The After Event Review: How to Use it for Competitive Advantage

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The After Event Review: How to Use it for Competitive Advantage

By Andrew Rudin, CEO, Outside Technologies, Inc.

Instead of "don't bring me excuses!" the edict becomes "bring me problems!"

"Bring me sales, not excuses!" Who hasn’t heard this sales management machismo at least once in their career? While successful executives are adept at motivation, those that perpetuate this sales-not-excuses mindset create an insidious financial risk, ripe for competitive exploitation: inadequate knowledge transfer.

Here's an actual scenario to illustrate the point (the company names are changed to protect the not-so-innocent): Advanced Technologies, Inc. lost a $500,000 sale at Indoor Products, Inc. to archrival Total Integration Services. Denise, the Advanced Technologies account executive, explained to her boss that she lost the sale for two reasons. First, their proposal lacked a capability that Total Integration provided as a custom add-on. Second, her sales support team was unable to meet with Indoor Products on the one day available to all of the decision makers. Consequently, she held a solo meeting the division VP of Operations, and she was relegated to email communication with the other senior managers involved in the purchase decision.

Denise's boss felt that she mismanaged the sale, and was only providing excuses. She should have been able to overcome the functional limitation by touting the other strong capabilities of her packaged software solution. In addition, he felt the reason she wasn't able to schedule a face-to-face meeting with the other executives was because she didn't try hard enough. Her opinions from her frontline experience were dismissed as excuses, and none of the information she provided was shared internally. No knowledge was transferred. No changes were considered for product or process. The issues she identified never went further than her boss and her two closest colleagues.

Did Denise mismanage the opportunity with Indoor Products? The answer could range from maybe to definitely. Regardless of the answer, do the problems she identified still exist? Yes. When the account executive for Total Integration brings the order to his boss, does he know the reasons he won the order? No doubt. Could his company exploit these advantages, and claim further wins from Denise's company? Yes. Should the identified risks be reduced or eliminated? That is a management question that the Advanced Technologies sales manager should have considered, but didn't. The takeaway: if firsthand event observations are framed as "excuses," there is high risk for repeated failure. No organization can achieve its goals when the causes of mission-critical failures, such as lost revenue opportunities, aren't corrected. When organizational learning doesn't occur, business goals aren't met, employees become discontent, valuable talent leaves the company, and hiring and training expenses escalate - creating a vicious cycle that extinguishes itself when revenue consistently no longer covers expenses and the company fails as a going concern.

Enter the After Event Review as an integrated part of the sales process. What is an After Event Review? A formal analysis of past events that uncovers what happened, documents the information, draws conclusions, gains insight, and shares the information. Instead of "don't bring me excuses!" the edict becomes "bring me problems!" For now, the key deliverable is to find out everything that went wrong along with what went right. The review will not generate business value if it primarily acts as a vehicle for assigning blame or for advancing personal agendas. According to Ryan Nelson, in "Project Retrospectives: Evaluating Project Success, Failure, and Everything In Between" (MIS Quarterly Executive, September, 2005), the manager at one company said ". . . reviews tend to be witch hunts, where the innocent get punished and the guilty get promoted." In other cases, reviews are seen merely as 'checklist items'. Enterprises conduct them, but do not apply the lessons learned. In order to deliver value, the review must enable learning and knowledge transfer through discovery.

Effective reviews

Capture important information from customers and prospects
Provide risk identification and mitigation
Promote organizational learning
Facilitate continuous improvement efforts
Enable more accurate sales forecasting
Facilitate team building
Improve attention to detail in recognizing and reflecting on success factors and problems

Every review should answer these six key questions:

What was the intended outcome?

Effective reviews demand specifics. For example, problems can be more readily identified if the answer provided is: "sell Indoor Products our Tier 1 Suite of application software for $500,000 by Q3, 2005," vs. "make a sale to Indoor Products." Specific outcome statements enable three valuable findings: 1) how clear was the expected outcome from to begin with, and did it change during the engagement? 2) what were the components of the outcome? and 3) what went right as well as what went wrong?

Sometimes, the analysis reveals that the stakeholders were unclear about the intended outcome from the beginning - an important and all too common cause of failure. Through deconstructing the outcome into multiple deliverables, managers have a context to identify and fix specific problems. Figuring out what went right is as important as knowing what went wrong, so an effective review must explore both situations.

What happened?

The answer to this question should be detailed, but does not need to be lengthy. In the example, the best answer is "Indoor Products chose to purchase a combination of custom and licensed application software and services from Total Integration for $508,000. Indoor Products plans to install the software Q1, 2006 and go live in Q2," vs. "Indoor Products placed an order with our competitor."

What was learned?

