Category: Best Practices

Demandbase Takes ABM Leadership to the Next Level

The ABM Tech Stack published by the AMBLA identifies a broad set of technologies involved in implementing Account Based Marketing.
The ABM Tech Stack published by the AMBLA identifies a broad set of technologies involved in implementing Account Based Marketing.

For several years, Account Based Marketing (ABM) was discussed by Demandbase with little interest from other firms.  In the past twelve months or so, it has taken off and become a full blown marketing fad well into its hype cycle (time will tell whether it becomes a movement).  Now that other firms are discussing ABM, Demandbase has formed an ABM Leadership Alliance with Oracle and several other firms.

Account Based Marketing identifies a firm’s best prospects and then looks to deeply market and sell to those organizations.  As B2B purchasing decisions span multiple individuals and departments, targeting single decision makers is no longer sufficient.

“If you are only looking at an individual, you may only get a part of the picture; seeing the collective acting together helps you to truly understand how interested an account is in your solution,” said Demandbase CMO Peter Isaacson.

Last month, SiriusDecisions released a “2016 State of Account-Based Marketing,” report which found that over seventy percent of B2B companies are looking at implementing ABM and have dedicated staff to ABM-specific programs.  The process is still relatively new with 58% of surveyed firms only in the pilot or test phase.  The percent of B2B marketing departments with full ABM programs in place grew from twenty percent in 2015 to 41% last year.

This year’s data shows ABM continues to gain rapid acceptance for B2B marketers.  What is most exciting is that marketers are rapidly building ABM skills so they can deliver on its promise. Marketing teams understand there are many ways ABM can deliver business impact and are reporting on a range of metrics focused on both demand creation and relationship improvement objectives. In the coming year we’ll see marketers continue to invest in ABM technologies to deliver on their goals.

  • Megan Heuer, VP of research at SiriusDecisions

The alliance is expanding ABM beyond Demandbase’s original programmatic marketing slogan to a broader concept spanning Engagement, Account Selection, Infrastructure, Measurement, and Sales Enablement (Sales Intelligence).

Sales Enablement is broken into three categories all supported by traditional sales intelligence platforms: Sales Intelligence, Account Insights, and Contact Development.  ABMLA has defined these terms a bit differently than I have.  By Sales Intelligence, they mean improved coordination between sales and marketing including target account intelligence gathered by marketing.  Account Insights focuses on buying signals to assist with outreach prioritization.  Contact Development focuses on deeper intelligence around decision-makers.

Missing from their model is ABSD (Account Based Sales Development) services that provide sales reps with pre-defined messaging and campaign cadences  which can be adjusted by sales reps.  ABSD firms provide what SalesLoft refers to as “sincerity at scale.”  Other firms in the ABSD category include QuotaFactory and KiteDesk.

“For ABM practitioners, being able to go beyond the account to the contact level is critically important to drive deeper relevance and specificity,” said Matt Senatore, research director at SiriusDecisions. “For those companies focused on lead generation within target accounts, technology that can help automate this is an important component that enables their ABM programs to scale more efficiently.”

The alliance noted that “B2B companies face a set of unique marketing challenges, which require specific technology to address. As you navigate the space, you’ll need to identify the technologies and vendors that have solutions built for the unique needs of B2B.”

The founding members of the alliance include

  • Demandbase – “Full Funnel ABM”
  • Oracle Marketing (Eloqua) – Marketing Automation
  • LookBookHQ – Content Marketing Automation
  • Get Smart Content – Content Personalization
  • Optimizely – Testing and Automation
  • Bizable – Attribution and Reporting
  • Radius – Predictive Analytics

At this point, the alliance does not have any Sales Enablement members which is understandable because Demandbase operates at the very top of the funnel targeting anonymous individuals at named companies.  However, several sales intelligence firms have already adopted ABM positioning including Avention, Zoominfo, DiscoverOrg, and DataFox.

The alliance was announced on the opening day of Demandbase’s annual user conference.

