Intelligence Gathering on Winning an Account

Sometimes winning projects can make one forget to gather competitive intelligence. Here is a list of questions one should ask the clients during a de-briefing:

• Customer Details
  1. Organisation name
  2. Name, title
• Opportunity Details
  1. Products
  2. Deal Value (License fee, Annual License fee, Consulting)
  3. Main decision-makers (Name, title, role)
  4. Main competitors (Organisation, products)
  5. Main reason for win/loss
• Process
  1. Engagement – when first engaged
  2. What did customer know about us before they started the selection process
  1. Reference Sites (site, comments)
  2. Feedback from our reference sites
  3. Feedback from competitors reference sites
  4. Proposal and Presentation
     • What was their view of the quality of proposal/tender response
     • Competitors?
  5. Presentations
     • What was their view of the quality of presentations
     • Competitors? Like/dislike?
  6. Functionality
     • Were products considered functionally superior/inferior to competitors?
     • What were the main functional advantages, be as specific as possible
     • What were the main functional disadvantages?
     • Was there anything that particularly impressed them with our competitors products or ours
     • How did our technologies compare
  7. Implementation and Support
     • Were they happy with the type and extent of the services proposed?
     • Were they comfortable with the quality of our implementations?
     • Were they comfortable with the quality of our support services?
     • Were there other services they would have liked us to propose?
  8. Prices
     • How did our prices compare to our competitors?
     • Was it considered that our price represented good value for money?
     • Were there specific areas of advantage or disadvantage on price?
  9. Service/Sales Process
     • Were they happy wit hthe level of contact we had with them during the sales process?
     • Were there things our competitors did that they particularly liked?
  10. Other – were there other ares of differentiation
• Summary
  1. What were the three key factors for them that led them to their decision?
  2. Lessons learnt
  3. Referrals
     • Are they aware of any other organisations who are/will be looking for a similar solution in the near future. Ask this twice using different wording