Deliver Insight to Your Buyer: Introduction

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you'll be able to:

• Explain how an opportunity's insight map helps a revenue team to gather and organize information about a customer's problems and what the initiative(s) associated with the deal must accomplish

• Describe how the revenue team uses the insight map to build trust and confidence with the customer's decision makers, and how the board helps them to stand out from their competitors

 

Today's buyers are more informed than ever before.

In a crowded field where buyers can easily learn about many potential suppliers, you need ways to stand out from the competition. Often, that requires your team to fully understand the customer’s business problems, what they must achieve, and why.

This understanding puts you in a position to propose solutions that will help the customer to look beyond features and functions, boosting your chances of winning the deal.

An opportunity insight map is the perfect tool to:

• Gather and organize information received from the customer's decision makers about the goals of their initiative.
• Capture the problems that affect their ability to achieve their goals.
• Communicate how your solutions can help them.

 

The insight map helps the revenue team to start conversations with the customer that show not only product expertise but also business expertise.

Collaborating with your customer on an insight map gives you a way of providing insights into their business they wouldn't get anywhere else, which helps you increase your value to them.

The customer sees that your focus is on their success, and not just on selling them something.

Above is a typical opportunity insight map. It's made up of cards of various types:

• Goals
• Pressures
• Initiatives
• Obstacles
• Solutions

Together, these tell a story about the customer's business problems and how they plan to address them.

Using the Insight Map to Create Value in an Opportunity

Lynn Benfield is an account executive at Retail POS, a company that specializes in advanced point-of-sale (POS) systems, including cash registers and card readers. They sell not just the hardware but also the related software, training, and consultancy services.

Right now, one of Lynn's best prospects is MyHealth, a chain of health-care clinics that provide pharmacy services. MyHealth is expanding quickly and is running into new problems as they try to scale.

Lynn learned from Susan Linton, the COO at MyHealth, and an important supporter of hers, that MyHealth has an initiative to upgrade their POS software, and she believes that Retail POS can offer them outstanding value as a supplier of this software.

She'll use an opportunity insight map to better understand who in the account is responsible for driving MyHealth’s initiative, the initiative's priority, and what the goals are.

She involves her team so that together they can capture their collective knowledge on the insight map.

To structure their collaboration, they ask a series of questions. We recommend that you also use these for each of your opportunities.

Question 1: What Are the Decision Makers' Goals for This Initiative?

On the insight map, the goals are the end results to be achieved by the decision makers within a specific time period.

In an opportunity, the goals belong to the decision makers responsible for choosing a solution.

In this case, these are Don Kellett, MyHealth's digital procurement manager, and Sophie Cooke, their digital operations manager.

Lynn learned about the goals by asking Don and Sophie how their software-upgrade initiative would improve their business.

Based on what they said, she captures the goals on the insight map as:

• Reduce pricing issues by 50 percent within six months of the upgrade.

• Improve stock management by reducing nonavailability of stock items by 30 percent.

• Improve pharmacy customer satisfaction from 89 percent to 95 percent in one year of the upgrade.

On the board, she also specifies the owner of each of these goals.

• Don owns the pricing and stock-management goals.
• Sophie owns the customer-satisfaction goal.

Knowing who owns each goal helps the team to understand the priorities for each decision maker.

 

But Lynn knows that the goals are just what the customer needs to achieve.

They don’t tell her why the initiative is in place, and why it's a priority.

Question 2: What Pressures Are Affecting the Goals?

Pressures are what drives customers to prioritize and fund initiatives.

They are the internal and/or external business issues that significantly impact their ability to achieve the goals.

Lynn knows that pressures are key to a compelling insight map.

She's ideally looking for the "big money" pressures (the ones that decision makers would pay big money to eliminate). Focusing on big-money pressures ensures that her team is selling to the pressures the key players care most about.

Understanding the significance of the pressures gives Lynn and the team insight into the priority of the software-upgrade initiative for MyHealth. The team needs to learn all it can about those pressures.

They know it's important to keep in mind that pressures can be internal or external.

• Internal pressures are the result of problems within the business that can be fixed, but haven’t been.
• External pressures are issues beyond the business's direct control.