ABM: The Art of the Start (Avention)

This morning, sales and marketing intelligence vendor Avention unveiled a survey and set of recommendations on implementing Account Based Marketing strategies.  ABM is quickly moving from a buzzword to an actionable strategy for strategically targeting your best customers and prospects.  If you are considering an ABM strategy or researching how to move forward with ABM, Avention’s “Account-Based Marketing: The Art of the Start – Leveraging a Strong Data Foundation to Fuel ABM Success” guide is now available.

The Avention Survey of over 100 top level B2B executives (e.g. CEO, CMO, VP of Sales) found that ABM strategies require “careful data-driven planning, execution and monitoring.”  Furthermore, the lack of data access and quality are “fundamental impediments” that need to be resolved for ABM strategies to succeed.

ABM is based upon strategic targeting of your best accounts and similar companies.  If your underlying data is poor you will have problems with best customer cloning, account messaging, and drilling deeper into organizations for cross-sell and upsell.  Furthermore, “once a program is started, it is essential that account and market news and events be monitored to ensure programs remain relevant.”

Todd Berkowitz, research vice president for Gartner1 wrote in a January report, “By getting a better view of customer data, creating predictive models, employing account-based marketing, and creating internal and external-facing content specifically for existing customers, even marketing leaders from smaller providers can increase the likelihood of success.”

90% of the surveyed B2B execs believe that ABM is relevant to their organization and 86% are confident that ABM will drive growth; however, 75% are having trouble finding the appropriate contacts for selling deeper into target organizations, and more than fifty percent of B2B marketers lack an ability to monitor and adjust programs directed towards ABM accounts due to a lack of real-time intelligence.

AV ABM Survey
ABM Survey of B2B Executives republished with permission from Avention.

Avention noted that ABM is a long-term strategy that requires continuously updated account and contact intelligence if campaigns are to remain relevant.  For example, messages and offers may need to be adjusted due to key events such as executive changes.

Avention CEO Steve Pogorzelski summarized the ABM implementation problems found in the survey:

Almost two-thirds of the marketers responding to our survey report not having access to a single source of truth for customer data.  This obviously impedes starting an ABM program and running it to successful conclusion, as such programs demand access to accurate and continually updated market and account data.  ABM offers enterprises the opportunity to quickly fuel their customer acquisition, growth and retention strategies.

Pogorzelski noted that Avention provides three capabilities which support sales, marketing, and sales operations ABM responsibilities:

  • Marketing: “Consolidation and visualization of in-house customer data for sophisticated segmentation.” (For more on these capabilities, see my February blog on the launch of their DataVision platform).
  • Sales: Strategic intelligence concerning companies and contacts along with predictive indicators.
  • Sales Operations: CRM and Marketing Automation ecosystem connectivity.

Finally, I would note that traditional approaches to marketing data quality which involve annual data cleanses are insufficient to meet ABM and predictive marketing needs.  Marketing data, particularly contacts, ages quickly.  The lack of a continuous data quality strategy will result in a drop-off in sales and marketing productivity as contact and company data decays.

1 Gartner, Tech-Go-to-Market: Four Ways Marketers can Generate Demand with Existing Accounts, January 29, 2016

Full Disclosure: I broadly advise companies across the sales intelligence space including Avention.  While I periodically write commissioned blogs for Avention, none of my commentary on my own blog or social media accounts is commissioned.

Putting Lipstick on a Pig

The task of software product developers has become increasingly difficult.  It used to be that marketing could “put lipstick on a pig” and sell a poorly designed product based upon futures, a few cool features, and a high ROI claim.  But increasing competition and higher user expectations make dressing up a weak product more difficult for several reasons:

