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The Challenge
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Gaining a competitive advantage requires sellers to select goals based on relevant and concrete information. The most critical questions to be answered include:
- What services and skills are needed to satisfy customers?
- Which are the best practices to emulate to guarantee those skills and services?
- How do our practices compare to the best or world class practices?
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The Solution
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For companies that do not have the time or resources to complete a thorough Customer and Market Audit, a Gap Analysis is the most powerful method to measure competitive requirements against world class criteria. The Chally Gap Analysis focuses the comparative evaluation on the most significant Customer Criteria, the most competitive Sales Skills and the 8 most important sales process benchmark areas. |
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Benchmark:
Customer Criteria
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In depth, qualitative and quantitative interviews with over 1000 corporate customers identified three broad criteria they expected World Class, business-to-business Sellers to address:
- Customers want to do what they do best, and outsource the rest without adding the overhead of supervising their vendors.
- Sellers must understand their customers' business as well as their own technology in order to create better solutions than customers could design for themselves.
- Customers want hard evidence their supplier has added value in excess of price.
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Benchmark:
Sales Skills
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To evaluate a seller’s capacity to satisfy these 3 criteria, corporate customers judged the salesforces responsible for delivering and managing their satisfaction on combinations of only 7 factors.
The big 7, listed in descending order of importance to deliver world class satisfaction are:
- Understands the customer's business
- Manages the customer's satisfaction personally
- Recommends applications and products expertly
- Provides technical and training support
- Acts as a customer advocate
- Solves logistical and political problems
- Finds innovative solutions to customers' needs
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Benchmark:
Best Practices
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Chally has documented, in detail, all the different methods and processes that the customer selected Best Sales Companies have developed in order to deliver World Class performance. These research results demonstrate the rationale or principles for selecting different options and their relative effectiveness in each of 8 best practice areas.
Based on best salesforce methods and their associated measurements, we have established detailed comparison criteria in each of the eight sales benchmark practices.
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The Eight Sales Process Benchmark Areas
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- Establishing a Sales Driven Culture
- Market Segmentation
- Market Adaptability
- Information Technology
- Direct Customer Feedback and Measuring Customer Satisfaction
- Sales, Service and Technical Support
- Recruiting and Selecting Salespeople
- Training and Development
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Benefits
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The Gap Analysis process can focus management's priorities and set new and effective targets in order to build profitable added values that create "Customers for Life." |
