Good Reason to do Prospect Surveys

I had an interesting conversation with an old colleague of mine. We started down the path of having a discussion on third party surveys. He had all the typical objections like: Our VP of Sales is confident about his entire sales process: he has all the prospects he needs; his team executes very well; and he has a keen insight into the sales process. So why would he need anybody like Contact 101 to help him with this? He went on to say: We have people in our tech support department and in our biz dev organization who routinely poll our customers and ask, "how are we doing?" From the reports that I've seen, our customers and prospects are not shy about telling us when we've done good and when we've done bad.

Then he mentioned that they even do loss analysis and understand why they didn't get the deal. So I asked him to give me an example and his example was: The prospect that we lost the deal to told us that the sales person was "too arrogant" and didn't want to listen to how to work with us. The prospect went on to say, we were looking for a "partner." Someone who would work with us in our licensing processes.

I should mentioned the deal they lost was a few million dollars. Had they used Contact 101, they would have gotten this information during the buying cycle and could have been proactive in making the appropriate changes to win the business.

Companies far to often, think they know everthing there is to know about how their customers and prospects feel about them. We at Contact 101 believe that companies are missing the boat by not surveying their prospects during the sales cycle.

I look at this example as a lesson on why wait until you lost the deal to get valuable insight into your prospect. Why not be proactive and get the information during the buying cycle, it will pay off in the long run.


Angi Fisher

How are Sales, Marketing and Customer Service really doing? Perhaps you’re company has a program to track their performance with audits of customer interactions. Over 90% of large companies use independent third parties to find out this information – because they can afford it. The sad truth is only 10% of smaller companies do the same thing because they think they can’t afford it. Now, Contact 101 has changed that.

The fact is only your customers and prospects have the information you and your Executive Team must have to maximize your company’s success. Contact 101’s unique approach is specifically targeted at and priced for small to medium size companies. Companies whose Executive staff knows that the data they need to maximize their success resides outside their walls – not in the conference room.

Rick Dural
CEO, Contact 101