Product Management and Win / Loss Research

Product Management and Win / Loss Research

blog image“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”

If you’re in product management, that quote from Steve Jobs probably means something to you.

As a product manager, do you feel pressure to say yes to everything your customers or co-workers want to see in your products and services? Do you ever feel like saying no to more product wish lists and wants? Of course you do. You can’t do everything at once, after all. At the end of the day, focus is critical in product management.

Think of how many constituents influence your product and service roadmap: your organization’s leadership, your sales team, your client service members and relationship managers, your current customers, your departed customers, and yes, even your prospects.

How do you keep all these voices satisfied while creating products and services that will help your organization meet its revenue goals and its customer service goals? It comes back to focus.

Your primary role as product manager should involve two key tasks – one, setting a long-term vision and strategy for your products and services; and two, communicating that vision and strategy to all those voices.

Sourcing, gathering, and studying data from these voices will help you – the product manager – focus on this vision and strategy. Collaborating internally most likely happens routinely within your organization through scheduled one-on-ones, team meetings, and cross-department meetings. You are probably not falling short on feedback or those wish list items from internal sources. Allow those data sources to contribute to your product decisions.

For those external sources – your clients (current and departed), your prospects, and your competitors – you need to find a way to gather that data. How can those voices contribute to your process? Sourcing this kind of business intelligence is fundamental to building your product roadmap.

One tool that you can use to help gather business intelligence is win / loss research. Most often thought of as a sales tool or a sales performance service, win / loss research goes beyond just sales. It supports product management by its very nature – to help organizations understand why they are winning and losing in new sales situations as well as to help organizations understand what its competition is doing in those same sales engagements. And if your products and services sit at the base of each sales situation (win or loss), why wouldn’t a win / loss program become part of your success story?

blog imageSales leadership takes a special type of person – someone who can lead and teach interchangeably. A successful sales leader needs to know how to sell, inspire, and coach. A sales leader relies on his or her team to chase growth and convert prospects to clients on a never-ending trajectory. There are always new deals to close, and more revenue to chase.

How does a successful sales leader keep a team focused and motivated? Setting the tone is key. It is crucial that a sales leader – be it the head of sales, a regional vice president, or territory manager – commits to the continuous improvement of each salesperson. With a focus on personal improvement, a sales leader can encourage collaboration, talk openly about what’s working well and what is not, and help sales professionals reach personal goals. In fact, when a sales leader commits to continuous improvement, the impact reaches all areas of the organization. Everyone wins.

Win / loss research is a vital tool for successful sales leaders. Win / loss has many objectives, but increasing a team’s win rate is the ultimate goal. The process can help sales leaders acquire valuable perspectives such as:

  • Why prospects buy or reject the company’s products and services
  • How the company is perceived relative to its competitors
  • What aspects of the sales process need to be strengthened
  • And finally, how the sales team should be organized and trained

Win / loss results also can be used as a coaching tool with individual salespeople. Sales managers can become a fly on the wall in each and every deal there is a debrief for, and can use the voice of the prospect to provide precise and accurate feedback on how salespeople are doing their jobs.

Reading and hearing candid feedback from clients and prospects is invaluable for a salesperson because it enables him or her to make adjustments and calibrate his or her sales techniques to the evolving competitive dynamics of the marketplace. Successful sales leaders know that win / loss research actually improves sales teams’ performance and win rates. In fact, win / loss clients generally experience substantial increases in their sales performance.

Brian Tracy, renowned author and sales coach, puts it best: “Your life can only get better when you do. Do something every day to improve your key skill areas.” Win / loss research helps sales leaders do just that.

blog imageNote: This blog was written by Ellie Mirman, CMO at Crayon, a market and competitive intelligence company that provides insights and inspiration for marketers.

Businesses today have great internal visibility – into their funnels, websites, and roadmaps – and many tools and data to evaluate those internal efforts. But when it comes to understanding and acting on what’s happening externally – with competitors, customers, and partners – most companies are radically underinvested.

