I’ve been conducting digital marketing research in support of our sales team for about six years. This is a shortlist of observations I’ve made over the years that have developed into maxims that I train junior analysts on when they come on board. I thought I’d share them with the community.

This is the first piece of training material I have a new analyst read – I’ve copied it here for you verbatim:

Being Comprehensive vs. Doing What is Sufficient

In most cases, you do not have to be 100% comprehensive with your analysis, you only need to be as comprehensive as is sufficient to achieve your objective, which is to support the sales rep with research that will close the deal (in practice being 100% comprehensive is usually impossible anyway). You can go deeper with your analysis if you have extra time, but only be as comprehensive as your task queue will allow. 

Research & analysis is conducted to reduce informational entropy (that is, we do this to reduce the amount of stuff we don’t know). In most cases, your research and analysis only need to reduce enough entropy to enable you to accomplish your objective and do not need to be more comprehensive than that. 

Focus on Pain, Gain, and ‘Smerts’

Focus on these three things as much as possible:

1. Pain points (competitive gaps, knowledge gaps, complexity, known pain, unknown pain, etc.) how we can help the prospect overcome them, what the impact will be.
2. Opportunities, how we can help the prospect seize them, what the impact will be.
3. Strategic insights (build a competitive advantage, impose an asymmetric cost on competitors, etc.), how we can help the prospect attain them, what the impact will be.

Do Not Let Prospects See Work You Are Not Proud Of

This is simple; if you are not proud of the proposal, make it better. Get feedback from another analyst. Get feedback from me. Get feedback from the sales rep. Improve it until you are proud enough of it to show it off. You’ve got to make sure you balance this with managing your time well and respecting your deadlines, but you should be proud of your work!

Practice Good Design Hygiene

The design elements of each slide should look well put together. You should make proper use of white space. The aesthetics should not create friction. There should be no grammatical inconsistencies or spelling errors. Spaces between elements should be congruent. Etc. 

Prospects will lose trust in our ability to act as an agent on behalf of their brand and company if we can’t even deliver a proposal with decent design hygiene. Fix this. Your close rate will improve. You will get more bonuses. Just fix it.

Design hygiene is the difference between a “D” grade proposal and a “C” grade proposal. Understanding the material is the difference between a “C” grade proposal and a “B” grade proposal. An “A” grade proposal (read: “strategy” here, because that’s the fruit of our research) is executable and a good strategic bet.

Do Not Let Prospects See Insights You Are Not Confident About

When you perform your analysis, you have to be 100% confident that your insights & conclusions are correct if you are going to present them to a prospect. If you are not, then either use qualifying language in the proposal, frame the insight as a signal & let the prospect know we will investigate further upon engagement, or do not include the insight in the proposal.

Analysts (jokingly but also seriously) use the following thought experiment to determine if they are confident in their insights; ask yourself the following question: “if Bill Gates walked into this office and bet me a billion dollars that my insight is correct, but if I lost the bet he would cut my arms and legs off and transplant them to a paraplegic child, would I take the bet?” If the answer is “yes,” then you are confident enough in your insight to present it to the prospect.

Do Not Make the Prospect Think Too Much

In sales presentations, we want the prospect to have to encounter as little friction as possible in order to understand our analysis. The best prospects are the ones who ask thoughtful questions, not because they object to our research, but because we’ve piqued their curiosity and they’re engaging with the sales rep.

Everything should be explained, easy to understand, and simple. Ideally, the sales rep will give their presentation to the prospect – who will easily comprehend everything presented without the research causing objection. The less they object to the research, the more they can focus on insights and opportunities – which makes it easier for the sales rep to make the sale. 

Disorganized Research is Worse Than a Bad Proposal

Here is why: if a proposal is bad, a senior team member (or the sales rep) can catch the mistakes when we review the proposal & research. But if the research is so disorganized that we cannot make heads or tails of it then we cannot catch mistakes. This means proposals have a better chance of going out to prospects with mistakes in them. That’s not good.

Furthermore, how can the operations team benefit from your research if they cannot understand it? Use simple, easy-to-understand naming conventions, keep all the files organized in the folders, and always put the same files in the same locations.

Visual Usually Beats Text – But Not All The Time

Humans are better at understanding data visually. Use visualization to create an impact if you can reveal the following visually:

• A compelling trend
• A compelling contrast
• Compelling data clusters
• To reveal context
• The insight you’re communicating is more concise or easier to understand if the data is presented visually

Otherwise, don’t overload the proposal with visualizations and keep things concise by using text.

Polaroid Slides: Rendered in 60 Seconds

A prospect should understand the principal idea of a slide within 30 to 60 seconds or less. The sales rep should not need to take more than a few minutes to explain a slide. If a slide takes longer than that to understand, it needs to be revised.

