- Independently, sales organizations are trained on sales process disciplines, marketing organizations invest into market awareness campaigns and product management adopts product management frameworks. However, sales organizations rarely diagnose their sales cycle performance, marketing conducts clever campaigns based upon internal market beliefs, and product management continues to develop non-differentiated solutions. All three organizations rarely synergize efforts and, even if synergistic efforts are conducted, they are usually based upon customer needs and not the needs of the prospect or the recent evaluators of current products.
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The key to sales, marketing and product management success is buyer alignment. More importantly, buyer alignment is the critical foundation of any market-driven philosophy. The primary benefits of an iterative buyer alignment initiative are:
- Sales organizations improve sales performance;
- Product management validates company and solution differentiation;
- Product marketing articulates a common market message.
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However, without tools or training, none of these benefits can be achieved and organizations are doomed to deliver average non-differentiated products, services and sales cycles. Moreover, without a continual and synergistic corporate-wide initiative to understand prospective buyer’s perceptions, all organizations will fail to fulfill the competitive advantage of buyer alignment.
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Sales Cycle Analytics, Inc. (SCAI) has the education and tools to instill a culture of buyer alignment and the knowledge to ensure that an iterative process is adopted that will always maintain alignment between your solutions and your buyer’s needs and processes. SCAI’s one-day Buyer Alignment Training and Workshop will align your organization’s solutions, sales process and differentiated message with your buyer’s needs, evaluation processes, and perceptions.
- To review the classroom objectives and to understand the specific training benefits to you, please select one of the following organizations that best parallels your responsibilities:
- You are probably one of the many frustrated Product Managers who can’t seem to extract “actionable” results from its market-based research. Don’t feel alone because 80% of worldwide organizations do not have a continual process with their prospects to extract buyer perception of their products, services or solutions. Only the enlightened organizations who value the “voice” of the prospect invest into buyer alignment initiatives to diagnose, align and outperform their competition. Furthermore, these outperforming organizations understand that the “voice” of the buyer is not exclusive to just the sales organization.
The smartest man of our times, Albert Einstein, said, “The significant problems we have cannot be resolved by the same level of thinking with which created it.” Therefore, can the sales organization be relied upon to realistically diagnose why your products and services win or lose competitive opportunities? The answer is clear: Product management must lead market-driven initiatives by understanding the buyer’s needs, decision process and perception in order to deliver solutions that resonate with their prospective market. In other words, product management must become the “voice” of the prospect and the validated buyer knowledge must be used to train the sales organization to better position and differentiate solutions. Otherwise, product management will be indentured to produce products and services that are contractually committed by the sales organization in order to secure one particular customer requirement. Remember, reactionary sales-driven development ignores the entire market needs and the derived benefits of market-driven initiatives.
- Sales Cycle Analytics, Inc. (SCAI) believes that “actionable” results cannot be valid if the conclusions are generated from inside of any organization. The CEO of Pragmatic Marketing, Inc., Craig Stull, states, “Your opinion, however interesting, does not matter.” Therefore, internal beliefs must always be substituted with “outside-in” market validation. Yet, market validation is not easy and few organizations possess the discipline, resources or executive commitment to fulfill its performance gains.
