Gathering Insights from Tech Buyers

Collecting feedback from buyers and evaluators once a deal closes is a critical process for obtaining valuable insights for sales enablement. Insights are valuable for both improving the performance of individual sales reps and for adjusting key levers in the go-to-market sales strategies that can significantly improve win rates.

A buyer's perspective is always the "source of truth" about what is competitively resonating with buyers; whether it is an actual solution weaknesses, lack of differentiation or insufficient messaging during the sales process.

Five areas of evaluation criteria to focus collecting insights from technology buyers include:

1. Overall Company attributes such as brand awareness, marketing, reputation, leadership, analyst reviews, referrals. industry experience, referrals, speed and cost of implementation, services and support provided including methods of support and availability, dedicated teams versus help desk, perception of vendor's technology, and future strategy and direction.
2. Sales Process attributes such as relationship development with sales representative, ease of doing business with, knowledge of business and industry, rep responsiveness to client business needs and challenges, responsiveness, quality of presentations and demos, appropriateness and quality of customer references, and support for other teams members in sales process including executives.
3. Solution Features and Functions which may be general attributes or solution-specific features. General attributes may include ease of use, user interface, integration with other modules, integration with other vendors, reporting, analytics, mobile capabilities, security, and availability of resiliency options such as back-up and disaster recovery. Transparency and relevancy into the product roadmap can be a valued criteria as well. There may also be solution feature / functions to evaluate very specific to your solution or industry.
4. Pricing attributes are most valuable if less around direct price which can be both hard to obtain and inappropriate to ask of a buyer, and more around relative value. Attributes may include perceived value for cost, cst relative to budget, pricing models around one-time versus recurring fees, how bundling or unbundling is structured, and ease of contracting and negotiation.
5. Onboarding attributes are useful to obtain on wins. This is way you should always wait a bit longer for win reviews than on losses. You can capture valuable insights on various aspects of onboarding; how well does Sales hand off to project, account or support teams post-contract, does implementation time and quality meet expectations, or how well issues are resolved. How responsibilities are handed off across teams is often overlooked due to lack of ownership around these gap or hand-off processes.

What insights does your company collect from buyers and evaluators after deals close?

Are you doing this on a systematic, recurring basis?

Do you also collect best practices and challenges from your Sales team as well?

Feel free to share what insights categories your Sales team collects.

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