  1. Buyers do much of their research upfront, so marketers and sales no longer control the narrative.  Purchasers are now able to frame their requirements and conduct much of their basic research before raising their hands.
  2. Review sites such as G2.com (FKA G2 Crowd), TrustRadius, and PeerSpot provide input on what users like and dislike about software products.  If there is a disconnect between promises and reality, these problems will be surfaced.  If there are connectivity, performance, or scaling issues, these will also be flagged. (Warning: be wary of reviews that are manufactured by vendor campaigns.  Look at the review dates and note if reviews are tightly bunched in time or if a small vendor has several-fold more reviews than its larger competitors.  These reviews are often derived by campaigns, some with rewards, for reviews.)
  3. We’ve all come to appreciate great design thanks to Steve Jobs and Apple.  Most of us are not experts in what makes for great design, but we are much better at identifying poor design, balky workflows, and ugly interfaces.
  4. Services must integrate with each other.  It is no longer possible to build a product that only weakly integrates with key vendors.  Simply providing a download CSV for enterprise software platforms is unacceptable to admins.  The AppExchange has thousands of vendors on it.  In SalesTech and Martech, it is expected that your service integrates with Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Adobe/Marketo, and Eloqua/Oracle.  Other common integrations are Chrome Connectors, Hubspot, Gmail, Exchange, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator (SNAP).  We are already seeing Sales Engagement vendors such as SalesLoft and Outreach.io build their own partner ecosystems.
  5. Competition is fierce.  In the Marketing Technology space, Scott Brinker identified approximately 3,500 Martech vendors in his 2016 graphic, up 87% over 2015.  By 2019, the vendor count had doubled to 7,040. That is a large gaggle of voices calling for attention.
"Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2016)" courtesy of Scott Brinker and Chiefmartec.
“Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2016)” courtesy of Scott Brinker and Chiefmartec.

Products rarely succeed if they are backed by poor marketing.  But is increasingly difficult for poor products to gain traction by marketing alone.  Firms now must tie strong marketing to strong design and an unmet user need.  A company like SalesLoft identified an underserved market (Sales Development professionals) and gave them “sincerity at scale.”  Likewise, DemandBase was talking about Account Based Marketing for years (and supporting it with their programmatic marketing platform) before other vendors recognized the value of targeting your best clients and prospects.

In a blog, Gartner Research VP Jake Sorofman warned marketers:

When your value proposition, use cases and features are all in perfect harmony with a high-value need, customers take notice. You’ve won their minds. When the user experience doesn’t just fulfill these use cases, but does so with artful simplicity and deep respect for the user, you’ve won their hearts, too.

When I’m evaluating which products to profile, a poor UI is a red flag.  I’m also wary of profiling products that lack an integration story, have typos on their website, push marketing puffery into bald-faced lies, or whose pitches suffer from featuritis.

So be wary of the firms that sell features over value, that promise ROI with gauzy claims of indirect benefits, or that fail to understand the underlying needs of their customers.  A pig with lipstick is still just a pig.

Still Not Convinced that Data Quality Is an Issue?

 

Integrate evaluated over 750,000 records from B2B companies and found consistent data problems whether the firm was and SMB, Enterprise, or Media Company. In each case, roughly 4 in 10 records contained inaccurate or bad information.
Integrate evaluated over 750,000 records from B2B companies and found consistent data problems whether the firm was an SMB, Enterprise, or Media Company. In each case, roughly four in ten records contained inaccurate or bad information.

While the primary theme of my blog is sales intelligence, you cannot have sales intelligence if your databases are rife with duplicate records, invalid emails, missing or incorrect firmographics, and non-standardized values.  These errors wreak havoc on marketing and sales.  I came across a 2016 Integrate report that had a series of quotes on the subject which addressed the impact of bad data quality across multiple marketing activities:

The issue of data quality continues to be one of the biggest roadblocks to effectively analyzing the prospect and customer journey. It also dramatically increases the costs of analytics projects and negatively impacts performance.
– Sameer Khan, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, IBM Customer Analytics

Dirty data is the silent killer of marketing campaigns. It makes you look bad, depresses the impact of great content and offers, and can put your brand, reputation and domain at risk (or worse).
– Matt Heinz, President, Heinz Marketing

Data is the oil of any marketing engine, and in order to create perpetual demand generation, data accuracy needs to be a top priority. Marketers must be ruthless and deliberate about data quality and standardization at point of entry.
– Jonathan Burg, Sr. Director, Marketing+Customer Acquisition, Apperian

And if you still aren’t convinced that data quality can choke your initiatives, their research found that 40% of B2B records have some form of data quality issue with duplicate data representing 15% of your marketing database.  Invalid Values and Ranges (10%) and Missing Fields (8%) were also common problems.

