sales | BioBM

Guide to Win / Loss Analysis

Carlton Hoyt 1:27 pm , December 11, 2014

As we discussed last week, there are only two fundamental reasons why someone won’t buy from you. Either you are talking to the wrong person, or the prospective customer doesn’t trust you. Unfortunately for commercial professionals, the reasons why someone could lack sufficient trust in you to purchase are myriad. Doubly unfortunately, those reasons often go undiscovered. Many organizations performing little analysis of why any given sale is won or lost, others do so superficially in ways that don’t provide meaningful information. Even more confusingly, many companies think they are performing win / loss analysis when really they aren’t! They are instead utilizing other tools and methods, often in an ad hoc and undocumented manner, which provide biased or misleading information!

Performing win / loss analysis correctly is not a trivial endeavor and requires a good deal of planning, but there are many benefits to doing so. These include:

Clearer understanding of the customer buying journey
Better understanding of the competition’s offerings (including pricing, positioning, etc.)
Early identification of market trends
Better understanding customer preferences
Understanding how you and your competition are perceived
A built-in “warning system” which informs you if your messaging is missing the mark
Feedback on performance of the sales team and effectiveness of sales processes
Market feedback to help guide product development

Planning for Win / Loss Analysis

Remember that win / loss analysis is a form of market research. It requires proper planning – and adherence to the plans – to ensure that the execution yields the answers you’re looking for.

The first question that needs to be answered is: who will implement the program? This should not be your sales organization! Ideally, the people running the program and performing the interviews will be far removed from the sales process. An external agency who is familiar with your market and experienced in performing win / loss analysis would be ideal, however other internal departments or functions can be used (usually a market research or CI person / team, if you have one, otherwise the applicable product manager or another relevant marketing person would be a good choice to head the effort).

Next, decide what specific objectives you hope to achieve from the win / loss analysis. There are basics that are central to the reasons a sale is won or lost and will therefore almost always be included, such as understanding the customers’ decision criteria and knowing how you measured up against the competition across a number of key factors, but you will also have the opportunity to obtain a plethora of other information. For the sake of customer participation and limiting the cost and / or effort, you will be limited to how much additional information you’ll be able to collect. You will therefore need to determine what non-core information is the most important. Are you interested in learning more about your competitors’ offerings? Do you want to know more specifics about the customers’ buying journeys? Are you interested in the finer details of how your brand is perceived compared to the competition? For long, consultative sales a customer may be more willing to engage with you in a lengthy interview. For short, low-value purchases where sales interaction was limited or non-existent, you probably won’t find customers willing to sit through a long interview. Know what can be realistically expected from your audience and plan accordingly.

The next question you need to answer is: what opportunities will be analyzed? Given the time and / or cost required to perform win / loss analysis, it is often only applied to major product lines or service areas and / or large accounts. (We do not recommend only analyzing large accounts unless your focus is improving win rate solely to large accounts; if you want to improve the win rate for all customer classes, you need to analyze them all.) You can define which opportunities will be analyzed more narrowly to cut down on the number of interviews and amount of analysis necessary, or you can be more broad to collect information about more opportunities and then perform post-hoc analyses of specific products, markets, etc. You also need to determine the frequency at which opportunities that meet the defined criteria will be analyzed. If the nature of your business is such that you have a low number of high-value opportunities, you may want to analyze them all. If you have a high number of low-value opportunities you may want to analyze only some of them. If you will be analyzing only some, you should select them either at random or at regular intervals (for example, at the conclusion of every fourth opportunity, chronologically) to prevent bias. Furthermore, ensure your criteria don’t exclude wins! It’s just as important to understand why you win as why you lose, and understanding your wins can be even more informative.

From the defined objectives, plan your questionnaire. There are a massive number of potential questions, and if you’ve clearly laid out your objectives the questions you need to ask should become somewhat obvious, but here are a few common ones to get you started:

What caused you to initially consider a purchase of this type?
Which other companies / products / solutions were being considered? Which one was ultimately chosen?
What actions on the part of our team made notable positive or negative impressions?
What selection criteria was used to make the ultimate decision?
What interaction influenced you most during your decision-making process?
How did our pricing compare to the competition?
Why did / didn’t we win your business?
Who was involved in the purchase decision?
Were you comfortable with the product features / company’s capabilities? Which were most / least important?
How do you perceive our company? How do you perceive our competitors?
Would you be likely to recommend our solution to others?

A common issue with win / loss analysis questionnaires is the tendency to focus almost exclusively on the latter stages of the buying journey. Remember that the early stages of the buying journey are often more influential. Ensure you ask questions that will inform you how well you are setting the stage for a win, as many lost opportunities aren’t simply failures to close.

