If you’ve been reading our blog, you know by now that customer experience management is an exercise in perspectives. In a way, it’s almost like an elaborate game of Telephone: the further you are from a customer’s transaction, the more disconnected you become from their needs, their concerns, and their purpose for doing business with you.
Far away from the customer, it becomes easy to buy into intuition and personal perspective. After all, our own intuition is valuable. It’s led to our respective cubicles, conference rooms, and corner offices.
But it’s a mistake to rely solely on your own point of view.
If you're trying to improve the way you make decisions, you should be trying to reveal and incorporate as many perspectives as possible. And I’ll give you two reasons why.
1. Subjectivity facilitates poor decisions and mediocre customer experiences.
Sales offers a good example of the power of perspectives. For companies with complex sales processes and big-ticket contracts, every interaction between a sales rep and a prospect can add up to—or negatively impact—the final outcome.
And sales reps have to forecast all of those outcomes internally: first to a manager, who rolls it up to a supervisor, who rolls it up to another supervisor, who submits it to a VP, who shares it with leadership.
So it really is a lot like Telephone.
The scary part of it is, in such a forecasting scenario, leadership will make financial and sales strategy decisions on that game of Telephone—on a complex combination of perspective, intuition, hearsay, and interpretation.
Again, the further you get from the interaction between a sales rep and a prospect, the more people can project their biases onto the interpretation of the event. Each layer of distance from the interaction provides another opportunity for subjective twisting of the narrative.
2. You’re only biding time till the inevitable happens.
Reason the second: gut feel is only going to take you so far.
It'll take you roughly to a harsh dose of reality.
But how do you resolve disconnects between intuition and fact? How do you make better decisions, and avoid the long and drawn-out anxieties of waiting for the inevitable?
Collecting customer feedback—and in this particular scenario, prospect feedback—can help. If you tie that feedback to the interaction, your customers’ and prospects’ perspective will be clear. And their perspective will help balance any projected biases as the interaction is passed up the corporate ladder.
The Trifecta Method: A Step Forward in Sales Forecasting Methods
To help resolve issues with gut feel in sales, we’ve developed a new forecasting approach called “The Trifecta Method.” It surpasses other sales forecasting methods by letting sales reps use prospect feedback (collected through Authentic Prospect Voice) to validate their intuition about the progress of deals. This means they can be more confident and accurate in their forecasts.
If you’re interested in getting our free ebook about The Trifecta Method for more accurate sales forecasting, then click the image below to download your copy:
And as always, if you want to keep up to date with us, you can subscribe to our blog for notifications of new posts, sent right to your inbox.
Thanks for reading! See you soon.
%20(1).png)