How are competitors shifting messaging and positioning? What are the most meaningful product and pricing changes in your market? Are companies in your space shifting marketing investment to new platforms? What’s their hiring plan? What’s their partner strategy? Are they winning or losing customers at an accelerated rate? What content strategies are working for them? Most companies can’t answer these fundamental questions.

What is Market Intelligence?

Market intelligence (MI) is information relevant to a company’s market – specific industry or product area – for use in strategic and tactical decision-making to achieve the company’s goals. Market intelligence includes data on one’s competitors, customers, partners, thought leaders, and other variables that can influence market success.

This intel is hidden everywhere – across a company’s website, online forum threads, review sites, and job boards. There’s an incredible wealth of information available online that can be used to get insight into competitors’ strategies and programs.

Increasing Adoption of Market Intelligence

More and more companies are committing resources to market intelligence – in fact, 94% of large companies are doing some market intelligence and 80% have whole teams dedicated to it. At the same time, we’re still in the early stages of companies learning how to build out effective MI programs — 40% of these programs have been in place for less than one year and only 22% have goals.

 

How to Build a Market Intelligence Program

If your business, like many out there, is just getting started with market intelligence, here are some key questions to answer to build out this new program.

  • Who are the key players in your market? Consider not only your direct competitors but also your indirect competitors and aspirational competitors.
  • What areas of your business do you want to impact? Having this in mind can help target your market intel efforts. Do you want to create differentiated messaging? Find untapped content marketing topics? Identify areas of strategic investment to investigate?
  • Where are our competitors and customers active online? Consider the complete digital footprint spread over a company’s website, online forum threads, job boards, and more.
  • When will you review and analyze intel? Timeliness is critical in order to get an advantage over others in your industry with the newly found insights. Determine your cadence for reviewing and analyzing intel in a timely manner.
  • How will you drive quantitative and qualitative results? Businesses employing MI efforts see both quantitative and qualitative benefits. Whether it’s an increase in sales win rate or an improvement in unique differentiation, MI can have a significant impact across every area of the business – remember to evaluate the full range of results.

 

The vast majority of companies haven’t awakened to the market intelligence opportunity yet. That’s great news for you! You can be first in your market to use actionable market intelligence to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

There’s a good chance if you don’t make the investment soon, someone else in your market will beat you to the punch. By the time you see their case study, you’ll be playing catch-up. Instead, you could have your rivals read a case study about how you won with market intelligence.

About Crayon

Crayon is a market intelligence platform that enables businesses to track, analyze, and act on everything happening outside their four walls. Tens of thousands of teams use Crayon’s software to capture and analyze complete market intelligence, pulling from more than seven million sources. Crayon was founded in 2014 by former HubSpot and AdMob executives who believe that millions of businesses have yet to take advantage of the intelligence data available today to drive actionable insights and opportunities. To learn more about Crayon, visit www.crayon.co.

 

blog imageThe beginning of a new year invites us all to think about everything we accomplished over the previous twelve months, and more importantly, all the goals we want to achieve in the new year.

What does your vision for 2018 look like? We all know gym memberships and personal finance milestones typically spring to mind, but what about your professional goals?

Are you looking to increase your win rate in sales situations? Train the next generation of salespeople? Improve client retention and loyalty? What about impacting your organization’s top and bottom lines in a meaningful way?

There will always be personal trainers waiting at the gym for you, or financial advisors willing to help you meet your personal resolutions, but do you have the right partner to help with those professional goals?

Many companies look to outside help from professional services companies to accomplish their goals. There are several third-party research offerings that provide the necessary feedback and training to unlock the data and insights needed for change and growth in 2018.

Consider these professional training tools:

  • Win / Loss: focuses on de-constructing how your company markets and sells your products and services from the prospect’s perspective, improving your sales effectiveness.
  • Post Implementation: identifies any challenges your new clients face when bringing their business to your company.
  • Client Satisfaction: produces unbiased and unfiltered feedback from your clients and customers, enabling you to assess the quality of those experiences and the likelihood that your clients and customers will continue to do business with you.
  • Departed Client: helps you identify the real, and sometimes unexpected, reasons your clients leave.
  • Intermediary Perception: helps you increase the win rate of new business opportunities sold through intermediaries (brokers, consultants, channel partners, VARS, etc.) by improving your understanding of how these key influencers view your company.

