Are You Doing Your Homework?

In a previous blog post, I shared 3 points to help succeed in the current virtual B2B selling environment. Virtual selling isn’t going away and it’s important to embrace and master the keys to succeeding. One thing that seems like Selling 101, but warrants further discussion is ‘doing your homework’. Customers have zero patience for educating you about their business from [...]

Tips for Embracing Remote Selling

The adjustments we have all had to make to the new realities of life in 2020/pandemic times extend, of course, to B2B selling also. I’ve interviewed many B2B buyers this year in my win/loss/churn research project work and thought it would be interesting to compile what I’ve heard and compare to what others are saying about what is different when selling [...]

Top 5 Ways to Close More Deals

As we approach our 20th anniversary of providing research support to companies, I recently stopped to think about what common themes I’ve seen across the hundreds of win/loss interviews I’ve done.  This information can help you benchmark your own company against these attributes that customers across all of my clients find most important and use as key criteria when choosing a [...]

Why Do Some Companies Avoid Research Like the Plague?

In a previous post about obstacles to win loss research, I talked about the fact that some companies just don’t do ANY research. Some of the reasons that companies don’t do research: Don’t trust their customers’ perspectives: Some companies are skeptical about their customers’ ability to be objective/overcome their biases.  Other companies consider their technology/concepts to be beyond their customers’ limited imagination.  [...]

Top Obstacles to Win Loss Research

I recently had a great conversation with a client who is championing win/loss research at his company and we explored win loss analysis: what is it, why do it, what are the obstacles, how to overcome them, and more. Win loss analysis is one of the lowest hanging fruit for organizations, providing a relatively easy and quick way to get invaluable [...]

Focus More to Shorten Sales Cycles

Long sales cycles are a major headache for most companies that are selling B2B solutions.  Customers have complicated evaluation and approval processes, spend significant time evaluating multiple solutions to reduce their risk, and sometimes just go ‘dark’ midway through the process.  This phenomenon drives higher selling costs and can also result in lower win rates.

Why CRM Implementations Fail: The Top Ten Killers

Submitted by guest blogger, Reuven Shelef, President of OUT OF THE BOX Consulting CRM solutions make big promises. Implement one well, and you’ll increase sales, improve support, and create loyal customers almost overnight. As a Salesforce Cloud Alliance Partner, I know that’s not universally the case. Over the years, I’ve become familiar with what can cause a deployment to work well, [...]

Understanding “Big Data”: What About Good Old Fashioned Customer Research?

Understanding your customers’ needs and wants and getting inside their heads about what challenges they face so you can figure out how to be invaluable to them is hugely important to business success. This information is data, regardless of how you GET that data. Conducting your own surveys, interviewing your customers, or buying syndicated market data. Plain and simple, it’s just data.