PSP's interview notes and transcripts were super-detailed! Our PSP contact worked with us to refine the questions to maximize the value of the interviews and made it a point to understand our technology to ensure that he could dig deeper into the discussions. Our buyers are quite specialized, so it was important for our PSP contact to connect with them; he reached a point where he could anticipate the questions we would have asked the interviewees without us telling him.

The most helpful outcome at the time was the quantitative analysis for both winning and losing factors, above and beyond the qualitative description of the buyer interviews. Sourcing the data from anonymous 3rd party interviews of both wins and losses within the potential customer base gave us an unbiased view of the truth that wasn't possible internally. But the bigger problem we needed to solve was the ability to apply that truth to the distinct reasons we won and lost deals, for instance by feeding those results into the marketing messaging and sales enablement collateral.

First and foremost, PSP is a fantastic business partner. They’re easy to work with, sharp as hell and always available and eager to help us apply what they’ve found out in our sales training as well as marketing and product planning. The quality of interviews is impressive. They ask the executives we sell to for 30-40 minutes of time but usually get a full hour, and use that time intelligently to cover all the bases and drill down into the issues which really made a difference to the customer. It’s all unscripted and shows that PSP did their homework to study our product and industry, which is pretty specialized. The transcripts are detailed and very specific about how we can improve our selling as well as our product. PSP’s analysis and executive recommendations are also excellent. Every point they raise is a specific issue with smart suggestions, many unexpected, about what we can do. There are no generalities or arm-waving. They showed us what’s statistically significant and what’s not, and backed up every point with multiple customer quotes. I also want to highlight PSP’s interview batting average. I used another agency to do win/loss at another company, and it was like pulling teeth to get customers to agree to interviews and we had to do a lot of the work. With PSP, I give them a list of contacts and they do the rest, getting interviews with around 1/3-1/2 of the contacts I give them. And that’s with blind interviews where the customer doesn’t know who is paying for the research. The other agency had us introduce them and they still struggled to get the interviews done, which was extremely frustrating.