Research has shown over 90% of people don’t achieve their personal New Year’s resolutions. No one will blame you if that gym membership goes unused or you stop appointments with your financial advisor. However, when you are trying to take the next step in your professional development, and participate in the growth of your organization, it makes a lot of sense to leverage the above tools to help you achieve your goals. Think of them as your professional trainer for 2018.

 

CurryLostSale

 

How much is one sales meeting worth to your business? Sports merchandise powerhouse Nike is finding out the hard way that not treating every pitch as significant can have major ramifications. In a recent ESPN article, reporter Ethan Strauss unveiled the story of the courtship for reigning NBA MVP Steph Curry by top sponsors Nike and Under Armour. Readers of the article learned cringe-worthy details of how the top sports brand in the world lost an athlete worth an estimated $14 billion to one of their top competitors. What readers might not have realized, however, is how prevalent the same mistakes that plagued Nike are in sales situations. Let’s take a closer look at how Nike turned off one of their most promising young stars, and violated several cardinal rules of sales.

In 2013, Nike met with Curry, who was a current client at the time, in order to sign him to a contract extension. Instead of bringing their top brass, however, Nike chose not to include one of their chief athlete advisors, suggesting to Curry that Nike did not feel he was important or relevant enough to warrant the additional attention. As Anova has learned through thousands of Win / Loss interviews, having the right personnel at sales presentations is absolutely critical to making prospects (and in this case existing clients) feel important and valued. Not having their top personnel at the meeting was a bad first step, but pales in comparison to the rookie mistakes made by the Nike officials that were present.

The Nike presentation was also lacking in customization. Included within was a slide with Kevin Durant’s name instead of Curry’s, indicating the PowerPoint shown to Curry was merely a reprocessed presentation of one given to another Nike athlete. To add insult to injury, one Nike official was said to have mispronounced Stephen’s name. Between the recycled PowerPoint and calling Curry by the wrong name, Nike failed to make their client feel valued. The inability to make a client (or potential client) feel important is consistently one of the top sales weaknesses cited by respondents in Win / Loss surveys. In this case, it cost Nike considerably.

Unfortunately, unprepared sales teams and uncustomized presentations cost businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue annually. In 2015 alone, Anova identified ineffective sales performance as a reason for losing bids in almost 50% of all situations!

The real question is: can your organization afford to NOT be more prepared than Nike was?

blog imageConversation is a primal part of being human. So why does it seem in today’s times, with more forms of communication possible than ever before, the core method of talking, using our physical voices, is being lost?

That issue was investigated in the recent Gregg Johnson article for the Harvard Business Review, “Your Customers Still Want to Talk to a Human Being”. Johnson contends that advancements in technology have helped organizations push their customers to more automated systems, and that further developments of “intelligent” technologies such as voice assistants will only increase the pressure for companies to consider shifting aspects of their customer service and sales units to machines.

However, the data proves that when it comes down to purchase decisions, human beings still want to talk to other human beings and contribute to the conversation economy. That coined term, conversation economy, refers to all the companies and industries that rely on verbal discussions as part of their business model.

Market research firmly exists within the conversation economy. Phone conversations are central to conducting market research, even though there has been popular movement towards other methods such as polls and web surveys. These instruments succeed at collecting quick, transactional-focused data, but often times fall short of accumulating any feedback of substance or use.

To put the value of conversations in perspective, consider how many times we have heard of organizations struggling to collect real feedback because they rely on web surveys instead of the time-honored method of having a discussion? Or even worse, they fail to collect any feedback at all because after a deteriorated relationship they are not in a position to even have the conversation.