Most people will misunderstand you if your story isn’t outrageously clear, concrete, and easy to understand – this is simply an unfortunate reality of giving presentations and telling stories with data.

Try to communicate a single insight with each slide and cut a slide if it doesn’t communicate an insight.

Short and Sweet and Nice and Neat

Keep the proposal as concise as possible. There is an inverse ratio to the length of a proposal and the chance it has for closing (I have tracked it). Try not to add too many more slides than there already are in the template.

The worst performing sales reps ask for and add the most custom slides to their proposals (I have tracked this too). In addition to being too large, the worst-performing proposals tend to be the ones that deviate the most from the template (that is across the board for all sales reps – even the top ones).

The template is tried and true, we’ve revised the template hundreds of times and we know it closes deals – stick to the template. Also, keep the formatting neat and on-brand.

Find Opportunity in Chaos

Do not be too harsh or too negative on prospects when their performance is a stinker. Focus on how the current problems are an opportunity and try to frame your comments in a positive way.

We do not want to put prospects in a negative frame of mind, and we don’t want to wound any egos. This doesn’t mean you should give every prospect good grades, either – use your best judgment.

You have got to show the prospects they need us. Just don’t make them feel like their dog died.

Put Data Into Context

Metrics are useless without context. And bad analysts tell lies with data by either omitting the context or doctoring it. Don’t do that.

Here is an example:

1. Say the prospect tells the sales rep that they don’t need an SEO upsell because their traffic has been trending up by 5% per month for the last 8 months.
2. Because you are a smart analyst, you tell the sales rep you will check the greater market context.
3. When you look at the historic trends for the prospect’s top keywords, you discover that the volume in their niche has been trending up by 12% per month!
4. You create a slide showing the trends and the sales rep pitches the prospect on the fact that they aren’t trending up and that they are in fact losing share of search to their competitors.
5. The sales rep wins the upsell. You get a bonus.

See? Context matters. Put your metrics into context.

You Are Biased and Blinded By Your Own Self Interest

Everyone is. Without exception. In order to be a good analyst, you have to constantly play whack-a-mole with all of your biases. When you do, you will thank yourself for it. You will also discover that your biases aren’t actually always in your best self-interest, which can be interesting to learn. 

You must always be on guard for your biases when you’re working on proposals. You must not put your own self-interest ahead of the greater good of the company, its employees, and stakeholders.

You also need to monitor leadership as well, because we are also susceptible to this ourselves. You also need to monitor the sales reps, because they are also susceptible to it. Sometimes a sales rep is tempted by a big commission and wants to close a client that’s not a good fit, for example. If you notice anything like this happening, and you don’t feel comfortable speaking up, you can come and talk to me, I’m willing to speak up for you if I think you’re right. And don’t worry about criticizing me if I’m the one doing it – I’m more concerned with being right and doing the best work I can than looking good, covering my arse, or avoiding cognitive dissonance. I will probably thank you for the feedback.

You Are A Divergent Force. Leadership Is A Convergent Force.

Here is how I structure this department in order to maximize innovation: your job is to be a divergent force for innovation. You can throw as many ideas as you want at the leadership team or at me. If you read about a cool digital marketing tactic and you want to make a slide, go ahead and make the slide and show it to us.

We act as the convergent force; you can think of us as a filter. We are going to decide to adopt some of your ideas, and we’re going to shoot some down.

Your job is to keep firing off ideas, even the moonshots.

Our job is to choose the right ones – because we have perspectives that you don’t have.

I spent the first four years I worked at Ignite throwing hair-brained ideas at the co-founder, but it worked – we have ended up crafting an excellent proposal. And to put things into perspective, he probably shot down 80% to 90% of my suggestions. But that did not matter. Make sense?

Be Willing To Kill Your Beautiful Creations

Sometimes during the course of your analysis, you have this beautiful creation, this beautiful idea – and you love that idea because it’s just so beautiful.

But along comes the ugly truth in one of its many forms, and you’ve got to kill that pretty idea. You’ve got to sacrifice it on the altar of truth.

But you don’t want to, because it’s just so pretty. But you’ve got to be willing to do that.

Be careful you’re not blinding yourself in this way.

Research Is A Means To An End Not An End In Itself. Solve For An Objective.

In most cases, the objective of research & analysis is to enable a decision-maker to make a more informed decision. In our case, the decision-maker is our sales prospect – we want to provide our sales staff with enough research to consult with them effectively so they can make an informed decision. Similar to servant-leadership – you can consider this like servant-selling – and our job is to support them while keeping maxim 01 in mind.

We have two objectives with our research:

1. Win the deal.
2. Reduce informational entropy – that is to say, reduce enough of what our sales prospect doesn’t know to enable them to make an informed strategic decision.