If you end up wanting to ask more questions than they reasonably can, remember that not every interview needs to ask the same questions. If you feel that a question has been sufficiently answered, change it out and ask another which would provide more new knowledge. You can also have multiple sets of questions and rotate through them to collect input, albeit less of it, on a larger number of some ancillary questions of lesser importance. (We strongly recommend always asking a set of “core” questions which directly address the most influential reasons for winning or losing.) If you ultimately want to ask more questions than would be feasible in an interview, you can create an accompanying questionnaire to collect additional data. This can be particularly useful if you wish to collect sizeable amounts of quantitative data which can be easily collected via an online survey or similar tool. Just remember that everything you ask a customer to do effectively has a conversion rate. Asking your customer to do two things will invariably lead to an increased number of incomplete data sets from respondents who either did not take / complete the interview but completed the questionnaire or vice versa.

Preparing for the Interview

Determine who will conduct the interview. Similarly to choosing the person or team to run the program, it’s best if the interviewer is not on the sales team. The interviewer should never be someone who was involved in the sales process for that particular customer. That consideration aside, the interviewer should be someone who is familiar with the product or service being sold, familiar with the market, understands the sales process without being too intimate with the sales team, and will make the respondent feel comfortable with the interview process.

Interviews should be scheduled with the customer or prospect very soon after the opportunity has ended. A good rule of thumb is that if more than a month has passed since the opportunity was closed or lost, don’t conduct an interview. Details of their decision journey and interactions with various companies need to be fresh on their minds in order to obtain accurate information, and collecting inaccurate information is often worse than collecting no information at all. When scheduling the interview, let them know exactly what to expect and what topics you are going to discuss. If there were multiple people involved in the prospect’s decision, they should be interviewed separately as they may have differing opinions and these differences can be stark at times. If you interview them collectively, you run the risk of those differing opinions not being expressed or falling victim to groupthink.

Before the interview, the interviewer should sit down with the sales team / person who was handling the opportunity and document some facts and perspective regarding the opportunity. How did the opportunity arise? Was there any previous relationship with the prospect? What tactics and sales tools were they using and why? Were there any noteworthy challenges during the process? What was the result and was it anticipated?

Performing the Interview

Interviews are generally performed by phone, although analogous communication tools such as teleconference can be used. In-person interviews can be performed as well so long as the customer is local and the interview can be performed without becoming cost-prohibitive. Being able to see the interviewee an be helpful, as gestures and body language can convey feelings which can in turn be used to help guide the conversation. (The interviewer’s impressions obtained from body language should not be documented as it could introduce a large degree of subjectivity. Additionally, when performing win / loss analysis across cultural borders, body language could be misread due to cultural differences.)

Any expectations of confidentiality should be discussed up front. As some purchasing processes involve sensitive information, ensure the interviewee(s) feel comfortable using any information necessary to fully explain themselves while knowing that any confidential information will not be recorded or shared.

The interview should have a “script” to ensure the interviewer asks all the questions, although some of which will likely vary slightly interview-to-interview (in phrasing or approach, not in intent) based on the nature of the opportunity and how the interview progresses. However, the questions on the script should be taken to be a minimum of the questions that need to be answered. A good interviewer will probe the interviewee to uncover the underlying reasons behind their answers. Simply surveying the interviewee by asking a set list of questions in sequence is a waste of a live interview and a good way to end up with incomplete information that is difficult to understand and / or leaves a lot of opportunity for guesswork. The ability to be meaningfully spontaneous is dependent on the interviewer’s knowledge of the market, the product bring sold, and the details of the opportunity and sales process for that specific prospect.

Post-Interview Analysis and Assimilation of Knowledge

Soon after each interview, send the customer a message to thank them. As with any customer interaction, a win / loss analysis is a branded experience and you want to ensure the customer experience is a good one in order to earn future business and cultivate brand advocates.

There is no single, correct way to analyze the information from a win / loss analysis because the information, and the kind of information collected, will vary based on the questions you are trying to answer and potentially other factors as well (as discussed earlier). However, data analysis provides ample opportunity to derail your win / loss analysis. It’s likely that most of your data is qualitative. If your organization has a tendency to be political, various groups may try to influence how the data is analyzed or presented in order to make themselves look better or further their own ends. It’s the job of the person managing the program to ensure this does not happen. Any quantitative data should be handled using proper statistics, and qualitative data should be analyzed in a way that is logical, defensible, and allows you to extract the necessary insight. Applying semi-quantitative methods to the analysis of qualitative data may help, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to them. Whatever methods you use to analyze the data, you need to ensure that they are consistent!

Once the data is distilled into knowledge, you need to ensure that it is utilized! When there is enough analyzed information to answer at least some of the questions that you defined in your objectives, a report should be drawn up and a meeting called with people from all departments who would stand to benefit from the resulting knowledge. (Depending on your company policies and culture, the reports and analysis may also be made available to anyone in the company who cares to learn from it, or restricted on a need-to-know basis.) At this meeting, the data and analysis are discussed, lessons learned are shared, and ideas can be generated for ways to improve – these ideas are the foundation for change. The results should inform your sales processes, market segmentation, product development, messaging, marketing communications, sales collateral, and other areas.

