Comments for Cooperative Intelligence

Comment on Six Things you Can Learn from Conducting Win Loss Interviews by Joe Levy

Joe Levy — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:38:23 +0000

Great article- I couldn’t agree more that creating a formal Win-Loss program has immediate and clearCi ROI.

Comment on Six Things you Can Learn from Conducting Win Loss Interviews by Monica

Monica — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:14:38 +0000

Excellent article, Ellen.

Comment on Trick or Tweet: 13 Ways to Alienate Twitter Followers by bestelkado-gadgethouse-1

bestelkado-gadgethouse-1 — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 09:49:44 +0000

Hi! Someone in my Facebook group shared this website with us so I came to give it a look. I’m definitely enjoying the information. I’m book-marking and will be tweeting this to my followers! Terrific blog and amazing design.

Comment on 18 Tippers to Improve Your Telephone Collection Skills by Trip

Trip — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 03:46:09 +0000

http://mbialek.cba.pl/pliki/langer.pdf

Comment on 4 Steps to Plan for Successful Win Loss Interviews by ellendnaylor

ellendnaylor — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:21:04 +0000

I forgot another really important issue. Make sure that the Loss is truly a loss, not a prospect that the sales people can’t reach. In a recent case, I took this for granted and a goodly number of losses were cases when the account rep didn’t get much past the qualifying questions before the customer stopped communicating. These customers aren’t connected enough to your company if they won’t even let you submit a proposal, so they probably aren’t going to have such insightful comments. Well, they might, but they will often be less willing to talk to you, and they don’t really know enough about your product, pricing, professionalism etc. if they closed you out prematurely in the sales process. I would rather invest my time with customers where I won or lost the business, and submitted a proposal, gave a presentation and then the customer decided.

Comment on Questions to Ask Competitive Intelligence Software Providers by Alessandro Comai

Alessandro Comai — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:34:05 +0000

Hello Ellen,

thank you for answering. Please let me know if you need some suggestions about the questions or topics.

Best regards,
Alessandro Comai

Comment on 4 Steps to Plan for Successful Win Loss Interviews by ellendnaylor

ellendnaylor — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:45:06 +0000

This sounds like B to C. I bet they really appreciated the insight that you discovered that they had no idea about. I suggest that you need to call to probe more deeply as to why customers like a certain aspect that prospects hated. I imagine that will render a deeper level of insight as well. Or it could be that they will have to accept a certain level of losses based on that particular aspect, as long as more of the potential and existing customer base likes that aspect, and thus it grows.

My latest is B to B and there is a Sales Rep assigned to each customer that I contact and the sales all happened this year. This a complex sale and takes a while to negotiate. Even so, I find that some are not positioned with the right person, and I have to find the right person, which is easy enough thanks to LinkedIn. Then I ask the junior person if I have located the right decision-maker(s), That’s been my surprise so far, since I would think that in a complex “in-person” sale, where there are proposals and presentations that you would know all the players at the company you are selling to!

Comment on 4 Steps to Plan for Successful Win Loss Interviews by awareci

awareci — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:07:01 +0000

I’ve just completed a win-loss project. One problem was getting contact details and a time to speak to both wins and losses – as our client never dealt with their customers in person or often even on the phone.

They gave us a list of 400 wins and losses – our job was to try and understand why they had more losses than wins. The first step was to send out a win-loss questionnaire (using SurveyMonkey) to all the 400 names. We got a 15% response rate that gave tons of information plus agreement for us to call up and follow-up with around a third of these. The follow-ups gave even more information.

Where we went wrong is that there were areas our client didn’t know about which came out in the interviews. If we’d known this, we’d have added it to the questionnaire – and gathered more conclusive data. As it is, we got a pretty good idea of where some of the problems were. Now the job is for our client to correct those problems – which won’t be easy as some clients (e.g. wins) loved the aspects that others hated (losses). It’s not going to be easy to change the service so that all groups are happy. However that’s not our problem. We gave the intelligence. Now it’s the client’s job to use it.

The lesson is that sometimes there are factors that the client doesn’t know about that you discover during the process. These can be crucial and provide the real intelligence.

Comment on Questions to Ask Competitive Intelligence Software Providers by ellendnaylor

ellendnaylor — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:04:40 +0000

Hi Alessandro,

You’re right: I was focusing on enterprise users since that’s who has the budget to buy CI software solutions. However, I also know a number of enterprise customers who buy a CI software product and then never use it or let it get out of date, since they hadn’t thought how much time and effort it would take to keep it up to date.

I enjoyed your Google study from earlier this summer. The various Google products are a decent source of information searching and monitoring. Interestingly enough I use Bing more often these days for searching as I believe the search results are more relevant than Google.

Thanks for sharing,

Ellen

Comment on Questions to Ask Competitive Intelligence Software Providers by Alessandro Comai

Alessandro Comai — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:18:40 +0000

Hi Ellen,

Thank you very much for the article. It gives an overview of potential issues that companies need to look at. Some of the issues are for big enterprises as well as for SMEs. I would however, consider the 3rd group of users which are individuals who uses intelligence.

Thinking about them, I find that there a grate number of professionals utilize free internet tools. There are so many that is not possible to list all of them. However, looking to the Google tools I came up with dozens of tools applicable to CI. Understanding how these tools are utilized was my objective. The result of a research “Google Tools for CI” I finalized in June 2011 can be downloaded from: http://www.miniera.es/es_resultados_articles.htm

Best regards,
Alessandro Comai