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.

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.