Insight on Sales

5 Surefire Ways to Find Your Prospect's Biggest Pains

2010-05-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

by Ginger Cooper

When you research prospects, you’re really trying to uncover their greatest pains—those issues they’re experiencing that make them need your product or service. If you successfully communicate that you understand those pains and have ways to address them, you’re far more likely to get the prospect’s attention.

Most salespeople start their research with the obvious—going to the prospect’s website and Hoovers.com for an overview of the company, its executives, its product/service offerings, its client base, and (from Hoovers) an idea of the competitive landscape. These are good starting points, but neither blatantly broadcasts what you're really after—information on the prospect’s business problems that impact its sales and potentially the job security of its key decision makers. When you’re ready to track down this information, try these tactics:

1. Go to the Better Business Bureau website. Since most people don't bother to file a complaint with the BBB unless they're really angry, this site can be a great source for uncovering product and service issues within the prospect company. Once on the site, click on "Check Out a Business or Charity" and then type in the prospect company name. You'll get a BBB rating—an A - F letter grade that's based on the number of complaints received and the average time it took for those issues to be resolved. You'll also see a breakdown regarding the nature of those complaints. Use this data as a springboard for doing a more refined Internet search. For instance, if you see that a prospect has 19 service issues, first click on the number in front of the problem (19) and you'll get a more detailed breakdown as to what's happening. Next, do a Google search using the issue (“service”) and the prospect company name/product name as your keywords. Also, for some companies listed on the site, you'll get the option of clicking on a "detailed view" and an "industry comparison". These provide additional data and also give you an idea of how often other companies in that industry receive similar complaints.

2. Check out Alexa.com, which follows website traffic and demographics. At Alexa, you'll see traffic for the past month and three-month periods for your prospect. You'll also find demographics on the gender, age, marital status, and education level of site visitors, as well as keywords they use to find the site and other sites they click to upstream and downstream of this one. The trick with Alexa is to also enter URLs for your prospect's competitors (there's a feature in Alexa that lets you compare sites) so you get a picture of any trends, dips or surges in traffic and an idea of how, in terms of website visits, this prospect stacks up against its competition. Additionally, by searching on the keywords used to find the prospect site, you can track down your prospect's smaller competitors.

3. Conduct a keyword search using negative words/phrases in conjunction with the prospect company/product name. You’re missing a veritable goldmine of information if you neglect to search on any bad buzz your prospect has received via blogs, opinion sites, and more. For your prospect, be sure to do a search on both the company name and on specific products/services offered. Alongside the product/company name, try typing in the following words: frustrated, disappointed, irritated, worst, hate, angry, problematic, terrible, cons, shortcoming, weak, weakness, don't recommend, problem, issue, challenge, don't like, and anything else you can think of—you get the picture. You'll be amazed at what you can uncover using this simple tactic. You might also consider searching on these same keywords for your prospect's competitors.

4. Do a keyword search on your "prospect name vs. its competitor name" and on your "prospect product/service name vs. its competitor's product/service name". For example, enter "Costco vs. Sam’s" or "iPhone vs. gPhone".

5. Visit your prospect's industry association websites and review topics for upcoming webinars and conferences. Speakers base their presentation choices on high-interest, high-pain themes for the industry they're addressing. By pulling up posted conference agendas, you can gain quick insight into issues that your prospect company is likely to be facing. While you're at it, check to see if any of your prospect's execs are on the speaker list and which topics they're covering.

Taking A Test Drive

Now, let’s put this strategy to the test. First, I'll choose a random company name—I'm not going to disclose the name for obvious reasons, but it's a real company. I check out the company website and then go to Hoovers.com. From these sites, I get a pretty good overview of what the company does and to whom it sells. From Hoovers, I learn that inventory management and marketing are two factors that present challenges for this prospect’s industry. Now I go to the following:

· BBB.org: I see that this company has had 994 registered complaints in the past 36 months—ouch! —and I look at the breakdown of these by type. I’ll hone in on one—repair issues—and I see that about 25% of repair complaints pertain to delayed completion of the repair. If I have any kind of solution that pertains to improving response times, this information alone could prove valuable.

