In 2018, leading enterprise technology companies (software, value engineering, system integration) are investing to improve online engagement across all channels. If your company has a diverse portfolio of enterprise solution offerings that requires a more complex sales cycle, your competitors likely follow the same content marketing playbook with webinars, white papers, and articles.
When a customer lands on your website, how are you engaging them to discover their business needs and recommend correct solutions?
How to Stand out from Competition
To combat these trends and stand out from competition, enterprise software companies like SAP, Informatica, and Adobe have embraced online assessments as a tool to provide a deeper level of self discovery and demonstrate thought leadership in their respective markets.
Only 29% of people want to talk to a salesperson to learn more about a product, while 62% will consult a search engine. (HubSpot, 2016).
What is an Online Assessment?
An online assessment collects user input in a survey, performs analysis, and delivers recommendations in the form of a report or summary. There are 2 important components:
Capture Business Pains
1. Assessment Survey
An assessment survey contains a series of business questions with quantitative inputs (rankings, ratings, etc). The goal is to quantify the business criticality of your customers' challenges. Presumably these are business challenges that can be resolved through products and services. Online assessments should be highly focused on industry and/or line of business topics that matter to your customer.
Align Solutions to your Offerings
2. Assessment Report
An assessment report provides a summary of the customer's appraisal with industry insights, benchmarks, and calculated results that help customers prioritize and alignment their business challenges to proposed solution offerings.
TIP: Think of personalized assessment reports as a "Whitepaper 2.0." You can demonstrate your market thought leadership, share key figures, industry stats, and align your customer's business pains to solutions and industry benchmarks.
Why Customers Value Online Assessments
To create immediate value to your customer, online assessment should quantifying the impact and business criticality of addressing business challenges. The outcome of a successful online assessment is clear and concise recommendations for solving business challenges.
Business Focus
Align customer business pains with your offerings
Quantifiable Impact
Understand impact and business criticality
Better Web Experience
Push relevant, prioritized content to prospects.
Personalization
Suggest personalized recommendations based on line of business and/or industry.
What are potential outcomes of using Online Assessments?
Accelerate your Customer’s Journey
Streamline the “discovery” process and deliver highly qualified leads to your sales team.
Demonstrate thought leadership
Showcase your understanding of your customer’s industry and line of business challenges.
Establish Industry / Line of Business Benchmarks
Create benchmark data (based on your assessment usage growth) so customers know how they compare to industry or line of business peers.
Feedback loop to your engineering / center of excellence
Track what features, products, and services are most /least impactful to customers. Systematically relay new business pains that need to be addressed.
Measure customer adoption over time
Prioritize the right solution offerings, and what impact those solutions have on your customer’s business through the entire lifecycle.
Create Strategic Partnerships with Customers
Leverage assessments for value engineering and center of excellence workshops. Help customers use assessments for strategic planning.
How do I get started?
Schedule a Free Consultation!
Contact us to discuss how you can utilize our Strategy Assessments playbook to surge ahead of your competitors.
Learn about our Assessment Toolkit
Learn how to use our solution assessment playbook and technology approach and deliver your assessment faster.
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