We are selling an Enterprise software product and during the course of last year I had many contacts to many companies that evaluated the product, some of which ended up as clients, others did not. Usually I called the prospects asking why they choose not to buy our product if they decided against it.
I would now like to have a more structured approach to get some understanding what we do right or wrong with our offering – is it the product, is it the service, is it the price or anything else (what should I ask?). My goal is to convert more prospects into clients.
My initial idea is to conduct on online survey and send an invitation to all the people I had contact with last year. Do you think this is a good approach? If so, which questions do I need to ask? (I am assuming there is a typical set of questions to ask). I would like to keep the set of questions as small as possible in order to make answering the survey more attractive.
Or should I take another approach? I am also glad about any additional pointers.
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Jay’s Answer: I don’t know how many people you need to contact (and the lifetime value of the prospect), but if it’s under a couple of hundred people, I would call them. An online survey request is all to easy to ignore. What you really want is a dialog.
Before contacting any of them, create a script that could use either for a survey (should you wish) or a phone call. The script would be very similar to the one you would use when you initially contacting them: 1) confirming that they are a decision maker for this service/product, 2) finding out their current solution to the product/service, 3) confirming that they would be interested in a better solution, 4) determining a budget for it, etc.
When you contact them the first time, you needed to learn about their organization’s needs first, then you could sell them your solution. If after testing, your solution was rejected, I would go over the answers that they initially provided to see where their answers and your solutions didn’t "match up".