· Alexa.com: I find that my prospect’s website traffic is down 37% over the past three months. People hitting the site are typically aged 45-54 and don’t have a college degree. That surprises me a bit, as I would have thought otherwise on the education level. I click on “high impact search queries” to see which products are generating the most interest among site visitors. I also see that the majority of people go to Google before and after coming to this site, but I also see that many are visiting the competition from here. I enter the top 3 competitor site URLs and see that all have experienced similar rises and dips in site traffic, but the competitor most resembling my prospect has had an elevation in traffic. That competitor also has 13 reviews, some good and some bad, which I might use as competitive knowledge when talking to my prospect.

· Keyword search on “worst”, etc.: I find that my prospect has quite a few people who have gone vocal with their service complaints, and their issues stem from delayed response time on the initial call (and not returning calls period) to incompetent service. I also find a number of entries noting that this prospect’s salespeople don’t understand all of their products that well.

· Keywords “prospect vs. competitor”: I immediately hit on a great article about this company’s business plan. Its strategy right now is to go head-to-head with its two largest competitors. The article outlines how the plan could work and also covers its potential risks. Interestingly, the article points out that my prospect prides itself on employee training, but I know from my prior research that many customers have complained about employee incompetence and lack of knowledge. This article was published a couple of months ago, so I find it curious that website traffic for my prospect is down—compared to its chief competitor—after it announced an aggressive growth plan. I suspect my prospect is feeling some pain and also that I may be able to focus on enhanced job security as a plus for the decision makers.

· Associations/Webinars/Conferences. I find an annual industry report, and after six more queries, I hit on a conference in which one of my prospect’s biggest competitors will be talking about the market and its business strategies for the current economy. I also discover that another well-known company is about to enter my prospect’s market—this could be perceived as a big threat. Given the size and reputation of this new entrant, my competitor must be bracing for a serious battle. When I make first contact with my prospect, I will definitely outline how my product can help differentiate it from this newcomer.

4 Reasons Why Your Prospect May Have Done a Disappearing Act (and What to Do About It)

2010-04-30T07:40:00.000-07:00

by Errol Greene

The prospect was a solid fit for your company’s value proposition. You sent salespeople on site, spent money on demos, supported testing, and then…the key decision maker suddenly stopped returning your calls. Now, the same people who consistently called you back are no longer available. You begin having one-way conversations with their voicemail. If you actually reach them, you’re met with a “no decision” or “we’re holding off” excuse that rings quite hollow. What's happening? And, more importantly, what should you do?

If your prospect suddenly becomes unreachable, ask if it could be for one of these reasons—some of the ones we encounter frequently when conducting sales loss analysis.

Reason 1: Your Prospect Experienced Unanticipated Financial Difficulties

In the current economic environment, this reason may not seem so surprising. But even in the best of markets, executives at private companies don’t want to disclose financial data, most especially to sales reps. To that end, if a prospect experiences unanticipated financial hardship, decision makers may hesitate to tell you why they can no longer afford your products or services.

Solution: These days more than ever, you can’t just sell to prospects. You’ve got to make easier for them to buy. For some companies, this means offering creative finance options or pay-as-you-go plans that may not have been available in the past. One company, for instance, completely overhauled its pricing strategy last year and went from charging on a per-day basis for its service to a much lower cost per-year plan. This strategy enabled the service provider to take on more, smaller customers by giving them an option that had been unaffordable in the past, and it worked. In a market in which most of the competitors operated in the red, this company stayed in the black. If your company can provide financing alternatives, make the prospect aware of this as early as possible in the sales cycle. Doing so will help you address a silent sales killer before it strikes.

Reason 2: You and Your Prospect Didn't "Mesh" Well

Sometimes, it just happens: People meet, and for some reason they feel at odds with each other. In situations in which the prospect could be an ideal client, a gear change may be necessary to save the sale.