If you’ve obtained answers to some secondary objectives, you can remove the associated questions from the interview script. These may be replaced with questions to fulfill other knowledge objectives. Remember, however, that the primary purpose of win / loss analysis is to understand why you win or lose business! The core questions facilitating the answer to that question should, under most circumstances, not be removed or replaced. If you find yourself desiring the answer to other questions more than the answer to why you are winning / losing business, then you should use a different tool or approach which is more suited for the information you seek to gain. You may, however, rotate through other product lines or service categories in order to obtain information specific to other areas.

Closing Remarks

A recent Gartner study (“Tech Go-to-Market: Three Ways Marketers Can Use Data From Win/Loss Analysis to Increase Win Rates and Revenue“) found that less than one third of organizations conduct win / loss analysis properly. The same study found that win / loss analysis can increase win rates by as much as 50%! That should be no surprise. Understanding is the foundation upon which improvement must be built. Sure, win / loss analyses require a good deal of rigor and effort, but that 50% should be well worth it.

"Improvement requires effort and resources. The key is ensuring those resources are well-spent; that they go into endeavors which have the benefit of careful planning and prior experience. You only have so many resources to spend. Ensure your marketing resources maximize your business returns. With BioBM, you’ll be in the hands of an informed and fastidious team that melds subject matter expertise and industry knowledge to further your commercial objectives in real, meaningful ways. If you’re an innovative company, then you deserve innovative marketing. Contact us today."

The Two Reasons People Won’t Buy

Carlton Hoyt 10:58 am , December 2, 2014

Marketers and salespeople wrack their brains trying to figure out how to increase conversion – be it to turn eyeballs into leads or to convert opportunities into sales. Fundamentally, there are only two reasons that someone won’t buy from you. Understanding them is crucial to increasing marketing and sales effectiveness.

Reason 1: You’re Talking to the Wrong Person

Half the battle is ensuring that you’re talking to the correct person; in other words, that your targeting is correct.

Companies waste huge amounts of marketing and sales resources trying to sell to the wrong person. The “wrong” person is generally someone who does not have a need for your product / service or someone who does not have sufficient resources, authority, or influence to purchase. From a marketing perspective, this is most often due to an overly ambitious definition of the target market. Companies tend to do so out of optimism: if you are selling to researchers within a specific field, for example, you may be tempted to define them all as your target market because you want them all to be within your target market. Such is rarely the case, however, and this leads to targeting a lot of people who – no matter how good your message and content is – simply will never buy from you.

It’s really easy to think a goose looks like a duck. Because your pool of potential customers can seem very similar to other groups which are not potential customers, it’s essential that you define your target audience specifically. This doesn’t mean that your audience has to be narrow or small, but you need to clearly draw the line between who is and who isn’t a potential customer. (This should be rooted in your positioning statement, but can – and often should – be expanded beyond that.)

It’s common for the target market to be underdefined because a company simply does not know what kinds of scientists would or wouldn’t be potential customers. That’s entirely understandable – it sometimes isn’t until a product / service hits the market that people can truly judge its value. However, this is not an excuse for poor targeting. In this case, the target market needs to be established either by market research or by a trial-and-error approach which progressively analyzes the market and whittles the target market down to include only those customer profiles who would purchase.

Reason 2: They Don’t Trust You

It doesn’t matter how good your targeting is if your audience doesn’t believe what you are telling them, and what you’re telling them boils down to one thing: the value of what I am selling you will meet or exceed the value of the money that it costs. If you are talking to a genuine member of your target audience, that is the only thing you need to convince them of to make a sale. If they believe that, they will buy 100% of the time. If not, they will decline to buy – 100% of the time.

Trust is a matter of personal belief – it is something that is part rational and part emotional. As such, there are two basic reasons that a prospective customer does not trust you:

The customer requires more or different information than what you have provided to them. This is the rational reason. You have failed to successfully make your case.
The customer does not have faith in the person or brand which is speaking to them. This is the emotional reason. The customer does not trust you to accurately present information to them and therefore does not believe what you say – even if it is simply factual.

Either or both of the above may be true in any given instance.

There are many reasons why lack of trust exists – everything from simple lack of message validation to a poor past experience with the person or brand – but the end result is always the same: the prospective customer selects a strategic alternative. Because there are so many reasons that a lack of trust may exist, it can be difficult to analyze precisely what is causing the distrust. It is therefore important to understand why your prospective customers go elsewhere. (The tool to do this is win-loss analysis, which we’ll discuss in an upcoming blog post.)

If you’re talking to the right person and you can get them to trust you, you will earn a sale. Conversely, in every lost sale one of these two things went wrong. Identify those areas, rectify them, and you’ll do wonders for your conversion.

"BioBM has been the marketing agency of choice for dozens of life science companies for half a decade. We use innovative marketing approaches to create transformational commercial success for your innovative products and services. If you’re seeking to upgrade your marketing, just give us a call."

