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Mystery Shopping in ECM

Generating leads is a big part of the business for a software vendor, but too often, it is the weakest link.  It often seems that the major qualification for telesales is the ability to fog a mirror.  That American idiom that has you put a mirror under a body’s nose to see if it fogs to show any sense of life.  But how can you know how your sales team is doing if they are not being evaluated regularly?  What you need is to bring on mystery shoppers.

The use of mystery shoppers is a common way for retail stores to evaluate guest shopping experiences.  The “mystery shopper” pretends to be a customer and has a typical shopping experience and reports back any deviations.  It wouldn’t be hard to include a mystery shopper in an on-line sales engine.  And one shopper could easily test a whole team.

Why do we need Mystery Shoppers?

It seems to me that most vendors are not doing any evaluation of their sales leads team.  Maybe the sales lead teams are only compensated by the number of calls they make instead of the number of deals they add to the pipeline.  It just seems to me that over the last few years the quality has dropped off.  I have seen many instances that are embarrassing to a vendor’s brand.  Here are some of the things I’ve seen:

It’s About Missed Opportunities Too

Mystery shoppers are also a good way to test if you’re missing opportunities.  Are you sure that you’re leads engine identifies all opportunities?  I talk a lot about how organizations sell “Enterprise Content Management” but customers are often looking for solutions to manage their “documents” or more specific “contracts”.  Shouldn’t this be tested? New solutions especially deserve to be reviewed.

Just Do It!

Organizations spend a lot of money and rely on their leads engine to fill their pipeline. Spending a little more to see if it’s making some of these simple mistakes seems like a no brainer.  It could be set up in house or done with an outside consultant. Why sit over their shoulder where they can see you and only hear half of the conversation?  What you learn may amaze you.

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