So if forty percent of your marketing data is faulty, then a significant percentage of your Marketing Qualified Leads passed to sales will contain errors including contacts not at companies (not evaluated by Integrate but contacts decay at a 25% rate per annum), and bad firmographics resulting in wasted time, incorrect routing,  inaccurate lead qualification, and poor messaging.  Furthermore, initiatives such as account based marketing (ABM), account based sales development (ABSD), and predictive analytics will stall if they are fueled by bad data.

Data Quality Isn’t Glamorous — Now Get over It

The Data Health Scan Report is one of the Optimized Customer Data Services.
A Data Quality report is an excellent way to start a data quality program.  It helps with sizing the problem and providing an initial remediation cost.

Unfortunately, data quality is a boring topic. No new CMO has ever joined a company and said, “First, let’s perform a merge/purge on our account and contact records, standardize the fields, and enrich the records.” (OK, I’m being hyperbolic, there may have been a few). No, they want a shiny new marketing automation platform, new branding, and an advertising campaign that gets the company noticed.

Sadly, there is little glory in improving your marketing database — unless, of course, you want to improve your lead nurturing, scoring, segmentation, routing, and sales ready lead quality.

Quality is generally seen as a cost center but it can just as easily be viewed as a cost saver. Bad quality erodes your marketing effectiveness, hurts your brand, kicks the knees out from under your nascent big data experiments, and demoralizes sales reps. A bad company or contact record is like a virus propagated from system to system raising the cost over time.

Furthermore, how can you think about predictive analytics when your databases are rife with bad, incomplete, and out of date records?

Bad data isn’t simply a mistyped address. It’s also:

  • Missing lead firmographics making it difficult to nurture, score, route, and qualify leads.
  • Invalid emails that hurt your deliverability scores and decrease the likelihood your messages will be delivered to inboxes instead of spam folders.
  • Junk fields on web forms because the individual didn’t want to fill out a dozen fields to read your whitepaper.
  • Large gaps in your segmentation analysis labeled UNKNOWN.
  • Hosting costs for storing out of date and duplicate data.
  • Leads with missing linkage that were held for nurture because the marketing automation system didn’t know the location was a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company.
  • Poor marketing messaging and targeting that tell the recipient that you know nothing about their business, job function, industry, or company size.

Finally, bad lead quality incentivizes sales reps to ignore leads because marketing never seems to send the “Glengarry” leads. Instead, they become demoralized as they call invalid phone numbers or find that the contact “doesn’t work here anymore”.

Henry Schuck, CEO of DiscoverOrg, describes the situation well:

Sifting through crappy leads as a sales person is incredibly demoralizing. Their commission – which often translates into their ability to save for their family’s future, have disposable income or cover their mortgage and car payments – depends on them being able to close business. Their ability to close business, in turn, depends solely on their ability to find, set appointments with, and CLOSE new opportunities. If the leads provided by your company will not help them do that – how does that feel? They just moved companies to come work for you and their future is uncertain, at best.

So look at data quality holistically. Address it at the front end in your call centers and web forms and then enrich and maintain your database over time. As contact records decay at a 25% rate per annum you need to view data quality as an ongoing process, not simply an annual refresh (which is more than many companies even do).

So by flipping your perspective, it is easy to find myriad tangible benefits which justify the cost of data quality programs. It may not lead to glory, but by recognizing the distributed costs of bad data and then remediating them, you can generate significant ROI.

Photo Credit: Data Hygiene report from Dun & Bradstreet NetProspex Workbench

Radius: Bad Data Is a “Rotten Ingredient”

640px-rotten_oranges

Stephanie Kong, Product Marketing Manager at Radius, recently compared dirty data to rotten food.  Working with either consumes more expertise and results in sub-par results:

Handing dirty data over to data scientists is tantamount to passing rotten ingredients to a chef and expecting that he/she transform the inputs into a gastronomical masterpiece. In both instances, the quality of the inputs impacts not only the quality of the outcome, it also impacts the experience and efficiency of the professional– how much time can be spent experimenting and applying the artistry for which the professional was hired versus overcoming hurdles to get to a sufficient baseline.

