The customer stakeholder saying “no” may be completely HIDDEN from the key account manager. Key decision-makers are ABUNDANT… on average, 5.4 people per B2B buying decisions, which drops their “intent to purchase” below 50% (compared to individuals at 81%). Many critical decision-influencers are RELUCTANT to meet with a salesperson. And because these decision-influencers hail from different job functions, they DISAGREE on what is needed.
Learn how to overcome this with Key Account Blueprinting
Some voice-of-customer experts recommend you exclude your salesforce from interviews because “they can sell but not listen.” True sales professionals are great listeners: You just need to reward them for listening. Strengthen listening and learning by your entire team, and you’ll out-perform competitors who side-line their sales pros when gathering market insights.
More in e-book, Reinventing VOC for B2B (page 24)
You would hope the answer is, “yes.” After all, research since the late-1980’s has shown asking the right questions improves selling success. Unfortunately, our own research of 396 B2B sales professionals shows decades of selling experience gradually improves probing skills, but not taking multiple sales training programs. These sales training programs are surely helpful in mastering other skills, but not for changing behavior when it comes to asking good questions.
Download research report, VOC Skills that Drive B2B Sales
It’s likely that entering call reports into your Customer Relations Management system (e.g., SalesForce.com) is more important than your sellers think it is. At least this is what our research shows. In a study of 12 voice-of-customer skills (with 396 responses), salespeople rated their competency in making CRM entries the lowest… and the least important. And yet, this VOC skill had one of the strongest correlations to beating sales quotas. Whoops.
Download AIM Institute research report, VOC Skills that Drive B2B Sales
Some companies have a small staff of “interviewing experts.” But large businesses chalk up thousands of face-to-face customer meetings each year… as sales and technical service reps go about their normal duties. Why not train these people to become VOC experts? They’ve already gained customers’ trust, they know the customer’s language, they’ll get key information first-hand, and there’s no extra travel cost.
More in white paper, Everyday VOC
Send commercial-technical teams on interviews… but don’t let them sell or solve. If you sell during voice-of-customer sessions, customers know you’re not really interested in them. If you solve, you’re jeopardizing your intellectual property. In either case, you’re wasting precious time better used to understand customer needs.
More in e-book, Reinventing VOC for B2B (page 24)
Your B2B customers have a long list of problems to be solved. But it’s not their job to carefully explain each one and deliver it gift-wrapped to your solution providers. It’s your job. When your sales professionals probe deeply and capture customer needs uniformly in your CRM, you’ll gain unprecedented market insight. And by probing well, your sales team will sell more. We call this Everyday VOC.
More in Everyday VOC white paper, www.EVOCpaper.com
Instead, ask the right questions about your customer’s problems. The consultative selling movement was given a major boost in 1988 with Neil Rackham’s ground-breaking research in SPIN Selling. By observing more than 35,000 sales calls, they established that the most successful salespeople ask great questions. Decades later, we had our own question: Are some questions more likely to drive sales? (The answer is “yes”!) We surveyed 396 B2B sales professionals with over 6,000 years of combined experience concerning 12 voice-of-customer skills.
Download AIM Institute research report, VOC Skills that Drive B2B Sales
Large businesses chalk up thousands of face-to-face customer meetings each year… as sales and technical service reps go about their normal duties. Why not train these people to become VOC experts? They’ve already gained customers’ trust, they know the customer’s language, they’ll get key information first-hand, and there’s no extra travel cost.
More in white paper, Everyday VOC
Every one of your B2B customers has needs… problems to be solved. What’s filtering them out, preventing your solution providers from understanding them? 1) Poor listening skills when your employees meet with them? 2) Few probing questions? 3) Haphazard call reports? 4) Weak CRM datamining? You can change all this when your customer-facing employees use Everyday VOC.
More in Everyday VOC white paper, www.EVOCpaper.com
Turns out that understanding market needs makes a big difference. In recent AIM Institute research, nearly 90% of survey respondents claiming a very poor understanding of market needs had new product success rates below 50%. This percentage dropped to less than 10% those for those claiming a good understanding of market needs. So understanding what customers want before you develop your new product is probably a good idea.
More in research report, www.b2bvocskills.com (page 7)
Some companies rely on a handful of internal VOC (voice-of-customer) experts to interview customers. You’ll do far better if you train a critical mass of employees—who routinely interact with customers anyway—to gather customer needs. Keep your VOC experts as coaches and trainers, but implement “VOC for the masses.”
This certainly applies to your sales team. Instead of being satisfied with just a “sales force,” why not also commission a “learning force”? That’s what happens when your sales professionals have strong voice-of-customer skills.
More in white paper, Everyday VOC at www.EVOCpaper.com
With apologies to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina… all great voice-of-customer (VOC) interviews are alike in the same way: The customer is talking during most of the interview. And they are talking about those outcomes (desired end results) they want to talk about. Anything else is clutter, much of which leads to unhappiness.
For B2B voice-of-customer interviews, plan on two rounds of interview… first qualitative interviews (called Discovery), followed by quantitative interviews (called Preference). In both cases, the customers will be doing most of the talking… and about matters that interest them. They’ll be happy. You’ll be happy.
More in video, Reinventing VOC for B2B
If you sell into a concentrated B2B market (one with just a few customers), your voice-of-customer interviews should have two goals: “insight” plus “engagement.” The latter is important: You want these big customers to be impressed and eager to work with you, not your competitors.
These 10 approaches help you engage your customers when interviewing them to understand their needs: 1) Kill the questionnaire. 2) Let customers lead the interview. 3) Discuss their job-to-be-done. 4) Project your notes so they can see them. 5) Focus on customer outcomes. 6) Learn how to probe deeply. 7) Don’t sell or solve. 8) Get quantitative in your VOC. 9) Use triggers to generate fresh ideas. 10) Use B2B-optimized interview tools. (See the 2-minute video, Engage your B2B customers.)
These are explained in the article, The Missing Objective in Voice of Customer Interviews