Blog / Demand Generation 10:58 am , December 2, 2014

Content as a Sales Tool

Carlton Hoyt 9:23 am , November 17, 2014

Content marketing is for more than just lead generation: it can increase sales efficiency. A lot of people think about content marketing in terms of inbound marketing and lead generation. You create content and either make it freely available with perhaps CTA at the end, or you put it behind a lead gen form so you can collect people’s information with the intention of adding them to an email campaign list (or similar). Lead generation is certainly an important use for content marketing, but content should also be looked at as a tool to support the sales function.

How Content Supports Sales

It’s no secret that customers are taking more control of their buying journeys and pushing back their first contact with a salesperson. That is a well-documented fact, from which we can posit that the ways in which customers obtain information is changing. The information itself, however, is not. Just because customers are obtaining information in different ways doesn’t mean they need different information and it certainly doesn’t mean they need less of it. What it does mean is that the information that they were previously obtaining from salespeople now needs to be made available from them in different formats. If you have the customers’ attention and you fail to provide the information that they want, their changing behaviors indicate you’re becoming less likely to induce a sales contact and more likely to lose that attention as they seek information elsewhere. (That’s the reason companies are creating decision engines.)

That’s where content comes in. Content is the vehicle through which you provide detailed, specific information to customers and influence their thinking in the early and mid-stages (and sometimes the late stages as well) of the buying journey. Companies have always used their websites as “brochureware,” but we know that’s not enough. Various educational and persuasive content is required that goes beyond simple product or service information. In that sense, it’s doing what customers are no longer allowing salespeople to do. In doing so, content makes sales more efficient.

Bolstering Sales Efficiency

If you’re an organization that is heavily sales-driven and have great salespeople, you may wish that you could get contact with customers earlier in the buying journey. You shouldn’t. The more naive your customers are, the more effort they will take to lead them through their buying journeys to the point of purchase. If you are leading them with human effort, your sales costs increase with the remaining duration of the buying journey. The more naive your customers are, the more expensive your sales are.

Content, however, is readily scalable. For a one-time creation cost you can provide information to as many customers as the content is relevant to. There is more up-front cost, but as audience size increases the long-term costs rapidly decrease in comparison to a sales-driven effort.

Additionally, content can be viewed as a sales support asset, providing salespeople with referenceable materials and information to provide to inquiring prospects. Customers can go back to a piece of content whereas they cannot go back to a conversation (unless the conversation is via email). Content is not just an inbound tool nor does its utility end upon customer contact with sales; it can coexist with sales to collectively and synergistically advance customers’ buying journeys.

How Can Content Improve Your Organization’s Sales Efficiency?

If your company and sales organization are experiencing the following, you are probably in a good position to utilize content to improve sales efficiency:

Your salespeople get asked the same questions repeatedly.
The average time between sales contact and a positive decision is long.
The average number and / or total duration of sales contacts required to close a sales is high.
You get an abnormally high proportion of contacts whom you never hear from again (they could be contacting you to ask questions, then retaking control of their buying journey).

If you don’t know what content you need to create to start improving sales efficiency, start documenting the questions that your salespeople are being asked. Those questions and thir frequency often indicate what the most beneficial content would be for you to create. For a more thorough process, create content roadmaps for each of your customer personas. This process will help you to define in more detail the content that should be created. When deciding on what content to create, keep in mind that content = time and money! If a particular piece of content would have a small audience, it may not be worth creating. You need to balance completeness with practicality!

Content is a useful tool for decreasing the duration of customers’ sales cycles and decreasing the cost of sales. As customers take more control of their buying journeys, however, content is even more critical. It is a necessary delivery vehicle for information which will influence, educate, and persuade your customers. If your company does not provide the information they are seeking they will look elsewhere, and the customers’ attention is extremely difficult to reclaim.

"The most effective companies don’t act as peddlers, they act as shepherds. They efficiently guide the customer through their buying journey in a way that is intrinsically sensitive to their needs. If you want to become the shepherd of your customers’ buying journey, contact BioBM. We’ll help you build a marketing architecture that will win your audience’s attention, influence their thinking, and earn their business."

Blog / Content Marketing / Demand Generation 9:23 am , November 17, 2014

Prepare for the Contact

Carlton Hoyt 10:02 pm , April 2, 2014

Improve your personal customer communications A lot of focus goes into optimizing marketing activities. That focus is important and very helpful in numerous ways, but all the A/B testing and conversion optimization in the world gets flushed down the drain as soon as a customer actually contacts your company. Not nearly as much effort goes into improving customer contacts. Perhaps this is because person-to-person interaction inherently has some degree of variability, or because sales and support staff are expected to be highly competent at customer interactions, or because people don’t realize that customer interactions can be optimized. Regardless of the reason, life science companies need to realize that customer communications can be improved, and there are a number of definite (and often relatively easy) ways to do so. We discuss some below.

Improve Response Times

There have been many studies which have shown that lead qualification rates drop off massively over time. Even a matter of seconds has been shown to have a significant impact in qualification rates. A study of lead response behavior found that 36% of inquiries were not responded to at all within a two-week time frame. Yet response times are something which companies have direct control over.

