A great line from Top Gun has a place in every tech company —“I feel the need … the need for speed.” There are a lot of clichés that come to mind: ‘The early bird catches the worm’, ‘Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today’, ‘If you are early, you are on time. If you are on time, you are late’, etc. In business tech-speak, we refer to ‘time to value’ and ‘response time.’ No matter what part of the value chain we are describing, faster response to client/prospect needs is better. Here are a few examples I experienced.
One company suddenly saw a dramatic uptick in qualified leads being passed to the sales team. The marketing message had not changed, nor had the number of impressions, so the team went looking for the cause. What they found was one SDR changed their approach and the metrics skyrocketed. They committed to respond to every inbound within minutes. Not that they were terribly slow to respond in the past, but consistently responding to every request within minutes meant that when buyers finally raised their hands to ask for info, this vendor was more likely to be the first to respond. In today’s digital market, buyers do the bulk of their research long before they contact any vendors directly. That means that when a prospect finally reaches out, they are ready to talk. The first vendor to respond gets to set the tone and agenda for the buyer’s journey. Speed makes all the difference, and being first, being responsive, grabbing the buyers’ attention, resulted in more than doubling the number of opportunities for the sales team to pursue. Buyers feel the need for speed.
A second example of the need for speed came from a post-sale situation. A vendor lost a deal to a competitor because the competitor promised a faster implementation. The winner presented proof points in the form of references to make their claim seem credible. The buyer acknowledged that the first vendor had a superior product, but the winning competitor was “close enough and good enough,” and time to implementation was what really mattered. It turned out that the buyer had a hard deadline due to an upcoming user conference. The sales team from the first vendor never explored what was really driving the deal. Their implementation team had been burned in the past by sales over-promising the implementation time, so the sales team never even considered offering an accelerated delivery. They simply presented to approved implementation schedule, and said that they could not make any adjustments to meet the prospects need for speed. The result was that the deal was lost. [In an ironic side-note, the winning vendor failed to make the deadline, and after an embarrassing user conference, the buyer cancelled their agreement. They were serious about their need for speed. They ended up going back to the first vendor for the superior product.]
The third example is product performance. Gone are the days when users are willing to wait for products to respond or refresh. We expect instant response times. An enormous client of a platform vendor complained that the product “just seems slow and sluggish.” They reported that their users were unhappy with the wait times and as a result they were going to have to look for an alternative solution. There had been other customer complaints about performance, but the vendor’s engineering team dismissed them saying there was no room for improvement. However the scale of the relationship with the “big guy” forced an attitude adjustment. The engineers dug into the performance issues and discovered that the customer’s use of the platform was way beyond anything they had ever seen. There was so much data and so many assets that the usage was far outside the deign parameters. The engineers understood that although the customer liked the features, they were prepared to move to a lesser platform if it could deliver better performance. Fortunately, the vendor’s engineering team rose to the occasion and managed to redesign and rebuild key elements of the platform that were contributing to the bottlenecks. The result was a dramatic improvement for the target customer, but equally important, the entire customer base benefitted from delivering greater scalability and speed. The engineering team learned a valuable lesson about listening to customer feedback and the ‘need for speed.’
All of these examples are quite different, but the underlying theme is that speed matters, and faster is always better. We cannot be happy to just complete something or just make it work. In nearly every area of a growth business, we need to press down on the accelerator and infuse the entire enterprise with the “need for speed.” Prospects and customers are not patient. Back to all of those clichés from the start of this post, they are all true, and every team member needs to understand how their ‘speed’ will impact a buyer or prospect’s perception and actions. Speed drives satisfaction and growth.