Solution: Regardless of how good your salesperson is, if you’ve got a personality conflict on your hands, your best bet may be to shift to another sales rep. Provide a no-questions-asked option of turning over the opportunity to another rep—one whom you feel can build stronger rapport with the prospect. Offer a split commission based on the amount of time and effort each salesperson put into the sale. And understand that bad things can happen even to the best of salespeople, so it’s important to present this as a solution rather than as a punishment. That said, if the problem becomes consistent, you probably need to retrain or re-evaluate that salesperson's role in the company.

In one situation we encountered, a salesperson understood her company's product thoroughly and presented it well, but she lacked strong relationship-building skills. Despite training in this area, she simply didn’t have a personality that made prospects want to do business over the long-run. The company had invested time and money in her, and management appreciated that she had developed a strong knowledge base. Instead of letting her go, they were able to reassign her to a technical support position that was a better fit. With a new salesperson assigned to the territory, sales improved—and the company was able to retain an experienced technical resource, representing a win-win for everyone involved.

Reason 3: Your Competitor Offered Lower Pricing at the Eleventh Hour

You’ve done all the work and have spent the better part of a year on a particular sale. Then, just before the sale should be closing, a competitor sweeps in and now your prospect—who happens to be your last, best hope for nailing your quota in this challenging quarter—won’t acknowledge that you exist. You’ve just become victim to the "eleventh-hour interloper", a competitor who knows that: 1) He has little or no money invested in the prospect to date, so he has nothing to lose and plenty to gain, and 2) To be able to compete this late in, he’ll have to pull a rabbit from a hat. Most of the time, the “rabbit” is an incredibly low price for a comparable offering.

Solution: Find the means to get small, initial buy-ins during the sales process, and continually look for ways to make yourself/your company indispensible to the project at hand. One company inserts their people into the prospect’s operations and offers unique services at no charge—pertaining to software and device management—that their competitors don’t provide along the way. By doing this, they create an environment in which prospects will derail their own projects if they change vendors. Even if a competitor comes in at an extremely low price, the cost of starting over with a new company—both in dollars and time—makes it a losing proposition.

Get creative—put yourself in the shoes of your prospects and ask how you could make yourself a critical component of their business during the sales process. If you’re comfortable doing so, you might also gather feedback from customers with whom you were directly involved in the sales process and ask them to recommend possible options that could make you invaluable to prospects.

Reason 4: Your Competitor Provided "Insights"

We've all heard the saying that “a picture paints a thousand words”. With one company, we actually saw PowerPoint presentations—created by a competitor—that purported to show the “cheap internal workings” of this company's hardware. Had the pictures been accurate, they could have been considered fair game, but they had been altered—drastically. Prospects rarely consider the fact that they might be viewing false pictures or information, and it’s amazing how effective this unscrupulous sales practice is, especially in software and hardware sales.

Solution: Despite the fact that most salespeople play fair, misrepresentations of a competitor’s product/service occur frequently. The key here is knowing how your competitors sell against you. If you can’t glean this information from the prospect in question, consider using a third party or talking to salespeople that work for other competitors. Once you’re aware of what’s really going on, you can warn prospects in advance and let competitors dig their own graves when they falsify information.

If your best prospects start “falling off the face of the earth”, it’s time to take a fresh look at your sales team, your prospect needs, and your competitor’s positioning of you and your offerings. Armed with a better understanding of what’s really going on, you can start taking measures that make this “unexplainable” phenomenon begin to fall off the face of the earth itself!