Technology can be used to assist to some extent. Automated lead distribution – and in particular automated lead distribution to multiple agents simultaneously – has been shown to have the greatest impacts on conversion rates, with rates over twice as high as when there is no automation to assist in lead distribution.

If it really comes down to it, hire more people. Considering that leads which are contacted within an hour are 7 times more likely to be qualified as those which are contacted even one hour later, the cost / benefit ratio seems to be well worth it. Seven times more qualified leads not only means about 7 times as much business (or at least something in that ballpark) but it also means that your sales staff’s time is seven times more efficient when contacting leads.

It’s not only about sales, however. Support inquiries are equally as important, as they contribute significantly to overall customer experience which in turn affects customer loyalty. This should not come as a surprise.

Arm Your Customer-Facing Employees with Information

Too often, the quality of a customer interaction is most directly related to the experience of the person the customer is interacting with. Newer employees are often less knowledgeable and therefore are often not as well suited to assist the customer. Training can only help so much.

To combat this problem, ensure that you maintain a well-curated body of knowledge for your sales and support teams. Having ready access to information, such as past issues and their solutions, will your customer-facing employees more efficient, reduce the time it takes the customer to get a good answer, and improve the customers’ experiences when interacting with your company.

Provide Consistent Experiences

Although not as important in terms of short-term demand generation, the consistency of customer experiences plays strongly on brand perception. Inconsistent experiences, even if they are largely positive, can have a disruptive effect which conflict with each other rather than building on each other. To some extent, customer interactions should reflect a degree of branding.

I’m not recommending that life science companies take it to this much of an extreme, but a great example of branded customer interactions comes from Mailchimp, which has voice & tone guidelines for customer interactions. While I find the Mailchimp example to be a bit much – certainly far more defined than what many life science companies would need – it’s both reasonable and practical to set general voice and tone guidelines while also ensuring consistency in finer details such as email fonts.

When thinking about optimizing your marketing, think beyond the standard channels and consider improvements in actual customer interactions. While these activities may traditionally be the sole responsibility of the sales and support business areas, they may not often take as structured an approach to improvement as marketing commonly does, especially when considering aspects such as customer experience and branding. By making improvements to actual customer interactions, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and opportunity conversion will all increase while delivering positive brand value as well.

"Is your company providing an excellent customer experience – across ALL touch points? If not, or if you’re not certain, give us a call. Our life science marketing experts will help shape the experiences that your company provides into superior customer experiences that improve brand value, increase marketing ROI, and create a strategic advantage for your company."

Blog / Customer Experience / Demand Generation 10:02 pm , April 2, 2014

Case: Content at a Small CRO

Carlton Hoyt 11:26 am , January 6, 2014

It feels like every week I see or learn something that reinforces just how valuable content is to life science companies. For instance, I was recently discussing some sales dilemmas with the founder of a young, small CRO. Let’s call him Greg. Greg’s CRO performs a well-differentiated and valuable research service. However, Greg was lamenting about the “commoditization” of contract research – how his firm can’t seem to compete on quality and all anyone cares about is price.

Knowing what his CRO does, I was a bit disturbed by this. There are such things as commodities, sure, but the whole reason commodities become commoditized is because there is no difference in quality. Even coal fetches different prices based on, among other things, how clean it burns. If someone can mine better coal and get a better price for it, surely his CRO should be able to get a better price for their superior service. … I dug deeper.

Greg used a current problem he was having to illustrate his larger problem. He had drafted a proposal for his contact at a pharma company. That person reviewed his proposal, along with a number of others, then handed it to his boss to make a decision. According to Greg, the boss would then just choose one of the cheap ones.

Now there are times when budgets are tight and price is simply the most important factor, but this was a recurring problem. So what was really the big problem?

Greg’s CRO is young and small. He has built a rapport with his contact. He has not, however, built a rapport with the decision maker, which he does not have access to. So the person making the decision only knows Greg’s CRO from the information that is available about them on their website and with a quick internet search. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but Greg’s CRO has no educational content. Unless the decision maker happens to know Greg or someone on his team, there is no reason for him to believe that they are capable of producing the higher-quality output they claim to be able to. Compared to the more established and lower cost CROs, selecting Greg’s CRO would be a high-risk endeavor!

To lower the perceived risk, and therefore increase the likelihood that their proposal is selected, Greg’s CRO needs to demonstrate their knowledge through content. Content can, at least to some extent, mitigate the inability to demonstrate knowledge through person-to-person content. It could help provide the confidence that may lack if Greg’s CRO cannot provide many reputable customer references. Instead of only knowing Greg’s CRO as a proposal, at least they would be able to build some degree of positive brand image.