Bottom line: the quality and state of your internal data can impact– and even worse, impede– the ability of even the most talented data scientist to generate breakthrough ideas. Many turnkey data solutions can help you maintain data, even enhancing accuracy and comprehensiveness, in addition to extracting insights. It’s not simply a means of “killing two birds with one stone”; accurate and complete data is a critical first step. In other words– and without being too macabre– good data is the essential and necessary “first kill.”

Marketers are becoming more strategic in their approach to data as they realize the limitations and costs of poor data.  Predictive Analytics systems are only as good as your underlying data.  Bad data is simply noise (or as Kong would call it, “rotten ingredients”) that obscures the underlying signal.  Without accurate data, how can you expect your predictive systems to give you anything more than random nonsense?

Likewise, the shift to Account Based Marketing requires strong firmographics for identifying the companies you wish to target.  Furthermore, strong linkage is necessary for targeting subsidiaries and branches.  Whether you are extending an MSA or looking to establish a beachhead, you need a holistic view of the organization across industries, regions, and job functions.  You also need an accurate set of contacts spanning all functions, levels, and locations.

When evaluating B2B content vendors offering predictive or DaaS solutions, ask about their

  • Data Processes: Data sourcing, update cycles, verification and validation, feedback processes
  • Hygiene Services: Do they offer email, phone, and address verification, field standardization, deduplication
  • Matching Capabilities: Is it a direct match or probabilistic match based upon multiple fields? Are fields standardized prior to matching? Is the focus on company or contact matching?
  • Connectors / Integrations: CRM, MAP, DaaS cloud, API, etc.
  • Ongoing Data Refreshes: Frequency, Cost, Level of Automation
  • Contact Coverage: Emails, direct dials, functions, levels, bios,
  • Company Data: Scope, depth, firmographic fill rates, identifiers, linkage, etc.
  • Other Data: Intent data, technology platforms, business signals, etc.

Data quality is a strategic asset so your content and technology partners need to be thoroughly vetted.  It is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each offering during both the vendor selection and implementation stages.  Otherwise, you may only partially address your “rotten ingredients” problem.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

FreePint: The Value Add from Company Aggregators

GBBChris Porter, who writes many of the company intelligence vendors profiles for FreePint, recently ran a research study where he conducted half his research using an unnamed subscription aggregator and half using the open web.  While he gave the edge to the aggregator, the margin was not as wide as he’d anticipated.  Porter commented that it’s “not time to cancel that subscription just yet – but worth keeping an eye on.”

Porter found that the free web was able to provide much of his project’s content, particularly for US publics.  However, the paid service made information discovery quicker and easier.

For private companies, he found that neither fully met his research needs so a combination of open web and aggregator service worked best.

Porter confessed that his subscription service lacked annual and interim reports which would have made his research easier.  These reports are available in some of the other aggregator services.

Porter was unhappy with the Reuters Significant Developments report.  “It was not picking up all the major developments I was looking for,” said Porter.  I have had a similar problem with the report as it is limited to material events.  But an event could be important for non-investors without impacting the stock price.  For example, a new VP of Marketing may own product positioning, a significant marketing budget,  and demand generation.  Likewise, the company may have announced a significant improvement to a struggling product line.  Such events may not move the stock price, but they are highly relevant to competitors, customers, partners, and vendors.

Where I have found the Significant Developments report useful is in looking at specific topics such as M&A or Litigation going back fifteen years for US publics and about ten years for international quoted companies.  Being able to quickly filter to a topic provides insights such as whether the pace of M&A activity has changed or whether the nature of the acquisitions has evolved.  It can also be quite useful for locating a historical event such as when a joint venture was launched.  Oftentimes, these are  difficult to discover as they are based upon vague information.

Aggregators bring together tools not available on the open web such as full family trees, prospecting lists, sales triggers, market research reports, executives with contact information, and SWOTs.  They also have advantages in downloading financials, researching European private company financials, locating earnings transcripts, identifying competitors, presenting analyst research, and downloading PDF profiles of companies or full-text news stories about companies.

As a competitive intelligence analyst and market researcher, I use both subscription services and the free web for company research.  I would never research a company without visiting its website.  If public, I will also visit the investor site for presentations, Corporate Social Responsibility reports, and other material they make available to their shareholders.  Likewise, I head straight to LinkedIn for researching individuals.  But if I want to understand the company structure, analyze its financials, or reach out to individuals at the firm, then aggregators can make a big difference.

