You know that you have the right stuff: the right products and services, the right solution for the prospect, and the right organization. But they just won’t return your calls! One of the most critical factors in compressing any sales cycle, indeed in getting a foot in the door, is getting that prospect to return your first attempt at communications.

1. Improve Your Success Rate: Cut Customer Response Time in Half
Improve Your Success Rate: Cut
Customer Response Time in Half
everythingchannel.com www.iped.com

2. Improve Your Success Rate: Cut Customer Response Time in Half
You know that you have the right stuff: the right products and services, the right
solution for the prospect, and the right organization. But they just won’t return your
calls!
One of the most critical factors in compressing any sales cycle, indeed in getting a foot
in the door, is getting that prospect to return your first attempt at communications.
For Solution Providers with average success rates this means an average of more than 5
attempts to contact a prospect, before you will even receive a single call back.
Our research has determined that these results have a high probability of meaning
that, even when you do get a call back, the game may be over. Either you are now in a
“beauty contest” or a competitor has already convinced this prospect about the nature
of both their challenge and solution. In either case, your chances of now winning this
business are slim or none - and usually none.
Solution Providers that achieve best in class business performance have a dramatically
better than average call back rate. In more than 50% of the time, they get a response
with less than 3 calls, and frequently from just a single call.
So what is the “secret sauce” that best in class Solution Providers use to so strikingly
improve their response rates and win the most critical part of the pre-sales game:
Defining the priority business issues to be addressed?
Best practices of these winning solution providers follow a straight forward but very
powerful set of approaches:
1. Do your homework before the first call : Analyze the customers specific issues and
potential opportunities from readily available data and always have a value adding
piece of insight available to share in the very first contact
2. Quantify the potential benefits: Determine a “ball park” level of potential financial
benefits for the client. Remember that every one of your solutions has to compete
with other investment opportunities. Will yours be in the prospect’s top five?
3. Indicate the competitive implications: Every prospect has lost some sale to a
competitor that they feel they should not have lost. Position your solution in the
context of gaining relative competitive advantage and winning that type of deal next
time.
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3. Improve Your Success Rate: Cut Customer Response Time in Half
ABOUT IPED
The Institute for Partner Education & Development (IPED) is the profes-
sional services division of the CMP Channel Group. IPED applies proven
best practices to deliver customized recommendations that accelerate
channel revenue through access to exclusive data and expert analysis.
With over 20 years of institutional knowledge, IPED is the only professional
services organization that can leverage the resources of the CMP Chan-
nel Group, the unrivaled leading provider of information and access to the
Channel. We empower vendors to understand and react to the motivators
and business value propositions that matter most to their partners.
Services for Vendors
• IPED empowers vendors to understand and react to the motivators and
business value propositions that matter most to their partners.
• This knowledge enables vendors to forge mutually profitable and long
lasting relationships with their channel partners.
• Differentiate their approach to channel partnership by enhancing their
business value proposition.
• Through data collection, analysis and interpretation, IPED provides market
intelligence that will set them apart from their competitors.
• IPED’s proven methodology helps technology vendors support to their
Solution Providers and present their portfolio of technology and business
solutions for a mutually beneficial business relationship.
For access to channel sales and marketing resources that focus on increas-
ing channel revenue, contact:
The Institute for Partner Education & Development
www.iped.com
Toni Clayton Hine
tclayton@cmp.co
212-600-3113
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