Content is an extremely multifunctional marketing tool that can assist organizations in numerous ways. Content can aid in sales support, as with the case of this CRO, it can generate leads, it can help drive inbound search traffic, it can improve your brand. There’s so much that content can do, and it contributes to so many aspects of marketing, that content marketing should really be a default. Especially in knowledge-intensive sectors like contract research and life science tools, content should be a centerpiece of the marketing effort for most companies. Content marketing is simply too valuable, and valuable in too many situations, to ignore.

What do you think?

What would you do if you were Greg? Would you invest in content marketing? Would you take another approach? Join the discussion on LinkedIn and share your thoughts.

"Is content the centerpiece of your marketing effort? If it’s not, or if you’re not sure what you need to do to craft high-value, multifunctional content, contact us. We’ll put you on the path to more leads, improved conversion, and more effective overall marketing – with content at the center."

Case Study / Content Marketing / Demand Generation 11:26 am , January 6, 2014

ROI: Marketing meets Sales

Carlton Hoyt 12:58 pm , September 20, 2011

There is often a disconnect in communication and reporting among the marketing and sales / business development teams in life science companies that makes the calculation of ROI less relevant, or just flat out less correct, than it should be. Each team or division generally focuses largely on what they can control and what their end-goals are. Usually for life sciences marketing teams the metric of choice is leads, and for sales teams the metrics of choice are sales and conversion rate. Considered separately, these metrics do not form a holistic approach that considers the interests of the company.

Primarily at odds when marketing and sales metrics are considered and reported separately is lead quality. As most marketers and practically all salespeople know, poorly designed or poorly targeted marketing communications can often generate large amounts of poor-quality leads. The large volume of leads will look good for marketing, but ultimately will be bad for sales, as few of the leads will convert. Because of this, an overarching reporting structure that considers both leads and sales should be implemented which tracks lead capture and development over the complete cycle. With such an overarching reporting structure, a better understanding of ROI can be gained.

Simply reporting a more holistic measure of ROI is not sufficient, however, as ultimately companies are not interested in reports, but in revenues. Certainly there are many problems that can be identified and subsequently fixed through improved reporting, however there need to be methods of direct contact, information flow, and feedback between marketing and sales teams.

Some products may not require sales teams, and for these products marketing will directly lead to sales without the intermediate step of lead generation. While in these situations it is easy for ROI to be measured, for many products and virtually all services it is not so simple. In these situations marketing and sales must collaborate, and data from one function must be related to data from the other. Only with more holistic approaches can a meaningful measure of ROI be grasped and meaningful strategies developed to increase it.

"Are you looking for new strategies and best practices to improve your life science company’s bottom line? Stop looking and start solving. When you work with BioBM, we work to ensure that your company gets solutions that are tailored specifically to your needs. Outside the box? Always. Out of the box? Never. Contact us today."

Blog / Marketing Strategy 12:58 pm , September 20, 2011

Technology & Scientific Sales

Carlton Hoyt 6:54 pm , September 14, 2011

Technology provides scientific salesmen with great tools. Perhaps the best example of this in recent history, at least in terms of visibility and adoption, are salesmen’s use of tablet devices to deliver sales presentations, product information, and other marketing content to prospective customers. Advances in technology, however, are often underutilized, especially in smaller life science companies. While general-purpose adoption is often good, these companies often fail to realize the full potential of such technology.

Too frequently, small life science companies (and sometimes larger ones as well) adopt new sales technologies by retrofitting the last generation of content for it without ever considering what benefits the new technology offers that could be leveraged to actually improve content delivery. In doing so, only a portion of the total potential benefit is realized. Let’s go back to the example of tablets. Sales presentations used to often require binders full of product information, salespeople would have to carry around brochures and other product information to leave with potential customers, and all of this created a lot of bulk that was heavy to carry around and could be clumsy to dig through on the spot. Companies also incurred the costs of printing, storing, and supplying such materials to their sales reps. Furthermore, customers could easily misplace a few pieces of paper and these materials were not readily shared and disseminated with labmates or other colleagues. Tablet computers were seen a way to solve these problems, and many companies and independent reps have adopted this technology. However, few examined how they could further improve their content delivery beyond alleviating these obvious issues. They simply retrofitted their previous content for electronic delivery via tablet (through pdf, powerpoints, word documents, existing web content, etc).

Now think about what could be possible if these companies thought about creating content that took advantage of the improvements in technology. Think about all the ways that various content could interact. Think about how content could potentially be created that is dynamic and allows salespeople to respond to expressed customer needs with specialized information that is more pertinent to those specific needs (the “landing pages” of next-gen content delivery). Think about how content delivery could become both more fluid and functional. These kinds of questions represent some of the forward thinking that needs to be done in order to truly leverage advances in technology to improve life science sales.

Technology is constantly changing, evolving, and improving. In order to maintain a truly up-to-date and highly effective sales force, life science tools companies need to not only adopt these technologies, but escape the paradigms created by previous technologies in order to create new and better ways to perform and support sales.