Foul Play? What to Do When You Lose a Sale for the Wrong Reasons

2010-04-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

You had every reason to win the sale, but you didn't. Your prospect was well qualified, and your product/service clearly outshined the competition's. Still, something went wrong. Exactly what could be any number of possibilities—you can read about most in the myriad of sales-related books and articles on the market—but sometimes sales are lost for less obvious reasons. The current economic climate, for instance, has fostered a hyper-competitive sales environment, and, unfortunately, it's one in which salespeople and their companies don't always play fair. Take these real-life situations we've encountered in recent loss-analysis cases:

A mobile devices vendor started losing sales to a particular competitor, even though executives knew they had the better product and salespeople were doing their jobs well. When prospects in these lost sales were interviewed, they claimed the competitor's product appeared just as durable, or even more so, at a better price. Price wasn't a true issue—salespeople could demonstrate that over the life of the product, their solution actually cost less—but the durability claim made no sense. This vendor clearly had a superior product, and side-by-side tests at the client site should have confirmed this.

What was happening? In the face of falling market share, the competitor had installed extra padding in the test versions of its devices. Since prospects weren't likely to pry open hardware when testing it, they thought they were seeing an equal or better product at a lower price—and they wouldn't know otherwise till well after the sale. Armed with this knowledge of their rival's deceptive practices, the vendor's salespeople began advising prospects to insist that all test devices be opened up on-site. The competitor immediately backed out of these sales, and the hardware company began winning deals again.

A staffing company has business clients who renew their contracts annually. These are generally "easy" sales that follow a standard procedure: The clients send out an RFP, and this company rebids for the business. Since the staffing company provides excellent service at a competitive price and is a key player in its industry, it has a history of repeatedly winning the business of its biggest clients.

Last year, however, company executives were shocked to learn that they'd lost a contract with one of their largest customers, and they'd lost to a much smaller contender with fewer resources. Until the moment when they lost the sale, everything had gone according to plan. The salesperson on the account had done her job flawlessly, and the Sales VP couldn't find anything that pointed to a problem. The whole situation "just felt wrong".

In this situation, the only thing different from the prior year was the addition of new Board members within the client company. As it turns out, one of these Board members, in his eagerness to help a friend whose staffing business was struggling, quietly (and illegally) provided his friend with a copy of the proposal submitted by the incumbent staffing company. When this friend subsequently submitted a proposal that—line for line—matched or beat the incumbent's proposal, the Board member argued on his friend's behalf. In these difficult times, he said, it made sense to go with a smaller, less expensive firm that would be trying all the harder to please.

Though the real reason behind this lost sale eventually surfaced, this story didn't have a happy ending. The staffing company’s attorneys maintain that they have the option to sue and may do so, but suing will require a long, expensive legal battle that could drain precious resources in an already bad market. For now, the company's executives have decided to shoulder the loss and use the resources to pursue new business, but they took a huge financial hit in letting go of such a big client.

A large technology company relies solely on indirect sales channels to sell its products. After launching a new product line, the company's executives anticipated strong returns, so they were surprised when sales growth remained flat. It would be easy to blame a bad economy, but that wasn't the case. A number of this company's "resellers" were in fact selling products for the competition. They signed on as resellers so they could gain competitive intelligence to better position their other offerings. When the technology company learned that these "resellers" had no intention of selling its solutions, it swiftly severed its relationship with them.

Digging Beyond the Usual Reasons
The above are just a few examples of dishonest sales practices adopted during these tough times. Most businesses continue to operate ethically, but there is a lesson here: If you're losing sales when you've got every reason to win, it may be time to look beyond traditional causes and do some digging. Hopefully, you'll uncover problems that point to a fixable change on your part, but if not, you may need to start thinking outside the box. Keep your mind open to the possibility of encountering situations you haven't seen in the past, and trust your instincts. Where do you start? Try these tactics:

1. Define what's happening.
Look at every step of your sales process, and watch for patterns or stages where things come to a halt. If you find sales breaking down at the same stage, ask if this is a matter of inadequate sales training or perhaps a sign that you need to revamp certain aspects of your selling resources or even your product/service offerings. Don't be too quick to assume foul play, but if things don't add up, start brainstorming as to what your competitors could be doing that would drastically turn the odds in their favor. Could they be misrepresenting your product, service, or company? Could they be doing something that artificially makes them look better? We encountered one situation in which a company's competitor provided false financial information that made the company appear to be faltering. In another case, salespeople blatantly lied about their rival's product—where the components were made, what was actually inside the product, and more. Prospects felt like they were getting the inside story when in fact they were receiving lots of false information. Because the competition's sales reps were so good at building rapport, however, prospects weren't doing their homework and getting to the truth.