- To be the “voice” of the buyer and to lead your company’s market-driven initiatives you must acquire the tools and skills to extract, deploy and measure buyer alignment. SCAI believes that the discipline of post-decision interviews is non-discretionary to align with buyers. Furthermore, if carefully executed, this discipline holds the key to market perception of your and your competitor’s solutions, differentiation and performance. If you are serious about becoming the voice of the buyer, leading corporate market-driven initiatives and authoring actionable “outside-in” knowledge to better position your solutions, SCAI offers a unique educational forum to enable the necessary tools and skills to extract, deploy and measure buyer alignment. SCAI’s Buyer Alignment Training and Workshop is a one-day event designed to mentor corporations preferring to internally learn how to mine prospect knowledge from post-decision interviews rather than outsource this imperative market-driven process. As such, this workshop is an essential companion education to any product management framework that your organization may have adopted. Using SCAI’s trademarked buyer alignment model, participants will be trained to self-diagnose, measure, and verify performance, messaging and competitive differentiation required for all of today’s product management frameworks. Participants will leave the workshop with a workable post-decision interview template that will extract actionable buyer knowledge. Participants are also left with an iterative buy-side validation process so that your organization has a continual monitor of its solution’s positioning performance. Once the interview process is mastered, SCAI trains our clients to transform all corporate, sales, and marketing (product and communication) assets into a common and centralized “message.” Specifically, the one-day Buyer Alignment Training and Workshop will teach participants how to:
- Extract “actionable” quarterly results using the buyer alignment discipline;
- Realize the benefits and systemic value of buyer alignment initiatives;
- Quantify market perception by adopting a prospect post-decision discipline;
- Diagnose your sales cycle performance;
Improve your internal sales and marketing message alignment; - Articulate your differentiation in a sales positioning story;
- Understand “buyer personas;”
- Align your sales process with your buyer’s evaluation process;
- Centralize corporate assets into a common market message;
- Draft a post-decision interview (Win/Loss Analysis) template;
- Conduct post-decision interviews (Win/Loss Analysis).
- You are probably one of the 60% of worldwide organizations who have invested into one of the many solution-centric selling processes (e.g., Value Selling, Solution Selling, CustomerCentric Selling, PowerBase Selling). If so, you must wonder:
- How can we diagnose our sales performance?
- How can we validate our market and product messaging?
- How can we verify our competitive differentiation?
- How can we ensure that our sales process is aligned with the buyer process?
- Solution-centric selling processes require, but, do not provide: Performance diagnosis; Articulation of your competitive differentiation; Common and appropriate messaging to the right buyers; Understanding of the buyer needs or mapping of your solution to those needs. Remarkably, only 20% of the organizations who have invested into a selling process have aligned their sales training investment with the customer’s buying activities. Without a diagnostic process, sales cycles fall short and organizations wonder why. Is it no surprise that when asked why an opportunity was lost, sales representatives falsely point to price, product shortcomings or lateness to the sales process? Furthermore, three (3) out of four (4) sales training initiatives fail to return its investment because they do not have a continual (win/loss analysis) buyer alignment process with their prospects to extract buyer perception or sales cycle performance.
- Sales process training vendors believe that “alignment” is between an individual qualified prospect and a vendor’s selling objectives during a single sales opportunity. In reality, diagnosing buyer alignment is not a single opportunity event. Instead, it focuses on aligning validated industry-wide prospect perception to an organization-wide sales message that matches buyer needs. This industry-specific alignment is best achieved by committing to and engaging, monitoring and measuring an iterative and corporate-wide buyer alignment process.
- Sales Cycle Analytics, Inc. (SCAI) believes that post-decision interviews are fundamental and non-discretionary because, if carefully executed, they hold the key to market perception of your and your competitor’s solutions, differentiation and performance (sales, brand and marketing). If you are serious about selling solutions, SCAI offers a unique companion educational forum for all sales process methodologies. The Buyer Alignment Training and Workshop is a one-day event designed to mentor corporations preferring to internally learn how to mine prospect knowledge from post-decision interviews rather than outsource this essential process. Using SCAI’s trademarked buyer alignment model, you will be trained to self-diagnose, measure, and verify your sales cycle performance, messaging and competitive differentiation imperative to all of today’s selling environments. Participants will leave the workshop with a workable post-decision interview template that will extract actionable buyer knowledge. Attendees are also trained on an iterative buy-side validation process so that your organization has a continual monitor of its sales cycle performance. Once the interview process is mastered, SCAI trains our clients to transform all corporate, sales, and marketing (product and communication) assets into a common and centralized “message.” Specifically, the one-day Buyer Alignment Training and Workshop will teach you how to:
- Extract “actionable” quarterly results using the buyer alignment discipline;
- Realize the benefits and systemic value of buyer alignment initiatives;
- Quantify market perception by adopting a prospect post-decision discipline;
- Diagnose your sales cycle performance;
- Improve your internal sales and marketing message alignment;
- Articulate your differentiation in a sales positioning story;
- Understand “buyer personas;”
- Align your sales process with your buyer’s evaluation process;
- Centralize corporate assets into a common market message;
- Draft a post-decision interview (Win/Loss Analysis) template;
- Conduct post-decision interviews (Win/Loss Analysis).
