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Help Us Stop The Fall
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Puzzle
Partner: "We sell a very sophisticated data analysis service to the marketing directors and other decision-makers at manufacturing companies. What we do is trap data related to marketing effectiveness, and then determine which portion of the company's marketing effort is working, and which isn't.
"During the past three years, we've seen a steady decline in sales, and it's my job to fix it."
Diagnosis
Initially, we conducted a series of phone-call interviews with company owners and leaders of various implementation teams, and gained little insight into the overall puzzle. So we scheduled a full-day executive strategy session with the goal of identifying areas for improvement and creating an initial plan of attack.
After the strategy session, our best guess was that their marketing message was too complicated – they were selling based on the technology they used rather than the result using it would achieve.
Solution
We decided to test our theory by crafting an offer and conducting 20 Right-Now Prospecting sessions. Our goal was twofold:
- Find an offer that went to the heart of the result our client could produce, and that would be understood by everyone who heard it.
- Determine what percentage of our client's prospects wanted the result and would pay to achieve that result.
Of course, setting up sales appointments would be a side-objective as well.
Results
After 3,000 Right-Now Prospecting phone calls and ZERO appointments, we analyzed the language prospects used when they said, "No" to our offers. Since many gave rather detailed reasons, we were able to determine that our client's prospects – mostly manufacturing companies – had purchased technology that could produce the same results in-house. Many were using SAP software or had created home-grown software that made our client's services obsolete.
As a result, our client changed its services to enhance the capabilities of SAP and other high-end software, and was able to exceed previous sales levels.
These 20 Right-Now Prospecting sessions have the distinction of achieving both the worst and best results we've ever had – no appointments, but puzzle solved.
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