62 hours of lost market intelligence per customer
62 hours of lost market intelligence for every new customer. Let me explain…
For all you revenue architects out there, you’ll know that at roughly £15K ACV, your SQL to new customer ratio is about 28:1.
Let’s break it down.
🤔 Qualifying a lead:
2 meetings say, initial discovery call and then perhaps a second disco demo / discovery call prior to hand-off (if two-stage selling). Let’s call that 30 minutes a piece.
🤓 Developing an SAO:
7 meetings minimum across five different stakeholders at 60 mins each. With the common economic climate and budgetary pressure, I think buyers are involving more internal stakeholders to ensure they make the right decision first-time (have others seen this?).
· Initial discovery meeting with Initiator and Champion
· Detailed demo with Champion and initiator
· Meet with Decider
· Meet with Gatekeeper
· Another meeting with Champion
· Meet with Exec Buyer and Procurement
· Final meeting with group
Assuming you agree to mutually commit, that’s 💬 8 hours of conversation 💬 per closed won customer just from the sales cycle. (I checked with Four/Four and that would give you about 240 codified insights per deal).
But don’t forget:
😜 We have to engage 28 SQLs for 60 minutes each to convert to an SAO = 1680 minutes of conversation.
😎 We then have to engage 6 SAOs for 8 hours each to convert to one customer = 2520 minutes of conversation.
So, for every customer won it’s fair to say that there have probably been over 70 hours of prospect conversations. Assume that someone is only reviewing the 8 hours of closed won conversations (trawling through recordings!), that’s 62 hours of market intelligence sitting there not researched!
Sales and customer success conversations are the gateway to gaining a perceptive perspective of what your customer needs and how best to deliver it. This article will highlight the importance of using these nuggets of feedback in shaping your product roadmap and marketing strategy.
Translating conversations into business intelligence:
At its core, your Value Proposition stems from what your customer needs. The deal is simple; sell something people need, and they’ll buy. However, understanding these needs often proves elusive for most companies.
The game-changer lies in leveraging the power of your sales and customer success conversations. Your sales team directly interacts with potential customers, gaining firsthand information about their needs, fears, challenges, and aspirations – raw, unfiltered data you could hardly get elsewhere.
Similarly, customer success representatives interact with current customers, offering valuable data on user experience, product performance, and areas of possible improvement. These conversations provide in-depth insights that position your business to make strategic, data-driven adjustments.
Integrating customer conversations in your product roadmap:
Detailed customer insights position your product roadmap into a more focused, need-driven pathway. Instead of speculating or relying on trends, you understand directly from the customer their experiences, needs, and potential improvements.
By doing so, your product roadmap becomes fluid, adjusting to customer needs, market shifts, or technology advancements. This ensures your product stays relevant, customer-centric, and competitive.
For instance, if feedback from your customer success interactions reveals an underlying need for a specific feature in your software, integrating this into your product’s design ensures you meet an existing need while also increasing your competitiveness.
Improving your marketing strategy with individual-centric conversations:
In a world marked by fierce competition, understanding and meeting your customer needs isn’t enough—it must be communicated effectively too. Knowing what your customers expect from you will help you create messages that resonate with your audience and lead to better conversion.
Customer conversations lead to better segmentation. It allows businesses to group their customers based on their needs, enabling them to craft targeted and personalized messages. Engaging with your customers in this way gives you a significant competitive edge.
Moreover, customer insights assist in identifying and forecasting trends and behaviours. Predictive analysis, facilitated by these trends, enables B2B companies to take proactive measures, tailoring their marketing strategies to future customer behaviours.
You must remove your HiPPOs
When it comes to business decision-making, there is a certain composed creature that occasionally roams the boardrooms and the corridors of corporate offices – meet the HiPPO. The ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion’ is a phenomenon where the most prominent decisions are influenced by the highest salary-earner in a business organisation – regardless of their expertise in the matter.
The root problem with HiPPOs is not their existence; indeed, experience and wisdom often accompany those with the heaviest pay. Rather, the issue lies in the assumption that HiPPOs always know best. This belief can stifle innovation, curtail growth, and limit potential by overlooking diverse perspectives and disregarding important data.
In an era where data analytics and AI-based applications are quickly becoming the lifeblood of decision-making, overreliance on HiPPOs can deter a company from harnessing the full potential of collective intelligence. A decision solely based on a HiPPO’s view may lack insight into the customers’ ever-evolving needs or miss spotting new trends in the market.
The danger of HiPPO syndrome
The High-Paid Person’s Opinion tends to steamroll lower-paid employees’ thoughts and ideas – perpetuating a ‘groupthink’ culture. Ungrounded trust in HiPPOs can demoralise less senior staff, undermining their confidence and rendering their expertise irrelevant.
Additionally, decision-making by HiPPO often lacks accountability. When decisions fail, there is no clear way to learn from the mistake and improve. This lack of feedback loop can cause the business to stagnate and make the same mistakes over time.
Customer conversations offer an often untapped mine of insights in charting your product roadmap and marketing strategy. Businesses today need to appreciate these conversations and institutionalize them into their strategic initiatives. By doing so, they align their products and marketing strategies with their audiences, enhancing their market positioning while guaranteeing increased customer conversion and retention rates.