- You are probably one of the many marketing managers tasked with articulating market messages that resonate with buyers. Yet, forums are hard to find that enable understanding of the buyer’s needs or the problems that your products and services resolve. Of course, customers are readily accessible, but they possess only current product ideas in context to the specific enhancements they want to see. Unfortunately, this perspective leaves a void when articulating differentiation of your solution or company by leaving the majority of the prospective customer market unrepresented. Therefore, lacking logic, product marketers have little option but to rely upon conjecture, best-guess or clever messaging when assembling a market message that they hope will resonate with prospective buyers. If this seems familiar, you must wonder:
- What buyer needs and problems do our solutions solve?
- How can we instill logic when articulating our solution’s differentiation?
- How can appropriate buyer messaging be validated?
- How can sales and marketing align with a common message?
- Real differentiation positions a solution to run a race that only it can win as opposed to being operationally more, or less, effective than the competition’s solution. Corporate differentiators are “owned” attributes that are embedded into an organization’s DNA (e.g., innovation, integrity, flexibility, professionalism). The only way to validate solution or corporate differentiation is by engaging recent evaluators in a post-decision interview to extract relevant process, perception, and performance ratings.
- Corporate messaging assets, or DNA, reside in many places (e.g., marketing, branding, sales, product management, customer training). This “silo” responsibility matrix is common, yet is the cause of disparate and autonomous messages that communicate differing goals. An organization-wide discipline must be adopted to internally align common messaging prior to externally aligning with your buyers. Yet, messaging cannot be valid if its foundation is incubated from inside of any organization. The CEO of Pragmatic Marketing, Inc., Craig Stull, states, “Your opinion, however interesting, does not matter.” Therefore, internal beliefs must always be substituted with “outside-in” market validation. The obstacle is that market validation is not easy and few organizations possess the discipline, resources or executive commitment to fulfill its performance gains.
- To understand buyer needs, quantify logic-based messaging and validate differentiation (corporate and solution), you must acquire the tools and skills to extract, deploy and measure “outside-in” buyer alignment. SCAI believes that the discipline of post-decision interviews is non-discretionary to align with your buyers. Furthermore, if carefully executed, this discipline holds the key to market perception of your and your competitor’s solutions, differentiation and performance. If you are serious about understanding your buyer, quantifying logic-based messaging and validating differentiation to better position your solutions, SCAI offers a unique educational forum to enable the necessary tools and skills to extract, deploy and measure buyer alignment. The Buyer Alignment Training and Workshop is a one-day event designed to mentor corporations preferring to internally learn how to mine prospect knowledge from post-decision interviews rather than outsource this imperative market-driven process. As such, this workshop is an essential companion training class to any product marketing framework that your organization may have adopted. Using SCAI’s trademarked buyer alignment model, participants will be trained to self-diagnose, measure, and verify performance, messaging and competitive differentiation required for today’s product marketing frameworks. Participants will leave the workshop with a workable post-decision interview template that will extract actionable buyer knowledge. Attendees are trained on an iterative buy-side validation process so that your organization has a continual monitor of its solution’s positioning. Once the collection process is mastered, SCAI trains our clients to transform all corporate, sales, and marketing (product and communication) assets into a common and centralized “message.” Specifically, the one-day Buyer Alignment Training and Workshop will teach participants how to:
- Extract “actionable” quarterly results using the buyer alignment discipline;
- Realize the benefits and systemic value of buyer alignment initiatives;
- Quantify market perception by adopting a prospect post-decision discipline;
- Diagnose your sales cycle performance;
- Improve your internal sales and marketing message alignment;
- Articulate your differentiation in a sales positioning story;
- Understand “buyer personas;”
- Align your sales process with your buyer’s evaluation process;
- Centralize corporate assets into a common market message;
- Draft a post-decision interview (Win/Loss Analysis) template;
- Conduct post-decision interviews (Win/Loss Analysis).
Perception Analysis