"Looking for ways to improve your sales practices? Is your life science company creating too few opportunities, or failing to convert the opportunities that it is creating? BioBM Consulting is here to help. With our deep industry experience, we can help you analyze your sales processes and implement methods to increase conversion and drive revenues. Contact us to discuss how BioBM can help your company succeed."

Blog / Content Marketing / Marketing Communications 6:54 pm , September 14, 2011

Send the Right Message

Carlton Hoyt 5:44 pm , April 6, 2011

Life science marketing research will boost your marketing ROI and ensure you target the right customers with the right messages. Life science marketing can be a difficult task, especially because scientists often don’t like to be marketed to. They are particularly adept at identifying marketing and ignoring it. With the limited chances your company may get to win over life scientists, you need to make sure you send the right messages to the right people using the right mediums. If your sales aren’t where you think they should be, throwing more money at the problem in the form of more marketing or advertising may not be the answer, especially if you have a good sized marketing budget already. Poor marketing ROI can be a symptom of many things – sending the wrong or sub-optimal marketing message, sending the message to the wrong audience, using the wrong medium to convey the marketing message, etc. In order to identify what the cause is you need to take a hard look at your marketing. You need to perform marketing research.

The American Marketing Association defines marketing research as “the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information–information used to identify and define marketing opportunities and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and improve understanding of marketing as a process.” Simplified, marketing research is the tool that is used to determine the best way for marketing to be performed.

Life science marketing research can answer many questions. Some examples include: What is the best medium to market to a target audience? What is the best message that we should use, and / or what benefits of our life science research tool should we highlight? Are we marketing to our customers enough? Are we marketing to them too much? What can we do to improve our marketing ROI?

Marketing, at its most basic, seems easy. Convey the benefits to the customers and the customers will buy the product, correct? Not necessarily. It’s very easy, and often the case, for a company to have a different viewpoint than the customer or overlook something that is important to the customer. (Some of the most hilarious marketing message gaffes come from mistranslations and would have been readily and easily avoided if the companies spent anything on marketing research. If you’d like some hilarious examples you can read about some here.) Marketing research helps you be on the same page as your customers.

You probably wouldn’t make product development decisions based on a gut feeling, so why make marketing decisions based solely on instinct? If your company is concerned with making sure your marketing is optimized and you’re getting the most from your marketing dollars, then spending a few of those dollars on marketing research can go a long way for you and supercharge your marketing ROI.

"Does your company want to improve the return on your marketing investment? Want to make sure that you are reaching the correct customers in the right way and with the message that they will be most responsive to? <Life science marketing research solutions from BioBM consulting can help you do all that and more. We provide custom marketing research solutions that are right for your company, your needs, and your budget. Don’t waste time and money guessing if your marketing will be effective. Contact us today and start getting more from your marketing campaigns."

Blog / Market Research / Marketing Communications 5:44 pm , April 6, 2011

Lowering Barriers

Carlton Hoyt 6:28 pm , March 30, 2011

Life scientists are busy people. Between bench work, meetings, writing, presentations, seminars, and everything else they may have to do in their day, their time is limited. As such, they appreciate (knowingly or not) situations where the purchasing of products that they need is easy, fast, and simple. While the ease of the purchasing process is usually not so important as to change the mind of someone who has decided on purchasing a given piece of lab equipment, antibody, reagent, or other bioscience product, it can easily sway the undecided buyer one way or the other. By identifying and lowering or removing the barriers to purchasing your laboratory products or services, you can sway those undecided minds in your life science company’s favor.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but for brevity’s sake we can break down the sales process, from the eyes of the customer, into three steps:

Finding your product / service
Obtaining the desired information
Acting on the desire to purchase

The first step is arguably the most important. It should go without saying that unless scientists can find your product, they are not going to buy it. Getting found is a multi-faceted issue that has no single solution, but rather many different potential solutions that can be used in combination based on your company’s situation. Having distributors list your products in catalogs, traditional marketing campaigns via print advertising in scientific journals, banner advertising on relevant websites, e-mail campaigns, search engine marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, word of mouth marketing, and utilizing in-house sales teams are all options with different benefits and drawbacks and a unique mix of any of these may be appropriate for your company and product (note that this list is not meant to be exhaustive). Identify how you can maximize your exposure in a cost-effective manner and implement those solutions so your life science products are easily found.

No matter how a customer finds your product or service, you always need to make sure you provide them with the desired information to get them interested in buying. As a general rule, more information is better so long as it is well-organized, relevant, and positive. Use this information to keep them engaged the entire time they browse it. Any time a researcher wants more information about your product but doesn’t find it is an opportunity for them to walk away or look for different products, so even if in formats not well suited to containing large amounts of information, the location of additional information should be given and this information should be as easily accessed as possible. A key component to this, since it will almost inevitably contain the most information about your products or services, is having a website with all the necessary product information laid out in an easily navigable way. (you can learn more about streamlining your website for additional sales here)

Lastly, the ability to act on the desire to purchase should be a fast, simple, and easy process (or at least as much is plausible given the nature of the product or service). For example, if your product does not require a quote-driven sales process, e-commerce allows your customers to order quickly and easily. Online forms for quote requests or demonstration requests are similarly low barriers to action. Where possible, free samples are a great way to get your products in front of the customer. If the customer needs to contact your company, let them do it in the manner that they prefer to, be it e-mail, phone, a simple contact form, etc. to ensure that they are comfortable establishing the necessary communication to further the sales process.