Big-money pressures typically fall into one of the following categories:

Common Internal Pressures

Category	Examples
Financial	Poor cash flow Rising costs Decreasing shareholder value
Operational	Low productivity High turnover Poor product quality

Common External Pressures

Category	Examples
Customer	Increasing customer demands
Competitive	Reputational damage Growing number of competitors
Market	Unfavorable economic conditions Regulatory requirements New emerging markets
Partner	Channel conflict Partner demands Weak performance
Suppliers	Growing supplier dependencies Declining performance
Technology	Rapid digital transformation

 

On their insight map, Lynn and the team capture the pressures that are affecting the decision makers' goals.

 

With all the relevant pressures identified, Lynn and the team can have the right kinds of conversations with MyHealth.

These conversations will assure MyHealth that the team at Retail POS understands their business needs.

Question 3: What Is the Initiative, and Is It a Priority?

In Lynn's opportunity, there's a single initiative: to upgrade the POS software at MyHealth pharmacies. The company expects that this upgrade will address the pressures captured on the insight map.

To determine how important this initiative is, Lynn and the team ask themselves:

• Does a key player lead the initiative?

If so, this confirms that MyHealth is committed to solving the problem.

• What is this initiative's priority compared to other initiatives?

Higher-priority initiatives are more likely to be allocated resources.

• Is there a compelling event?

In other words, is there a specific date by which the customer must have implemented the initiative if they are to avoid adverse consequences or derive the benefit they expect?

Question 4: What Obstacles Need to Be Overcome?

Obstacles are the operational problems a business needs to fix in order to resolve its business pressures. Something is broken, or doesn't exist, and needs to be fixed during the course of the initiative.

Typically, obstacles exist within one of the following:

• The organizational structure
• A process
• The company's culture
• People's skills
• Technology

On their insight map, Lynn and the team include any obstacles that are causing problems or issues, which if not resolved during the initiative will continue to cause business pressures.

Typical obstacles include:

• Inadequate or missing applications. In MyHealth's case, retail staff have to carry out manual administration tasks that the latest POS systems will do automatically.
• Slow or broken devices. For MyHealth, payment processing can sometimes be very slow.
• Lack of resources, skills, or tools. New MyHealth staff find the software difficult to learn, so getting new staff up to speed is an inefficient process.
• Ineffective processes or methods. Sophie Cooke, the digital operations manager, told Lynn that MyHealth is struggling to keep the current POS infrastructure running consistently because it puts too much strain on the company's IT resources.

 

The most important obstacles are those that require an existing process to be fixed, or a new one put in place. This is because the customer is more likely to commit funds to fixing something (such as POS software no longer meeting the company's needs) than to simply improving something that's not broken (such as providing more training).

Lynn and the team are particularly on the lookout for obstacles that Retail POS can solve better than any competitor.

On the insight map, they define each obstacle clearly, ensuring that:

• It's expressed in a way that helps to demonstrate Retail POS's unique business value (UBV) to MyHealth.
• It's quantifiable, so that the obstacle's magnitude is clear. An example is the amount of downtime the system suffers, and whether frequency of downtime is increasing.
• It describes something that's broken and needs to be fixed.

Question 5: How Can You Help the Customer to Be Successful?

The insight map tells a story about what the customer needs to achieve and why.

Lynn and the Retail POS team aim to offer MyHealth a solution that addresses some or all of the obstacles. This solution will help MyHealth deal with their business pressures so that they can achieve their goals.

But the team won't add any solution to the board until they're starting to feel confident that:

• They really can help MyHealth address their obstacles and pressures.
• The quality of the solution helps Retail POS to stand out from the competition.

Question 6: Are There Any Gaps in Your Knowledge, or in Your Solutions?

Lynn will review her team’s initial insight map with Susan Linton, her supporter at MyHealth, to make sure it's an accurate view of MyHealth’s current state and the state they want to reach.

As well as verifying the information, this review will also demonstrate to Susan that the team at Retail POS has been working hard to fully understand what MyHealth wants to achieve.

Susan may point out some information gaps on the board to help Lynn and the team develop it further. They probably won't fill all the gaps on the first review. Lynn and the team may need to connect with additional key players at MyHealth to find out everything they need to know.

Lynn and the team will also need think carefully about whether their solution fully addresses the obstacles on the board.

If they can offer just a partial solution, they may be able to find a partner to share the opportunity with, or they may be able to add a complementary solution to their proposal.

 

Lynn’s insight map is a nice visual representation of the decision makers' goals and what they need to do to deliver on them.

The board helps her to communicate this story in a way that creates value and earns her customer's trust.