- Imagine being in one of your many company planning meetings to discuss prioritizing solution enhancements or an impending launch. Is most of the participant buyer-based input initiated from that of an inside-out (e.g., contractual sales obligations, internal opinion, developer imagination) viewpoint? What would happen if you stood up and said, "The prospects that I interviewed believe …" during the meeting? Would the attendees become silent and accept any buyer-based knowledge as meaningful validation of the optimal direction? You bet!
- So, why is it that only 1 out of 5 organizations conduct prospect post-decision interviews (win/loss analysis) with any kind of discipline or regularity? Furthermore, even if an organization does conduct win/loss analysis: the sales department defensively conducts the interviews; little expertise exists regarding how to extract “actionable” knowledge; and metrics are excluded that could monitor sales channel positioning.
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Still, organizations turn to product managers to understand its buyer needs and turn to product marketing to articulate how its solutions resolve those needs. Unfortunately, most product management is ill-equipped to harvest prospect-driven knowledge or to become the catalyst of organizational change.
For example, in most companies, when sales performance weakens:- Marketing management turns to client satisfaction ratings to point the finger at the product misgivings or the sales channel’s inability to position properly;
- Product management wonders why the sales channel can’t sell a product that should sell itself;
- Sales management turns to self-serving win/loss interview results to point the finger at the product, price or marketing misgivings;
The objective reality is that weakened sales performance means:- Marketing management hasn’t articulated a consistent message to the market or a message that the sales channel can position with confidence;
- Product management hasn’t validated the evolving differentiation of its product(s) or service(s);
- Sales management hasn’t trained its salesforce to articulate its competitive differentiation, successfully position its solutions or how to monitor its performance.
- Do you know how to fix this? Product management must take the leading role when transitioning from a customer-driven company to that of a market-driven company. To extract market-driven data, product management must align with more than their customer base in order to diagnose positioning processes (sales cycle, buyer evaluation), validate differentiation (company and solution) and to align market messaging (internal and external).
- This is your opportunity. Most organizations only listen to current customers (a small percentage of the market) to gain their future positioning and new solution needs. Yet, customers are ill-equipped to assist with anything other than opinions of their existing solutions. Instead, organizations should be in tune with prospective buyers and evaluators. For this reason, new instruments and practices are required to align with prospects evaluating your solutions and prospects that have yet to be exposed to your solutions.
- Aligning with prospective buyers or evaluators is not easy because many internal issues stand in the way. The top 8 reasons given for buyer misalignment by product and marketing management are:
- Management won’t make win/loss analysis a priority;
- No “actionable” results are extracted from existing win/loss analysis efforts;
- Blueprints to enable transitioning to a “market-driven” company are nonexistent;
- Sales channels don’t understand how buyers buy;
- Sales channels can’t quantify the real reasons why it wins or loses opportunities;
- Real solution and company differentiation is not externally validated;
- The sales department owns the only “voice” of the prospect;
- Marketing doesn’t understand what messages resonate with its prospect base.
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In order to become a market-driven company, all eight reasons for buyer misalignment must be overcome. The secret to overcoming each of the misalignment reasons is to instill a continual process to interview product/service evaluators. Logically, evaluators can only be interviewed at the conclusion of a sales cycle, so we believe that a sales cycle is not complete until the prospect’s post-decision interview is conducted. Therefore, to fulfill the promise of a true market-driven company, you must acquire the skills to align and maintain your sales process and solutions with your buyer’s perception of their needs and evaluation process.
You are invited to join a unique membership for individuals who have the responsibility for buyer and market-based alignment within their organizations. Whether you are a Product Manager, Marketing Director, Product Line Director, Marketing Communications Director, Sales Support Manager or sales enablement professional, you need to be involved with this one-of-a-kind educational forum. Specifically, this unique advisory service provides models, tools, and templates to better align you with your buyer’s needs. What’s more, this service is delivered in a safe format to enable learning and creation of real “actionable” results so that you can impact “market-driven” organizational change.
All Buyer Alignment Advisory Service members will receive:
- Topic-of-the-Month (TOM) Presentations including: Branding, Win/Loss Analysis, Aligning Sales & Marketing Messaging, Verifying your Differentiation, The Importance of Knowing your Attributes, Aligning Sales & Marketing Strategies with Prospect Perception, Value Mapping, Creating a DNA Ecosystem, Performance Diagnosis;
- Discussion Forum for logging questions, sharing and receiving advice;
- Library of prior recorded presentations and “guru” interviews (e.g., Win/Loss Analysis, Research Methodologies, Solution Selling, Value Selling, ValueMapping, Serious Gaming);
- Templates for conducting successful win/loss analysis;
- Buyer alignment Tools;
- Periodic Newsletter with original and guest articles to maximize buyer alignment;
- Optional: Coaching Teleconferences available in two hour increments ($500);
- Negotiated Member-only pricing on essential sales, marketing and business development content such as educational eBooks, videos and audio products.
Individuals, not just companies that fund training, are invited to join the Buyer Alignment Advisory Service because we want all business stakeholders to have the common tools to align with their buyers. Clients annually pay $20,000+ for common advisory services offered by research companies, such as Gartner Group and Forrester Research. However, the Buyer Alignment Advisory Service membership is 1/20th of the price charged by a single service from such advisory services.
To fulfill the promise of becoming a market-based company using better buyer alignment tools, product and marketing management members will skillfully master how to:
- Realistically diagnose sales channel positioning and performance
- Verify company and solution differentiation
- Align disparate marketing messages with sales messaging
- Successfully conduct win/loss analysis interviews
- Extract "actionable" results from win/loss analysis efforts
- Discover your unique attributes and how to use them to conduct logic-based campaigns
- Align your sales cycle process with your buyer’s evaluation process
- Map the underlying needs of your clients to your solutions unique value
- Become the unprecedented "voice" of your prospects Leverage market perception into sales improvement
Perception Analysis
