Though the virus has not been successful in contacting most of us, its impact financially and socially is felt by all. The most obvious influences it had is on how we interact with each other. It has forced most of us to work from home and use digital technologies as our primary medium of communication. This slight change has greatly impacted how we understand our customers and our competitors.
Working from home in virtual offices has changed the interpersonal interactions between colleagues and also with customers. We are definitely saving a lot of cost and time for commute and enjoying the convenience of our homes. But, there are some flipsides to this arrangement. We now have a fixed time allotted for all interactions and a clear agenda for our calls. We are missing out on casual conversations with our colleagues and our customers. It is estimated that about 55% of the sales people get competitive and customer intelligence from informal interactions (https://hbr.org/2016/01/only-half-of-companies-actually-use-the-competitive-intelligence-they-collect).
Our selling interactions with our customers would probably continue to be virtual for a while. We are not only missing out on the non-verbal cues of face to face interactions, but also on the opportunity to develop close customer relationships. We do not have the opportunity to chat with customers while waiting or while walking into the meeting room. Nor do we have the opportunity to exchange ideas casually over a post-meeting coffee. The quality of our understanding of customer’s challenges and priorities would suffer to some extent. But is there something we can do to change this?
Our interactions with our colleagues would also remain mostly virtual. We may be observing some initial increase in work productivity from working from home, but we are missing out on the casual chats by the water cooler. Though sales reps may be sharing information about their customer interaction to their managers, this information is often not transmitted laterally to fellow colleagues. This information about the customer preferences or the competitor would be very valuable to a colleague who would be selling to the same market. Incidentally the amount of information we gain from our colleagues in the current circumstances is lower than before. Can we do something about this?
Surely there must be something we can do, and there is. A problem caused due to digitalization, ironically has a digital solution - to enhance the communication between colleagues on customer and competitive intelligence. An enhanced CRM, that can collect, analyse and disseminate competitive intelligence would be extremely helpful in bridging the information gap between colleagues. The analysis, filtering and assimilation is generally done by a team of competitive intelligence experts and distributed centrally through CRM. Integrating competitive intelligence within CRM provides the following advantages:
- It saves the sales teams, the time and effort to dig through and filter out large amounts of probably outdated competitive intelligence information within the company
- It helps in providing access to competitive data to sales teams exactly when they are looking for it, right inside their CRM opportunities.
- It helps in maintaining the quality of data as there is only one source of periodically updated competitive information within CRM.
This solution would solve the challenge of distribution of competitive insights across the organization while retaining the quality of the data. This in turn helps you understand your market better and stay ahead of your competitors.
In case you are an existing Salesforce user, there are a few solutions already available for you to use. Please explore them on Salesforce Appexchange. For more content on competitive strategy, please follow us on Thandra Consulting company page on LinkedIn.