Airline pilots receive countless hours of training and must pass rigorous exams before they are allowed to solo. Before each flight they must check out the plane; the drill is the same every time and of course saves lives.

Pilots do not leave the pre-flight checklist solely up to memory, even though it has been drilled into their heads countless times. To make sure they do not miss anything they run down a paper based checklist, to make sure they are not leaving anything to chance.

The checklist is not a substitute for the training they received, only a tool to make sure they are on track. Similarly, the single most favorite tool of sales reps everywhere is the “Two Pager” for lack of a better name.

Two Pagers typically cover:

·         basic background demographics on the competitor,

·         their typical sales pitch,

·         where their  offering is strong/weak,

·          areas to attack,

·         common landmines the competitor will set for you and how to diffuse them,

·         and maybe even a short SWOT analysis.

Some people would argue that sales reps prefer Two Pagers over other sales tools because they hate to read more than a single sheet of paper front and back. If you have burdened your sales force with 100 page play books than I would guarantee that they would pick the Two Pager any day.

Just like the pre flight checklist, Two Pagers are not meant to replace baseline training, but can serve to remind the rep of what’s most important minutes before it’s needed.

Solid Two Pagers are even more important if your sales force faces a number of competitors in a given day. Keeping all competitors straight can be a challenge, and quick reminders can help reps emphasize key differentiators on every deal versus every competitor.

If departments other than sales need to access the Two Pagers, it may take you some time to nail down the format. Err on the side of giving sales what it needs, and do not let them creep up in size since it is hard to find three sided paper for your printer.

Just as pre flight check lists save lives, Two Pagers save deals and serve to increase your win rates.

Avoiding Telemarketer Voice

When it comes to doing win/loss analysis there seems to be two schools of thought.

One is to get an experienced caller and have them actively engage the targets in a free form manner without a formulaic set of questions. 

The other camp has endless detailed questions and the responder ranking items on a scale of 1 to 5 in a mind numbing fashion. These ranking are then run through some sort of statistical model and voila-recommendations aplenty are spit out.

Once people catch on that you are calling from a list of questions you fall into the only group of workers beneath used car salesmen and lawyers - the telemarketers.

Maybe it’s their voice or cheery greeting that gives them away. But there is no doubt that people do not like talking to telemarketers, hearing their seemingly pre-recorded scripts, or giving them any meaningful competitive information.

The goal of any good Competitive Intelligence project is to gain greater insight and win more deals. By talking to people in a more meaningful manner, you can get much better information than a bunch of rankings from 1 to 5 would ever be able to tell you.

By using experienced callers, instead of the hourly paid drones that most credit card companies employ, you can branch down lines of questioning you may have never imagined at the onset of the project. You are also much less likely to tip off the competition as to what you are up to by using experienced callers.

Whoever you have call, make sure that they avoid telemarketer voice at all costs. And don’t have them call during dinner.

Most organizations invest dearly to round up their field sales forces for offsite training. While this may be one of the most effective ways to train, motivate, and reinforce your culture; it can never be done often enough.

In addition to ever increasing travel costs, short term productivity takes a hit with all your reps out of the field. Of course there are offsetting benefits to having a well trained sales force or these meetings would never be approved by the friendly folks in finance.

The question then becomes how to economically reinforce the teachings of these meetings on a much more frequent basis without impacting sales productivity.

The answer lies in taking advantage of what all sales reps have in common - unproductive time that can be taken back for training purposes. This is not meant to insult sales reps, but to point out the fact that they spend a large percentage of their day in transit, lots of nights in hotels, and countless hours in waiting rooms.

One of the main goals of offsite training is to make sure everyone is delivering the same message consistently. By enabling your sales force with better tools, you can reinforce the message on a daily basis, ensuring less variability.

If you are not providing your sales force with sales friendly, on demand tools that they can quickly review when they have non-productive time, you probably have significant variability in the message that they are delivering and are not maximizing the impact of your training investment and your likelihood of crushing quota.

Some of the best reps inevitably get promoted into sales management, but they have never had to teach others how they became successful. This group of folks is unconsciously competent in sales. They know what to do innately, but have never been forced to explain, or teach it to others.

Sales representatives’ most valuable asset is time. Ever increasing quotas, ever decreasing territory size and tougher competition makes every available prime selling hour a precious commodity. The most successful reps jealously guard their schedules and focus on the task at hand.

As new managers transition from a direct contributor role into a mentoring role they need to become consciously competent. By figuring out why they did the things they needed to do to win, they can start to teach others. Many managers never make this transition.

Imagine a coach telling their team to go out and win before the big game. Not real helpful advice. They need to be told how to win, or better yet how to help the competitor lose.

This brings us back to an important group of folks, the successful reps that have not jumped into management roles. These are the very folks who know how to win, but do not have the time or the monetary incentives to teach others.

It would become a tremendous burden on your top reps if every new hire constantly interrupted them to tap their knowledge. In fact they may be more incented to guard their time and not help. This is not a judgment of their personal qualities; they are being driven by their compensation plans.

No senior rep knows it all. They can benefit from the knowledge of their counterparts, but often do not have the time to comprehensively survey.

Imagine the gains in knowledge, if your best reps were interrupted just once. Their knowledge catalogued, their best practices gleaned, and their hard lessons shared.

In every company there are a handful of reps who have figured out how to beat a targeted competitor. Typically they are not incented to spread this knowledge, so it cannot be leveraged across all reps.

By sacrificing a small amount of time one time, everyone can elevate their game. Many companies do not have the internal expertise or the resources to complete this vital task. Others get the research right then fail on the rollout.