This section represents the heart of the review, and requires the most thought and time. All stakeholders must candidly and objectively figure out what caused the disparity between actual and goal, and distill those findings into understandable statements. This discussion requires completely open discourse. Any ego that enters the conference room will quickly become an impediment, as the review often identifies multiple failure points, including managerial. If Denise's company conducted a review of her lost opportunity, here is what would have been discovered:

The absence of Feature X was identified as a reason that our product did not compare favorably to Total Integration. Feature X could have enabled our client to reduce administrative costs by $100,000 per year, based on their estimates. That reduction represents 5% of their overall administrative costs. Because our competition offered this feature, Indoor Products believed they offered a better value. It is possible that the absence of this feature could result in other lost sales.
The sales team was not ready for this requirement when we conducted our on-site demonstration, and we were not familiar with it. Our two prior discovery meetings didn't expose Feature X as a need. Our pre-sales preparation was insufficient, because it didn't expose this requirement.
During the demo, the closest work-around for Feature X was a three-step process consisting of five screens. Using their legacy software that includes Feature X, Indoor Products uses one screen in a single step. Therefore, the customer perceived that our software was complicated and lacked flexibility. Beyond doing a better job in discovery (#2), we need to improve how we manage our answers during demos regarding non-standard features.
The requirement for Feature X was included in Denise's follow-up report to Colleen in Development, but Colleen didn't transfer the requirement to her operations report, and it was never considered for inclusion in the development queue. The feature fell off the radar for future releases of the software. We believe there are inadequate controls to ensure customer needs are consistently communicated and prioritized.
No one from the sales support team was able to make the proposal presentation meeting the customer preferred because all trips scheduled on less than three days notice require the department manager's approval. The manager was on vacation and could not respond in time. The process for securing mission-critical resources represents a bottleneck and likely failure point that could jeopardize future opportunities.

In general, many of the findings will be from internal sources because the knowledge is easily accessible. But the insights from the prospective customer and other stakeholders, such as technology partners are also crucial. Most customers will meet to provide opinions when the reason for meeting focuses on fact-finding. Trust and value will evaporate if the discussion devolves into second guessing decisions or trying to change your customer's mind. The best approach is to plan for this meeting at the beginning of your sales engagement by asking "whatever you decide on our proposal, can I have your commitment to meet following your decision to discuss the reasons why?" Some companies outsource the post-sale review to organizations that can provide objectivity, consistency, and standards to the review process. In any case, the information gleaned from customers will improve the quality and value of the review significantly.

What do we do now?

This section prioritizes what should be completed in order of greatest to least impact. The impact criteria will vary from company to company, but the same question should always be asked in assessing impact: "which problem represents the greatest risk to achieving our business goals?" Smaller organizations will be able to determine whether other current opportunities face imminent risk of failing if the problems identified are not corrected, whereas larger organizations may need to collaborate with other business units to share findings before priority can be assigned. The recommendations should be succinct and unambiguous:

Document the discovery of Feature X as a customer need
Add Feature X for consideration on the software development queue
Improve the processes for communicating prospect needs from the sales team to development
Change the proposal process to evaluate and include any needed custom modifications
Change the process for acquiring pre-sales resources to enable flexibility and agility in meeting prospect scheduling needs
Document the loss, including the total financial value (present and future)

Who else should we tell?

Clearly, the value of the review depends on who has access to the information and what actions are taken as a result. The answers to the previous question, what do we do now, must be included in this section.

Action item	Who needs to know
Document the discovery of Feature X as a customer need	Development Manager, Pre-sales support manager, Marketing Manager, Sales Manager, Channel Sales Manager, Channel partners, Customer Support Manager
Add Feature X for consideration on the software development queue	Development Manager, Marketing Manager, Sales Manager
Improve the processes for communicating prospect needs from the sales team to development	Sales Manager, Sales Operations Manager, Development Manager
Change the proposal process to evaluate and include any needed custom modifications	Sales Manager, Sales Operations Manager, Development Manager
Write a loss report including the total financial value (present and future)	CFO, COO, Sales Manager
Change the process for acquiring pre-sales resources to enable flexibility and agility in meeting prospect scheduling needs	Sales Manager, HR Manager, Pre-sales Support Manager

How do we tell them?

The review team must determine whether to share findings by reporting methods already in use, such as Win/loss reports, CRM systems, and collaborative management tools, or whether the communications require other means. Those could be special memos or documents, project announcements, meetings, etc. Whatever method is chosen must possess three important, interdependent qualities: timeliness, clarity, and accountability. The most effective reviews will communicate findings in a timeframe that is congruent with the urgency of the needed repair. The action items must be unambiguous so a manager can readily decide whether or not the recommendation merits resources. If a manager decides to take no action, there must be oversight so that he or she is accountable for his/her decision. In general, communications from reviews should be sent to more than one person and should be specific about who needs to decide on what specific action.

Where's the value?

By answering the following questions, you will be able to determine whether After Event Reviews should be a regular, integrated part of your sales processes: What value do we need our sales force to contribute to achieve our goals? How important is knowledge management to my corporate strategy? How do we identify and mitigate risk in our organization? How valuable are field-level observations about market needs and product fit?

The story about Denise's lost opportunity could have had a happier ending if her company could have made some near-term course corrections by engaging in an objective examination of the loss and making changes based on the insight gained. The results could range from new strategies to tactics that provide competitive advantage. Observations and findings are an inevitable byproduct of any business activity. But unless insight is obtained and shared from these findings, losses will extend beyond revenue because when essential knowledge is not uncovered, documented, or shared, resources are wasted. The After Event Review can provide a means to achieve sustainable increases to corporate value through lower sales risk and improved financial performance.

Andy Rudin is the CEO of Outside Technologies, a sales mangement consultantcy. His company helps clients generate more revenue through outsourced sales . For more information on the services offered visit http://www.outsidetechnologies.com. Andy can be reached at 703.371.1242 or info@outsidetechnologies.com

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