2. Go back to the prospect.
Ideally, you've asked for the option to follow up earlier in the sales process, but if not, find a way to get the prospect talking. You've already lost the sale, so some prospects may not consider it worth the time to speak candidly with you. Make it worth their time. Be clear that you're not pursuing the sale, and find a way to offer value so the prospect wants to speak with you. Perhaps you can provide information that helps the person do their job better. You might try offering a gift card to a nearby restaurant, from amazon.com, or any number of other places. When you reach prospects, be careful not to take up too much of their time (15 minutes should be adequate), and be prepared with highly targeted questions so you don't waste one moment. Opt for open-ended questions that give you the opportunity to spot red flags.

As numerous studies have indicated, prospects and customers tend to be far more candid with third parties than they are with the company in question. If you feel that you're not getting the full story, consider going through a sales loss analysis firm or some other outside source. You may pay a bit extra, but the information you glean is likely to more than pay for itself.

3. Seek out your internal champions.
If you have internal champions within the prospect company (and you should), contact them. Often, you'll learn more from them than you will from the decision maker since, after all, they wanted to see you win. Along these lines, do your best upfront to build some type of relationship with various members of the prospect's Board of Directors. This isn't being underhanded. It's being smart, and you should do so with the cleanest of intentions. Early in the game, go to the prospect company's website and do a little research on each member, then look for opportunities to reach out. When there are changes within the Board, act quickly to build rapport with new members.

4. Hire a “secret shopper”.
If you’re concerned about a potential problem with resellers, try sending a “secret shopper” (ideally, someone within your company) to trade shows. Have this person ask generic questions and ask resellers for their opinions on five or six vendors rather than specific questions on your product/service. This can quickly give you an idea of how your product/service is being positioned against others.

5. For proposal issues, understand your options.
If you suspect a problem pertaining to a proposal you've submitted, your options can vary depending on the size and nature of the company issuing the RFP. According to Kent Webb, attorney at Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in Atlanta, many large companies now have hotlines through which you can file a complaint. To locate this number, call the business directly, check the corporate website, or do an online search that includes the company name along with keywords such as “procurement hotline” or “ombudsman”.

When the business involved is a government entity, you may be able to access the other proposals submitted, or at least the winning proposal, thanks to what are referred to as “Sunshine Laws” (there's a federal version of this and many state ones as well). These laws promote open records and guarantee public access to information held by the government entity. In the case of the staffing company mentioned earlier, this is where executives spotted their red flag. They found a small footnote on a single page of their rival’s proposal that became sufficient grounds for a lawsuit.

If you’ve submitted a proposal to a small or mid-size company and suspect foul play, Webb notes that your options are more limited. For any proposal you submit, regardless of company size, you should include a confidentiality provision or request that the company sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement). These are typically included in the original RFP documentation as well, and they can provide grounds for you to pursue legal recourse should you choose. In this scenario, you would need to go through an attorney, file a suit, and have the competing proposals released for review through pre-trial discovery.

A word of warning here: Should you suspect foul play and consider filing a protest, be prepared to face possible repercussions. You may find yourself making accusations against Board members or executives at the prospect company, for instance, and those people may have friends or peers within your client and prospect businesses. Sometimes, painful as it may be, it makes better sense to walk away from these lost sales than it does to pursue fighting them.

Trust Your Gut
It’s always important to understand why you lose sales, and most of the time, you’re likely to find a flaw in your process. In the current economic environment, however, it makes sense to be on the lookout for “unusual” causes once you’ve ruled out the more obvious ones. If your gut feel is that something really is off, it very well may be.