Image: Global Business Browser from Avention.

From Data Science to Data Strategy

InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti offered three marketing themes for 2016.  The first two, Sales and Marketing Alignment and Data Driven Messaging and Targeting, have been well discussed over the past few years.  It has long been clear that sales and marketing need to work together and that data should be driving the marketing function.  The new idea for 2016 is the elevation of the data scientist into a strategic position in the company.  According to Milletti:

If 2015 was the year of the data scientist, then 2016 will be the year of the data strategist.

We’re in an explosion of sales and marketing technology, and every system relies on data. The more data you have, the more important your ability to update and sync that data becomes. Companies are consolidating systems and that is driving the need to implement a strategy for customer data that resides in multiple places. Otherwise, you get silos of customer information.

Good data strategy considers the flow of information, the accuracy of the data, and the consistency of the data. To do that well requires someone focused full-time on a company’s strategy for their data.

This is why the title “Chief Data Officer” seems to be more popular with search frequency trebling over the past three years on Google Trends:

GT
Google Trend for the search term “Chief Data Officer”

Data quality, an element of broader data strategy, is becoming increasingly important.  While the statement “garbage in garbage out” goes back decades, marketers long allowed their databases to go stale.  Many marketing databases are rife with out of date contacts, incomplete or inaccurate firmographics, and undeliverable addresses.  With predictive analytics and big data, the ability of these systems to provide insights is dependent upon the underlying data quality.  Data quality is also required for tying together historical data silos which have employed different standardization rules and identifiers.  Pulling together all these elements requires an enterprise owner of data strategy.

If your company isn’t ready for a broad data strategy, you should at least consider implementing data quality practices in your CRM and Marketing Automation platforms.  Several vendors including ReachForce and NetProspex are developing ongoing data quality solutions that synchronize data across multiple platforms.  These systems verify and standardize global address, validate emails and phones, manage duplicates, and enrich platforms with company firmographics.

Another important feature is web form verification which matches prospect records against their database and performs real-time validation of entered fields.  Not only is data validated at time of entry, but the number of required input fields can be reduced, resulting in a lower web form abandonment rate and higher ROI for your digital marketing investments.

NetProspex Workbench also offers Dun & Bradstreet linkage, D-U-N-S Numbers, emails, direct dials, and tech platform variables (products and vendors).

Although InsideView doesn’t offer lead verification tools (e.g. phone, address, email), it supports match and enrichment for a broader set of CRM and marketing automation platforms.

Keep in mind that data quality not only benefits your marketing though better targeting, segmentation, and lead scoring, but it also provides value to your sales function.  By infusing leads with broad firmographics and linkage, you are more likely to be passing actionable leads to your sales team and routing them to the correct sales reps.  Furthermore, when leads are mapped to sales intelligence platforms, reps can quickly qualify them and begin planning account messaging.

Workbench-Deliverable-website-450x280
The NetProspex Workbench Data HealthScan report provides a free PDF detailing pre and post enrichment field population rates, data error rates, and segmentation reports.

InsideView, NetProspex, and ReachForce are all cloud based solutions with low barriers to adoption.  They also include data health analyses, segmentation reports, and integrated prospecting as part of their feature set.  So even if you cannot implement a global data strategy across your enterprise, sales and marketing can begin by focusing on a solution which improves the quality of their leads, contacts, and accounts.

GIGO: Did We Lose on Price Again?

Loss Reason

Steve Silver, a Research Assistant at Sirius Decisions, recently blogged about a client where the overwhelming reason for losing deals was price.  But the client had a differentiated service where price should not have been the primary factor.

Silver discovered the reasons for this anomaly:  The field was not used by any departments at the firm.  Without an owner, the path of least resistance was selected — the first choice in the picklist.  And in the case of the client, 90% of the losses were flagged as price-based.

Did we establish value?

