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TruVoice™ Competitive Advantage ScoreUnderstanding Your Company’s Relative Advantage

Measuring Competitive AdvantageIn a sales opportunity, a buyer’s perception of your strengths and weaknesses against the competi-tion is what drives the final decision. TruVoice Profiler’s Competitive Advantage Score is a metric to describe how that buyer compared you to the competition through the buyer’s ratings in core deci-sion criteria. Typically those criteria are categorized as solution, sales, and company drivers.

Knowing your competitive advantage gives you the ability to bring value to your customers’ business-es and sets you apart from your competition. In order to deliver value that is above and beyond what your competition delivers, it is essential you understand your competition and their value proposition.

You not only need knowledge of your products and how these offerings fit into your customer’s business processes, but also need to understand the competition’s solutions, strengths, and weaknesses. Only after you understand your competitors, their businesses, their solutions, and their strategies will you truly be able to establish and maintain your competitive advantage.

Primary Intelligence’s Competitive Advantage ScoreThe Competitive Advantage Score is focused on performance gaps – where was the positive or negative differentiation? If you performed at a “10” but your competition also performed at a “10”, there was no differentiation.

The score has a range of -10 to +10. Scores less than 0 denote a disadvantage, while those great-er than 0 show an advantage for you. A score of 0 indicates that there was no advantage. If a score cannot be determined, typically due to incomplete ratings from the respondent, an em dash is used.

Your competitors represent one of the most important variables to the future success of your organization.

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10Competitor

You

Performance Gaps

{ } { }+10.0+5.0-5.0-10.0 0

The competition had an advantage over you You had an advantage over the competition

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How the Score is CalculatedThe advantage score is calculated for each driver (such as sales experience, solution performance, and company attitude) and then averaged into an overall score. The overall score uses a weighted average of the three drivers’ advantage scores to ensure decision drivers with more criteria are not inappropriately given more weight.

Example: Tenscon’s Advantage over SistemicCompetitor Solution Sales Team Company Overall Average

vs. Sistemic +5.5 +10.0 +6.2 +7.2 +2.1

Tenscon’s Competitive Advantage Score against Sistemic in this opportunity shows positive scores in every decision driver – Solution, Sales Team, Company. In fact, Tenscon exceeded their historical record against Sistemic in this deal. When competing against Sistemic, Tenscon typically has only a slight advantage (+2.1 advantage on average), but in this deal they had an overall advantage of +7.2 (where +10.0 is the strongest advantage possible). So, how did they do it?

Their strongest advantage was in the sales experi-ence they provided to the buyer (+10.0 – the stron-gest advantage against Sistemic possible). Tenscon outperformed Sistemic in 8 of 9 sales experience criteria, with significant advantages in Facilitating ease of purchase, Knowledge of your industry, Re-lationship with sales, and Responsiveness.

The Competitive Advantage score calculation is proprietary to Primary Intelligence, but in es-sence, we take the total gap (in this example: 3+2+4+2+2+2+3+3 = 21), compare it to the maxi-mum gap possible (10 points x 9 criteria = 90) and normalize to the range (-10.0 to +10.0).

Given all the large gaps, it’s easy to understand why Tenscon’s sales experience was perceived as superior by the buyer.

It’s worth noting that Tenscon’s performance was somewhat average – the average rating across all Sales criteria was only 7.7. But that’s not what the Advantage Score measures. Tenscon was much stronger than the closest competitor, Sistemic, which is what matters in the end. The Advantage Score measures your relative performance against the competition, not the rating scale.

Did You Know?• There is only a 5% likelihood

of a performance gap of +/- 4 points

• There is a 65% likelihood of a performance gap of +/-1 point

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Viewing the Score in TruVoice ProfilerThe Competitive Advantage Score is shown in two places in TruVoice Profiler.

1. Dashboard: opportunity tiles show the overall score against the strongest competitor. 2. Profile View: the slide-out analytics panel (left side of the page) displays detailed scores for

each vendor you competed against.a. Your score in each decision driverb. Your overall score against each competitorc. Your typical score against the competitor for all other evaluated deals

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Win-Back OpportunitiesOn your dashboard, filter on losses only and look for the deals with a positive score. These are deals you lost even though you had an advantage against the winning vendor, indicating a win-back poten-tial for future deals.

Putting it All TogetherThe Competitive Advantage Score allows you to quickly see the performance advantages or disadvantages you had in a particular deal versus your competitors. This is essentially the buyer’s per-ception of your solution, sales team, and company attributes in comparison to your competitors.

Understanding your advantages and disadvantages in your oppor-tunities helps set you apart from your competitors and strategize for your next opportunities

Need More Help?To further discuss your opportunities’ Competitive Advantage Scores, please contact your Primary Intelligence Program Consul-tant.

Points to Remember• A score of +10 and a score of

-10 both represent differentiation. A score of 0 means the buyer perceived no difference between you and the competition.

• Buyers typically select the ven-dor who performed the best, but sometimes you’ll lose even with strong positive differentiation. Buyers may make their decision on another dimension—such as choosing on price alone.