Additionally, tales of fading conversation skills are prevalent all over the news. Newer generations have devolved words into abbreviations and into emojis, and have replaced phone discussions with email and text. However, there is real value to picking up that phone and having a dialogue with someone on the other end. Things such as emotion, tone, and extra detail that someone may abandon if forced to write it all out themselves are critical pieces of the puzzle that are lost if an actual conversation does not occur.

As web-based survey methods have become more popular, phone debriefs are almost now a contrarian approach to collecting feedback, but one that is still highly strategic and valuable. In a recent Anova program run on an annual basis, the client requested we inquire how respondents would like to provide feedback next year: either continuing with the traditional phone method or switching to an emailed web survey. 77% of respondents stated they wanted to continue to have phone discussions because of the ability to talk with someone who understands their business and thus provide more verbose, insightful commentary.

The message is clear: the conversation economy is one with much room to grow and phone conversations still have a valuable place in today’s business world.

blog imageNote: This is the third perspective piece on the different ways to analyze client satisfaction data. Previous posts focused on Overall Satisfaction Ratings and At Risk Accounts.

One of the biggest drivers of satisfaction is the experience clients have with the personnel they interact with. Think about it: aggravations with products or qualms over pricing can be remedied by having someone you feel good about interacting with, someone who listens to your problems and tries to solve them. Organizations devote extensive resources to making sure the personnel that interact with their clients are professional, knowledgeable, and likeable. As such, gathering scores rating service team members is an important part of client satisfaction research.

Asking open-ended questions about the personnel can be very useful. It is important to give your clients the platform to openly share their opinions of what their service team is doing well or could improve on. It is also important to gather quantitative ratings on relevant attributes of the service personnel. When analyzed, scores for areas such as responsiveness, consultative approach, and quality of interactions can identify areas your team could improve their skillset.

Training

After gathering a myriad of ratings for an individual team member, calculate the average for each attribute and see which areas someone may need additional training. A Relationship Manager may have high ratings for problem resolution skills and responsiveness, but lower scores for proactive approach. Consider ways to help that individual find their voice and reach out to clients without prompting (this can range from a simple “checking in to see how things are going” email to providing value-add content such as an invite to a relevant webinar).

Creating a Baseline

In Year 1 of gathering ratings, make it clear that these initial results are a baseline, and track how service team members’ scores trend over time. When scores are improving, praise the personnel for realizing their weak points and improving them. If scores are trending downward, be sure to provide training and resources to your employee on how they can reverse that trend.

The baseline is not just relevant for day-to-day contacts but also management. For example, a new executive such as a Head of Service or COO should note the satisfaction scores in the first year of her new role, and track how the overall rating trends over the course of her tenure. Super users of client satisfaction research also tie in performance reviews and compensation to the year-over-year results of their study.

Incorporating into Culture

Scores should not be used as part of a witch hunt or to single out employees, but rather to identify areas where additional training can be provided to your employees. In the best situations, Anova’s clients are eager to receive their ratings each year, particularly looking to see if the areas they have been focused on with their customers are translating to improved scores. If the ratings are incorporated in a positive manner into your company’s culture, they can be used as a springboard for positive improvement and development.

blog imageYou’ve spoken to your clients. You’ve collected hundreds or even thousands of individual data points rating the relationship between your organization and your customers. And now you are looking at a spreadsheet filled with open-ended commentary and quantitative scores rating service team members, detailing pain points, and reflecting on the overall relationship between your two organizations.

The most logical question is: What’s next?

Finding the answer to this question may seem overwhelming and you could be scratching your head wondering where to even start. It may help to begin by looking at the most fundamental questions that a client satisfaction study sets out to discover:

  • How satisfied are your clients?
  • Who isn’t satisfied and at risk of leaving you?
  • Which service team members are high performers, and who needs additional training?

Discovering Who’s Happy (and Who’s Not)

While open-ended feedback is a critical component of a successful customer study, most executives still want to know the answer to the most essential reason for conducting client sat: What percentage of the client base is happy with the products and services they are receiving?