Silver omitted a third reason, and one which is common amongst sales reps.  Price is an easy scapegoat for lost opportunities.  But if your service is well differentiated and you focus on your value proposition, price should not be the primary loss driver.  Yes, some deals will be lost because a competitor low balls the deal (a true price loss), or the prospect simply does not have the financial means to purchase your service (a poorly qualified prospect), but in most cases, losing on price is a failure on the part of sales reps.  If they thought about it more, they would realize that price is not an exogenous variable outside of their control.  That’s because price is tied to value.  Price is the critical variable if your value has not been established.

This isn’t to say that pricing could be wrong.  If your competitors are quickly moving up the value curve, your historical price may no longer be sustainable as you become less well differentiated.  With good data and analytics, you would capture this shift in the competitive marketplace and act accordingly (e.g. R&D to better differentiate your service, better product bundling, or reduced prices), but price should only dominate the loss reasons in a commodity business.

GIGO

So what else could be gleaned from this situation?  First, somebody needs to own data quality within the CRM.  If a field is viewed as busywork, your sales reps will populate it with junk data.

Garbage in, Garbage out.

Managers should also be pushing back on reps to better understand why deals were lost so that mistakes can be avoided in the future.  Does the sales rep need additional training or coaching?  Are additional sales tools needed for competitor handling or establishing value?  Are we poorly qualifying opportunities or failing to identify the key decision makers?

Yes, it is easier to move onto the next deal without taking the time to analyze deal losses; but a learning organization needs to understand its failure points.

Sales Operations

Sales Operations should be cross-checking fields.  If the loss reason is price or features, then a competitor had a better offering.  Was the primary competitor recorded in the CRM?  If the competitor is blank, then additional explanation should be required.  Did you really lose on price or features if you don’t know who the competitor was?

Or did you lose to no decision or the incumbent because there was insufficient value established to warrant funding the purchase or sustaining the switching costs?

If you don’t collect the data or you allow a field to be treated as busywork, it won’t be available for analysis.  I have had several instances where my clients did not record the loss reason or the competitors.  I have also had others where the fields were usually blank.  In short, the firms were operating in a competitive fog and not using their CRM for market monitoring.

In the end, it is important to not only gather win/loss information, but to use the data for sales training and coaching, marketing communications, sales enablement, and product development.  When information is valued by the organization, then sales reps are less likely to blithely skip fields or enter the first field in the required picklist.

Eliciting Objections

Quote

In a blog, Sales Consultant Tanja Parsley recommends eliciting objections from your prospects. Parsley argues that “objections are not barriers or obstacles – they are clues to understanding client needs.”

While this seems counterintuitive, it makes a lot of sense. Your customers and prospects have concerns. Pretending that they don’t is simply wishful thinking.

Parsley recommends the following phrasing for eliciting objections:

“If there was one thing that might get in the way of moving forward with us what might that be?”

Her wording is positive and contains the assumption that you will be closing the deal (“moving forward with us”). Furthermore, it asks for the primary objection, not a list of minor nits. This phrasing allows you to focus on their top concern instead of giving them a reason to dump on your product or service.

So what are the benefits of eliciting objections?

  • It provides you with an opportunity to address their main concern. It may be that the concern is an area you’ve failed to address during your previous meetings. In that case, you can work to ameliorate their concerns.
  • It highlights a potential pain that your firm may be in a position to address. Perhaps they need strong SLA wording or additional support services. Maybe they are concerned about a gap in your product features that will be resolved in the coming months. Unless you know about their concerns, you can’t address them.
  • The concern may be a landmine left by one of your competitors. Based on the wording, it could give you a clue about an unknown competitor or provide you with the opportunity to leave behind a few of your own traps. Keep in mind that you can only defuse the landmines that you spot.
  • You come across as forthright and willing to solicit uncomfortable questions. This puts you in a stronger position for addressing the concern as you are not caught off guard at an inopportune moment.
  • It provides you with a more realistic assessment of the probability of closing or potential delays in the decision making process. Your pipeline forecasts will be more accurate and you won’t be caught with egg on your face when your 80% probability of closing opportunity is won by your competition. It also provides an early warning of potential signing delays.

So, given all of these benefits, why wouldn’t you ask about objections? I think it comes down to simple human nature. Asking about objections makes us vulnerable. But it is through honest discussions that we gain the most.