Your Best Source of Untapped Customer Intelligence

With more access to information than ever before, it’s become clear that customers no longer “need” supplier input to make informed purchase decisions.

SEC research shows, on average, customers are 57% of the way through their purchase decision before they make first contact with a supplier—which more often than not means the only thing suppliers are left to compete on is price. With that in mind, the ability for reps to get in early and shape customer demand has become a necessity in today’s world of sales. But how does your organization support reps’ efforts to shape demand?

We know that high performing sales reps have been doing this on their own for quite some time, but it’s been unclear as to how exactly they’ve been going about it—until now.

Our 2012 research shows that high performers’ success at shaping customer demand is attributed to four distinct behaviors, one of which is conducting non-traditional customer due diligence. By surfacing in-depth information about opportunities from outside experts, internal subject matter experts, operations teams, other sales people, partners, customer stakeholders, etc., the best reps cultivate a deep understanding of accounts. High performers then engage customers in the formative stages of their learning process with tailored insight developed from this understanding.

Though non-traditional due diligence is only one of the elements of successful demand shaping, today’s marketplace dictates the need for sales organizations to better support their reps in this activity. Gen-i Corporation, a New Zealand based provider of IT and telecommunications services, is one company doing just this. Gen-i has figured out a clever and scalable way to provide sales reps with valuable due diligence that organizations have traditionally overlooked.

In an effort to better drive account health and profitability, Gen-i shifted from a sales-driven account plan to a business plan that gathers inputs and assesses direction from all stakeholders interacting with the customer. Gen-i trains its customer-facing non-sales staff to use low-risk talking points during their everyday interactions with customer end-users to capture pain points and valuable account intelligence that sales reps are not normally privileged to. Gen-i then brings sales and non-sales staff together to develop a cross-functional business plan informed by this composite account intelligence.

Gen-i’s business plan enables non-sales staff to better serve accounts with business unit-specific goals aimed at bolstering customer loyalty and account profitability. But more importantly, it arms sales reps to shape the nature of demand within accounts by highlighting growth opportunities they would otherwise have been unaware of.

SEC Members, to learn more about the mechanics of Gen-i’s customer intelligence pipeline, the questions they train staff to ask customers, and the cross-functional business plan, make sure to check out the new best practice featured in this year’s study Getting in Early: Shaping Customer Demand Through Pre-Funnel Engagement.

Also make sure to watch out for an upcoming webinar on the subject featuring John Woodyard, Gen-i’s Sales Academy Manager and creator of the best practice, in the coming months.