Scientists, lab managers, purchasers, and procurement agents all prefer simple and streamlined sales processes, and reducing the barriers to purchasing your bioscience product can be an easy way to increase your conversion. While the ease of the purchasing process is most often not important enough to the customer to change a purchasing decision altogether, it can easily sway the undecided buyer one way or the other. By streamlining your sales process, you can tilt those undecided buyers in your favor and increase your life science sales.

"Would you like to make it easier for life scientists across pharma, biotech, and academia to buy your products and / or services? Want to use a streamlined sales process to tilt undecided buyers towards purchasing your products? BioBM Consulting’s marketing and internet consultants can help you streamline your marketing and sales process. Talk to us and we’ll help you boost your conversion by identifying and lowering barriers to purchase."

Blog / Demand Generation 6:28 pm , March 30, 2011

From Site to Sale

Douglas E. Rogers 11:41 am , February 22, 2011

Many companies under-utilize their website, and life science companies are no exception. There is often a lot of marketing going on, and that’s good, but most websites seem to stop there. While good online marketing will indeed reflect well on your products / services and make customers more likely to buy, companies often fail to think about how their website can take that one step further and leverage it fully to dramatically improve lead or sale generation. In order to do this, however, you need to know how visitors are using your site and analyze why they use it like they do.

Important Tip

Make friends with Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s fairly easy to set up (it just requires adding a small amount of HTML to each page on your site) and for basic analysis it’s quite easy to use as well. Google Analytics will tell you how visitors to your site are getting there, what keywords they are using when finding your site via search, what pages they are looking at, etc. Put together, this is powerful information.

Chances are that some users will enter your site via virtually every page. You should, however, be able to determine what pages users enter your site from most often. Are these the pages that you’d want them to be entering your site from? If not, you may want to rearrange some content or add / change the content of the pages to make them pages you would want visitors entering from. There are other techniques for influencing what page users enter from as well. Just don’t expect all users to enter your site via your homepage – it’s never going to happen. The majority probably will, but that’s as good as you’re going to do.

Imagine you are a salesperson. You have all sorts of pitches and responses to customer inquiries and concerns. As you stand in front of a scientist, lab manager, etc., you can alter your responses to their statements in real-time. You can have a dynamic conversation. On your website, you don’t get that luxury but you still want to make the sale or get the lead. Your website, in effect, is the salesperson that talks to the most customers so make it behave as such. Since your website cannot have that fully dynamic conversation you therefore have to anticipate what the viewer is going to want to know or do after viewing a certain page and make sure that they have access to the desired information (or action) from that page.

Along those lines, you do not want any page to be a dead-end. If you get to a page where there are no good options to continue looking for more information or enter the quote / sale process, you probably found a page that a lot of viewers are exiting your website from. Even at the end of the sale or lead generation process, lead users back to the homepage to continue browsing your products / services.

Side Note from BioBM Principal Consultant Carlton Hoyt

A tactic that I’ve seen work wonderfully in the past have been free samples of consumable products or demonstration requests of equipment. These tactics significantly reduce the barriers to getting your product in front of the customer. There are both pros and cons to this strategy, however. We’ll discuss this in more detail at a later time, so be sure to check back, or contact us if you would like to discuss it in greater depth now.

Another web faux pas is not having a way to complete the sale or lead generation process online. There are situations where companies have a reason for not implementing an e-commerce platform (for example, they do not sell directly to scientists) but there is never a reason not to at minimum capture lead information on your website. Some people will find filling out an online request for more information or performing an online purchase easier or simply preferable to calling to inquire about a product or faxing / calling in an order. You want potential customers to progress with the lead / sale process in the way they find easiest. Taking into account the preference of your customers by utilizing these relatively easy measures helps lower the barriers to purchasing and therefore increases conversion and helps you derive more value from your website.

Having a well-designed website is about more than just the look and feel. A well-designed website will ensure that maximum value is captured from your website. It is often not possible to know how to optimize this value upon the initial design of your site, but by monitoring and analyzing your site’s analytics you can determine how to best lead take your audience of scientists and researchers from site to sale.

"Are you interested in deriving more value from your website? Want to turn more visitors into leads and / or sales? BioBM’s experienced internet consulting staff can implement and perform the necessary analytics to determine how to optimize your website for improved conversion. Contact us if you have questions or would like more information on how we can help you derive more sales and leads from your website. Alternatively, you can request a free site review to ensure that any problem areas for your website and overall online presence are properly identified remedies are discussed."

Blog / Digital Marketing 11:41 am , February 22, 2011

Tag : sales