Business intelligence or “BI” as it is often referred to, is a current hot topic in the business world. Much of the discussion that has taken place around business intelligence has focused more on the technical aspects of BI such as analysis and interpretation of data. Scores of technology companies have jumped on the bandwagon promoting their cutting edge products for data extraction, analysis and compilation of BI. There is no shortage of new technology product announcements promising to be an answer to all your business intelligence needs. So what is BI and how can it provide competitive advantage in selling your products or services?
Lets take these questions one at a time. In essence, BI can be defined as any meaningful data that assists a business to better compete in the marketplace against their competitors. BI can be acquired in many ways such as through customer surveys, marketing studies, analysis of market transactional data including competitor activities, consumer buying habits, demographics and consumer preferences, to mention a few. One often overlooked opportunity to acquire BI lies within your sales process itself, specifically your sales people -those individuals that interact directly with your customers and prospects. The old adage-“people buy from people” has a lot of truth to it. I like to take that saying one step further -“people make a decision to buy or select a specific supplier in part to satisfy their personal needs -whether that need is to avoid the risk of doing business with a new unproven supplier, to establish a reputation for being innovative or to simply satisfy their boss. Regardless of the motivation, the point is that business transactions are influenced by the personality of buyers and sellers.
From a selling perspective, a good example of how individual personalities can influence a buying decision that comes to mind is in trying to gain a sponsor -an individual within a prospective account where you and your company have no track record of business. A sponsor has to be willing to champion your products or services as solutions for a problem their company wants to solve. Some personality types are better suited than others to assuming this role -it usually requires a personality willing to take a reasonable business risk and someone who possesses a bias for innovation and action -to go against the current thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to profile the buyers and prospective buyers your sales people interact with every day and to focus your selling efforts on those individuals that are interested in new ideas, innovative approaches to solving problems or are at least willing to look at alternatives to their current supply situation? This is where mining business intelligence from your sales force activities can pay big dividends.
At its core, all business transactions, regardless of the complexity of the selling environment, sales cycle or product complexity, can be broken down into individual component relationships between people – a buyer or decision maker on the customer side and a sales representative on the sellers side. Take a closer look at these individual person-to-person business relationships – there are very valuable bits of business intelligence data to be gleamed from these relationships that can be compiled into meaningful profiles of buyer and consumer behavior.
The first step in defining the attributes you want to track and compile is to analyze your current selling process and your approach to differentiating your offerings from your competitors. Start by thinking about your products, services and your entire business organization as a total package sale. In other words, you must adopt the mindset that every operation within your organization can impact the selling process -for better or worse. Now, consider how your products or services can be positioned as solutions to needs. What are your competitive advantages other than price? What are the strengths of your organization overall? Perhaps your organization has a world-class customer service operation that processes customer requests for product information efficiently. Customers may place a premium on suppliers that can provide product data as efficiently as they provide the product itself. Unfortunately producing a competitively priced quality product that meets customer delivery requirements no longer assures business growth. The point here is to brainstorm your organizational strengths from your customers’ perspective. This is where your sales force can provide invaluable assistance. It is those individual buyer to seller relationships that can reveal much about why buyers choose your offerings over competitors or the opposite -favoring competitors over you. Your organizational strengths become your value added services and play a major role in differentiating you from your competition.
Once you feel you have at least a rough framework outline of your organizational points of differentiation over competitors and have defined your selling process which should include specifics on how your sales force positions your products or services, the next step is to analyze relationships at the individual buyer level. To help you with this, customized tracking tools can be created and integrated into a database or data mart for on-going analysis and reporting of trends. I have created database tools for use in my own daily selling activities, which allow me to track individual buyer attributes or characteristics. The work you have done to define your value added capabilities will assist you to determine the types of individual buyer attributes that fit your organizational strengths, those you will want to track and compile.
Now start identifying personal attributes of your key buyers or decision makers. Use a personality profile that translates personality traits into specific business related behaviors and actions. For example, you could include an assessment of an individual’s level of risk tolerance relative to making business decisions or whether they are big picture oriented or tend to look at just immediate needs Another behavior could be a buyers propensity for taking a solutions or systems approach to solving business problems. It is also helpful to classify individual contacts by the roll they can play in a buying decision. Are they true decision makers? Do they have the authority to buy? If not, can they influence those that do?
Another interesting BI opportunity lies in tracking the overall customer organization in terms of business philosophy and buying environment. Each organization has its own business culture and buying philosophy. Some organizations encourage creativity and initiative from their workforce. Others stifle their employees. Likewise, some organizations simply want the lowest perceived cost from their suppliers and won’t value anything else in a supplier relationship. Some larger organizations are highly decentralized in their buying practices; each division is responsible for their own supplier base. These are all macro level attributes that can be tracked along with the individual attributes discussed above.
Once you have acquired enough data to give you a statistically significant population, you can start to correlate individual and organizational attributes with actual sales results by account and individual buyer. Some interesting patterns may emerge that might cause you to think differently about the decision making process in general and you may find that some of your assumptions about accounts and prospects have changed. You should also be able to identify the types of buyers that can become your sponsors in an account by understanding what appeals to them in a supplier. This information can become the foundational business intelligence from which to formulate strategic plans for revenue growth and market share increases.
Greg Evershed,
gme5001@yahoo.com
Greg Evershed has over 23 years sales experience in B to B markets. His consulting practice focuses on assisting clients to develop strategic selling plans and selling processes using business intelligence tools.He also conducts customized sales training programs focused on solution and conceptual selling.
