The experience a buyer has with a sales team is one of the top 3 influences for their buying decision.
In a recent win loss interview with a large physician practice who recently selected an EHR system, the buyer's experience with the sales team was one of the top 3 factors that influenced their decision. What did they mention?
Sales Presentation
Understanding Needs
Responsiveness to the Buyer
In two of the three areas mentioned, Understanding needs and Responsiveness, the winning vendor’s sales team outperformed the competitor.
UNDERSTANDING NEEDS
Understanding your buyer's needs is one of the most common complaints we hear from buyers about poor sales team performance. As you can see from the graph above, the winning vendor effectively communicated to the buyer that they understood the buyer's needs compared to the competitor.
How did they do this? First, they took time to listen to the buyer and then they positioned their solution to align with the buyer’s needs. The losing vendor unsuccessfully tried to “push” the buyer in a different direction. The buyer said “We explained [to both vendors] where we were going and what we needed. And the [losing vendor] explained to us what they needed on their end and at one point there was kind of a confusion. They kept trying to push us one direction when we were like “no, no, we already told you in the beginning this is what we needed.”
RESPONSIVENESS
The second way the winning vendor beat the competitor was with their responsiveness to the buyer. Sales executives who respond quickly to buyers build confidence in their solution and their company. In this opportunity, confidence played an important role for the winning vendor because the losing vendor had an advantage among physicians. Many physicians advocated for the purchase of the losing vendor's solution. Usually this is enough to win an EHR opportunity.
However, in this opportunity, the buyer said that the winning vendor was “on it since day one, and so I knew I could shoot him an email or send him a text and he would respond pretty immediately.” Whereas, the losing vendor was more casual in their responsiveness to the buyer. This difference in responsiveness enabled the winning vendor to align more with the buyer and ultimately helped them win this sales opportunity.
SALES EXCELLENCE
The insights shared above shouldn't surprise any veteran sales professional. It serves as a reminder to act with excellence the best practices we all know. A rigorous win loss program administered by an independent service organization can help fine tune your sales team and boost your sales success. As we have worked with our clients, we find that we are able to provide twice the sales intelligence than internal teams.
WIN LOSS
SOLVE Research helps companies build and maintain a competitive advantage. Our proprietary win loss methodology will drive sales revenue and boost win rates.
To learn more, please contact Erik Westerlind at erik@solvescores.com
