Smart Sales: Let's Go to the Videotape May 06, 2008 It's time to come clean about your company's successes and failures
By Dave Stein
Just for fun, try asking a sales rep why he lost a particular deal, then sit back and watch him start playing the blame game: "The price was too high." "The product is too old."
Sound familiar?
Now, ask the same rep why he won a different deal. All of a sudden, he's ready to take responsibility: "It was the relationship I built with the CEO." "I'm better than my competitor."
Also familiar, no doubt.
The time for playing these kinds of games is over. Companies need to objectively and formally determine why they win sales opportunities and why they lose them, just as they must determine the cause when a product fails, a department goes over budget or they get cited by the FDA for lack of compliance with a regulation. Without understanding what causes you to win or lose, sales effectiveness will always be an elusive goal.
What I'm getting at here is this: If you haven't already done so, you need to establish a win-loss function within your organization.
Ken Allred is an expert in this field. His company, Primary Intelligence, Inc., has been performing win-loss analyses since 1998. Ken says a win-loss analysis program is the best foundation from which to build and improve your organization's competitive win rate. Without such a program in place, you will have to rely on your gut and anecdotal evidence when making critical sales and marketing decisions. And that just doesn't get the job done.
Ask yourself these questions:
1. What are the critical factors that affect whether a decision-maker selects you or your competitor, from the decision-maker's perspective?
2. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your sales strategies and tactics, from your market's perspective?
3. What would you surmise are the top three reasons why you lose to each of your top three competitors, from your market's perspective?
4. Would your customers say your company is really aligned with them and their needs?
5. Are you able to consistently, systematically and effectively optimize your sales and marketing approaches in order to to meet the demands of an ever-changing competitive environment?
If you can't answer the questions above with confidence, your sales and marketing strategies may be driven from a foundation of assumptions, old information and subjectivity. That's no way to build competitive advantage.
The implementation of a win-loss program is easier than you think. And with the right tools, you and your team can have real-time access to sales and competitive intelligence. Leveraging that intelligence across your entire organization should lead to establishing an edge in your target markets.
Ken suggests the top three best practices for implementing a win-loss program are:
1. Buy-in from sales leadership. This is the most important factor that will determine the success of your win-loss program.
2. An equal representation of wins and losses. You'll learn from both.
3. Dissemination of the win-loss data. The sales intelligence must get to your sales reps, as well as to your company's leadership.
Competing in today's sales environment without a win-loss program in place is no different from a head coach demanding success from his team without bothering to first review videotapes of his and his competitors' games.
Just some final food for thought from Ronald Wright: "Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
Dave Stein is the author of How Winners Sell and CEO and Founder of ES Research Group in West Tisbury, Mass. (www.esresearch.com. He can be contacted via e-mail at edit@salesandmarketing.com.
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