were strong in those same areas during wins? Or, did they win despite the an across-the-board weakness? You’ll never know unless you discover their performance in both wins and losses.

4-Goodwill with your new customers. Your new clients worked very hard to make the best decision for their company. They appreciate the opportunity to tell you
what went right or wrong and how you can be more effective in like situations.

5-Competitive intelligence from a friendly source. Your new clients are the most likely to provide you with the best actionable competitive intelligence, based on the tactics and messages presented during the recent transaction. You shared time with your competitors. Find out what your prospect/new customer found out during
that time.

I understand that losses look more important. I understand that having the inside scoop on a recent loss is nearly a status symbol. But, don’t forget the wins. They’re what keep you in business.

Let me know what you think. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801.838.9600 x5050)

Can’t We A Just Get Along? (Sales and Marketing)

I was working with a company yesterday that just doesn’t get it. They have a fairly traditional relationship between sales and marketing. Sales says that the leads that Marketing produces are worthless (and that’s an attempt to keep this blog family-friendly) and Marketing says that Sales doesn’t work the leads and expects too much.

So, in the end, these departments tend to go their own way, complying with corporate strategic initiatives, but leveraging each other’s strengths to produce a result that is greater than the sum of its parts.

How does this relate to competitive intelligence? Sales and Marketing need each other here more than anywhere else. We see examples of success and failure among our client base often at Primary Intelligence.

Where else is the competitive battle fought more passionately than the sales trenches – deal by deal. The right information delivered at the right time, coupled with the skills of an experienced sales representative can mean the difference between a loss and a long-term client with substantial lifetime value and profitability. But, yesterday, the marketing team was “number-crunching weenies that love their reports and miss the boat.”

And, who can provide marketing with more information about value proposition, messaging, competitive pressures and information specific to different industries or segments? The sales team works in this arena every day. They have their ear to the ground. Sales reps will see trends develop long before marketing hears word one. But, in yesterday’s meeting, sales was “gun-slinging outlaws with more bravado than brains.”

In my experience, the sales and marketing department have to be married (happily) and work together continuously. In some companies, the position of VP Sales and Marketing exists. There are potential problems in combining two roles into one person, but there is less territoriality and conflict.

I recommend that someone from Sales and Marketing stage a love-in, professionally speaking. Create dialogue between the two organizations. Develop committees with leaders and worker bees from each group. Develop communication channels to move information up the chain and around to everyone in both departments.

The benefits will include:

-Stronger market alignment
-Messaging that is much more precise
-Sales reps that are better equipped with competitive intelligence
-A company with pronounced tactical advantages
-Increased sales and higher lifetime client values

I can’t think of any real cons to this arrangement.

If you have ideas on moving Sales and Marketing closer together to leverage strengths and produce synergies, let me know. (cdalley@primary-intel.com, 801-838-9600 x5050)