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Study Indicates Sales Organizations Still Searching For Answers

Competitive Intelligence, Win-Loss Analysis Rarely Being Addressed by CRM Systems – Cerado™, Inc., a provider of sales force information services, today announced the results of a study which indicates that, despite recent investments in CRM and other technologies, sales and marketing professionals are still looking for ways to significantly improve their effectiveness.

HALF MOON BAY, CA July 21, 2003 – Cerado™, Inc., a provider of sales force information services, today announced the results of a study which indicates that, despite recent investments in CRM and other technologies, sales and marketing professionals are still looking for ways to significantly improve their effectiveness.

The survey indicated that sales teams are being forced to compete in complex, dynamic environments with many competitors, and often do not have current information about their competitive situation. It also has identified an important gap in current sales processes and systems around the management of win-loss information.

While the respondents felt that having better competitive and win-loss information would enable them to sell more effectively, a large number did not have these capabilities today. Additionally, for the organizations that were performing some type of win-loss analysis, the processes and systems for both the gathering of the information and the dissemination of it were primarily ad-hoc.

Key findings of the survey include:

- 49% of the respondents have more than five primary competitors in their market.

- Only 27% of respondents have tailored competitive points by competitor.

- Only 4% of respondents have a dedicated competitive analysis team analyze win-loss information in their organizations.

- 46% of the respondents said that win-loss information is rarely captured in their organizations each quarter.

- The primary tool for capturing win-loss information was Microsoft Excel, used by 19% of the respondents. Email and ACT! tied for second place, each with 14%. Microsoft Word was in fourth place, at 10%. CRM / SFA systems were rarely used for capturing win-loss information. No CRM / SFA system (e.g. Siebel, Salesforce.com, etc.) was mentioned more than 3% of the time as the system that was used to capture win-loss information.

- 51% of the respondents stated they analyzed win-loss information in an “ad-hoc” manner.

- Email was the most common way of sharing win-loss information, at 47%.

- 79% of the respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “having improved access to win-loss information would allow them to sell against the competition more effectively.”