Whether you ask for a yes or no response or categorizing values on a numeric scale, a question in your survey should be designed to answer this very question. However, getting the percentage of satisfied clients isn’t necessarily the hard part; it’s understanding that number that can be more challenging.

Say 72% of your client base is satisfied. Is that good? Bad? How does it compare to your competitors? Is satisfaction increasing or decreasing compared to last year?

If you are using a third party to help conduct the study, they should be able to provide some benchmarking information for organizations like yours. However, in the absence of industry benchmarking data, tracking satisfaction over time may be the most useful way to apply context to your satisfaction score. Year-over-year trends can really help an organization understand how effective its service efforts and product enhancements are.

A negative score, one that is either lagging compared to the benchmark or trending downwards over time, is obviously cause for concern. The next step here should be to investigate further by looking at the scores and feedback for individual attributes to identify what aspect of your offering is troubling clients the most. It is also useful to look at these attributes even with a positive overall score, to fully get a sense of your clients’ feedback.

Diving deeper into the responses for individual questions is one way to get more granular with the data. Another is looking at each of your client’s individual responses. Doing this will allow you to understand which clients are satisfied, but more importantly, which are in danger of leaving. In our next blog post we will look at ways to analyze the data to discover which of your clients are “at risk”.

blog imageImagine this: I want to measure people’s loyalty to you. I reach out to everyone you know – friends, family, co-workers, even the barista at the coffee shop you go to each morning. I give everyone a scale, say 0 being the least loyal and 10 being the most, and ask them to rate you. I tally up the results. Your friends’ loyalty score to you is a 7.6. I walk away and all you have in your hand is a number.

Maybe you like the number, maybe not. Does it feel right? What does that number indicate?  What’s the context? How does one friend’s loyalty relate to another’s? Are they even thinking of loyalty in the same way?

Aren’t you and your relationships more than just a number?

In fact, you are. And so are companies. Consumers have more to say and more to share than just a number. While a Net Promoter Score® (NPS® ) measures the recommendability that exists between a provider and a consumer, it does not encompass true Voice of the Client feedback. It doesn’t unveil anything meaningful or usable about a company’s products, customer service, pricing, or any other incredibly important indicator of future sales. It also assumes all consumers have equal experiences from which to score. Where’s the detail? How can you grow and improve your company in the right places with one NPS® score?

A successful client satisfaction program gives you actionable results and allows you to isolate the motivators for future growth in client retention, i.e. the details and data that you can do something with. Through a successful client satisfaction program you can gather both quantitative and qualitative feedback directly from your customers, helping you understand your team and your business from many different angles. A robust client satisfaction program has context and detail. It allows for different lenses. It promotes conversation between you and your clients.

Don’t limit yourself or your company to one number. It just doesn’t feel right.

To investigate how full client satisfaction programs can help organizations, we will be using this blog to start the conversation about how successful programs are run. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for further posts about the subject!

 

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

blog imageIt’s not a new idea, that’s for sure. Listening to customers has been and continues to be a cornerstone of organizations. Getting feedback from current customers is a constant endeavor, and in this day in age when we are hypnotized by big data, sometimes the bigger picture can be blurred. It begs the question: is there a way to increase revenue by really listening to your customers? Yes, there is.

A successful client satisfaction program isn’t just about tallying up numbers, it is about listening to and learning from your customers.

A successful client satisfaction program gives your customers the opportunity to share unbiased, unfiltered feedback.

A successful client satisfaction program will provide the tools and analysis to help you secure relationships with your customer base, which in the end, helps you increase your bottom line.

There are a multitude of ways to gather feedback from a customer base, and before undertaking such a program it is important to know the ins and outs of what that research may look like. Over the next few weeks, Anova will be diving into the topic of client satisfaction more in-depth. We hope our education on the topic will help you:

  • Realize the benefits of client satisfaction
  • Understand the difference between conducting a Net Promoter Score® survey and client satisfaction
  • Create a baseline for future reference
  • Unleash the power of “Voice of the Customer” feedback
  • Leverage data in the most effective way possible

Let your customers know you are listening and learning from them. It will pay off!

 

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.