Why? Why did a prospect decide to buy from one vendor instead of another? Tools like Salesforce can give you insights into the sequence of meetings, emails, and phone calls between your sales team and a prospect. It can even record the reason why a deal was marked closed-won versus closed-lost (Budget, Price, etc.) Yet, […]
Things are different now than they were a few months ago and it has become quite the cliché. Nevertheless, things are different in life and in business. We are all learning to adapt. As things settle into a new normal, remember that our markets are settling into a new normal too. Remember Precedented Times? McKinsey’s […]
Win-Loss Analysis is a technique that leverages qualitative interviews with organizations that decided to purchase or not purchase a solution from your company. Effective Win-Loss Analysis programs can identify insights that you can leverage to improve the success of your marketing and sales efforts. Most people think Win-Loss Analysis just focuses on the end result […]
Competitive intelligence is a skill every product manager should have in their toolbox. There is no excuse for not leveraging competitive intelligence that is freely available on the Internet. Building a baseline competitive intelligence profile takes less than 30 minutes. Facts like these can help separate the myth from reality of a competitor’s true capabilities. […]
The best solution is to talk to your prospects and customers yourself. “67% of the buyer’s journey is completed digitally before ever contacting sales” is one of the worst Internet marketing myths out there. The stat is attributed to Sirius Decisions, a research, sales and marketing consultancy that originally published it in 2013. An example […]
Buyer and User Personas are a staple of contemporary SaaS product management and marketing. Personas are tools that simplify complexity for marketers, sales professionals, and developers. There is a lot of advice on the Internet on how to build personas – Google conveniently lists 68,900,000 links to help you. Qualitative in-depth interviews are critical to […]
A critical aspect of product management, product marketing, and sales is understanding what makes decision makers tick. What is important to them today? What challenges are they having in their business? What is the cost of not having a solution to important problems? Answers to questions like this can have a dramatic impact on product […]
As you may know, Win-Loss Analysis is a market research technique companies can use to discover key learnings from customers and prospects. These learnings can then drive improvements in marketing and sales, resulting in more revenue and profits. Most contemporary product management methodologies (Quartz Open Framework, Pragmatic Marketing, 280 Group, and Blackblot) all recommend that companies institutionalize […]
Market research is a core skill for product managers. Artifacts like product requirements, competitive landscapes, and positioning all require some type of research. Regrettably most product managers only leverage their intuition and secondary research sources like websites. Product managers should conduct more primary research to support their work with actual market facts instead of assumptions […]
Win-Loss Interviews are a market research technique designed to learn market facts from customers and prospects. When you Google ‘Win-Loss Interview Questions’ there are over 77,900,000 results. We have found from years of experience conducting Win-Loss Analysis projects that there are some questions you should always ask. The question set you use needs to be […]