If you do not have the time, resource availability or expertise to capture this data internally then consider an experienced third party to help quickly harness and spread this critical knowledge throughout your organization. The quicker this is accomplished the quicker you can start giving better guidance than “go out and win”.

Every time I interview a bunch of sales reps for a competitive analysis, I am amazed by the diversity of how much each of them knows about a targeted competitor. After only a few minutes on the phone you can quickly tell if the rep barely sees them or is a seasoned expert with a high kill rate.

Sales reps are pressed for time and do not have the time to embark on primary research to up their odds of winning. Your best reps guard their time wisely and have the least incentive to share since they already have it figured out.

Even your experts do not have all the pieces to the puzzle; but have differing knowledge and deploy varying tactics to win.

Some sales reps may form informal networks of their peers to share tips and tricks; but this can often be localized and lots of the puzzle pieces can go missing.

There just are not hours in the day for a rep to call everyone necessary to figure out the best way to attack a competitor or to handle a prospect’s objection.

There are a couple of ways that you can tap into the expertise of your star performers. The first is to interview them, preferably when they have some downtime in the car, and roll the information out via formalized tools.

The second way is to tap into their talent at your next team meeting. By breaking you reps into two opposing teams, you can have them whiteboard out the best ways to attack and defend, or the relative strengths and weaknesses of your offering. Make one team represent your company, and the other your toughest competitor. This will force everyone to think like your competition.

Make sure that you put at least one star in each team. If you are short on stars, put them on the competitor’s team since you are looking to gain insights into how your competition thinks.

I bet your stars will be more than willing to share their thoughts in this type of environment. Their natural sales abilities will help the other team mates learn how to think like a top performer.

If everyone could think and act more like your stars, your competition is going to become very uncomfortable.

Keep in mind that just figuring out why your star performers are more effective is only half the battle. Unless this information is rolled out to the masses it is simply an academic exercise.

If you are short handed, can’t wait for your next planned meeting or do not want to spend months figuring out the best way to create and test tools, consider a third party to speed up your efforts.

Less than 20% of companies[1] have an active win/loss program. Others try to gather this vital information but make some basic and costly errors. 

The most frequent error we see is having the sales rep or sales manager who lost the deal call into the account for feedback. It is human nature to let people down easy, apparent to anyone who has ever watched an episode of Seinfeld is aware of the “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse.

Too often, sales managers debrief their sales reps or account managers to try to understand why they lost a specific deal in their pipeline. Really, what is the incentive of a sales rep to explain where he was unable to communicate value? And, even if integrity is not an issue, how can a sales rep possibly understand all of the client-side dynamics that were in play?

Some companies task the marketing organization with these calls, but they risk sending biased information up the chain of command. One recent study found that the reason the reps were losing deals was not on product features as they initially hypothesized, but because they rarely returned the prospect’s repeated calls. Since sales did not want this type of bad behavior broadcast throughout the organization, the results were squelched, and the wrong never righted.

If you are serious about improving your win rate, your analysis should answer the following questions:

·         How is your company perceived by the marketplace?

·         Which of your competitors made the short list?

·         The real reasons for winning and losing business.

·         Product strengths and weaknesses.

·         How your pricing stacked up.

·         If your sales process is providing adequate differentiation; and most importantly

·         What could have been done differently to win lost business?

Many product managers and VPs of Sales think win/loss analysis is a good thing since it will help them build a wish list to go beat up engineering with. The truth is that a win/loss analysis is much more likely to uncover a process problem than product gaps as the major reason for losses.

Knowing that there is likely to be bad news about the sales process makes it even more sensible to have a third party complete the analysis and deliver the (bad) news. Unless there is an action plan that will be put in place and backed by the senior exec’s, the study is a complete waste of time and will offer no benefits.

Taking no action, after reviewing the painful truths that often emerges from a win/loss study is the second most egregious error I have ever seen.

Hiring someone to help with the process costs money, but the benefits will help you win more deals.

If you are interested in understanding your sales team’s performance, then you should get information from the only perspective that matters-the one who is in a position to write you a check.

When completing a competitive analysis, the first thing everyone always wants to know is how the products stack up ala Consumer Reports.

Even if you are lucky enough to find an RFP response in the back of a cab, they are typically useless since most everyone answers “yes” to each question for fear of getting tossed out in the first down selection round.

Unfortunately, when it comes to collecting competitive intelligence most organizations are not creative in who they gather primary intelligence from and do not end up with all the information that is available. Many organizations collect intelligence from sales reps, pre-sales consultants, and outside analysts. Some even go so far to conduct win/loss studies. But that is not enough.

So the question becomes: who has the best product info? The real info.

Sales and Pre Sales Teams hear about things during various sales campaigns, but the competition typically only tells prospects about the shiny parts of their system, and “gets back to them later” on anything that would generate a “no” type answer.

Outside analysts do not often use the products they review on a daily basis. They are regularly briefed by vendors and may make some calls into their customer base, but they may not have the detailed info that you crave.

The greatest, largely untapped resource of product information is from the humble folks that have the pleasure of implementing the solution. These tireless souls get to know the product in a much deeper fashion than would ever be covered during a demo. They know all the holes, who is happy and sad, and best yet: they love to eat free lunches and talk.

Many software companies have moved to a partner model for implementations. This makes finding people willing to talk easier than ever. Since third party implementation companies often handle multiple product lines, they can be a rich source of intelligence.

Of course you may have some implementation folks that are very experienced in your competitor’s product already on your payroll. I would bet that one of the reasons they were hired was for their “industry experience” which is code for they worked for your competitor at one time.

Unless your HR department is still using black filing cabinets for an HR system, they probably have a record of who-worked-where before joining you organization. Happy hunting.