We guarantee that none of our publications will contain any respondent's or company's name.
Should any such publication be presented, we will pay the respondent or company $10,000.
PSP Builder is analytic software you can use to perform analysis on customer interview data collected for you by PSP Enterprises. You can explore the detailed reasons why you have won and lost competitive contests and determine the prioritized actions needed to improve performance in the future. PSP Builder lays out its findings in a graphic format that is easy to understand and present. It even automatically generates Microsoft PowerPoint slides that you can use in your executive briefs and sales training events.
PSP Builder runs on your PC with Microsoft Excel. It is straightforward to use, so a new analyst can begin doing meaningful investigation of transcript data within 15 minutes. PSP Builder can execute entirely on-premises and does not rely on any external portal to run or store data; sensitive transcript and analysis data stay inside the four walls of your organization.
Why are you losing to a particular competitor? Why is your win-rate higher in one region than another? What are winning reps doing that everyone else needs to know about? PSP Builder lets you slice and dice interview data by selecting interviews according to any combination of criteria. Analysis of these selected interviews in aggregate makes it easy to visually compare customer opinion in different regions, across different product lines, and across different periods of time.
Click here to learn more about interview selection.
PSP Builder generates charts which show the prioritized reasons why you win and lose deals. All charts provide statistical confidence measures which help you distinguish those issues which are statistically significant from those which are merely anecdotal.
By applying these quantified findings to your future sales pipeline, PSP Builder helps you forecast the revenue impact of changes in the competitive environment and analyze tradeoffs among the changes you make in your product or marketing. At any time, customer quotes relevant to any decision criterion are just a click away.
Click here to learn more about interview analysis.
PSP Builder makes it easy to share your findings and recommendations. It automatically exports charts you build to PowerPoint slides using your company's template. It even generates detailed speaker notes that explain how to read the charts.
Full verbatim transcript with an executive summary of key issues and supporting customer quotes.
Learn MoreRecommended actions with the quantitative analysis and supporting customer quotes to back them up.
Learn MoreYour complete tagged data set of all key customer comments, sortable by demographics, competitors, and key criteria.
Learn MoreOur questionnaires probe the issues you want to understand in depth, while preserving the flexibility to speak about unanticipated concerns.
Read MoreVerbatim transcripts identify key issues and customer comments in an executive summary, as well as a quantitative analysis of the criteria for the decision made in each interview transcript.
Read MoreThis is a sample Executive Presentation. It is targeted to answer the question, "What?"
Read MorePSP Enterprises guarantees that respondents' answers are completely anonymous, and that neither any respondent's nor any company’s name will be published in any analysis or written report.
PSP Enterprises guarantees that the research conducted on the behalf of our clients will be done with the strictest confidentiality. We work under the terms of your company's NDA. Our clients are never revealed to their customers at any point. All company and respondent answers are completely confidential and will never be published in any outside analysis.
PSP Enterprises strictly adheres to the Strategic and Competitive Professionals' code of ethics.
Learn MorePSP Enterprises has proudly earned an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau. There has never been a single complaint filed against PSP Enterprises in over twenty years of BBB accreditation. Click here to view our formal accreditation from the Better Business Bureau.
Learn MoreThese are the main industry segments we have researched in the past.
Application Infrastructure / Platforms | Document Management (EDM) | RFID Middleware |
Application Integration (EAI) | Hyperconverged Infrastructure | SAN and NAS |
Application Lifecycle Management | Hypervisors | Sourcing |
Application Server | Integrated Document Management (IDM) | Spend Analysis |
Backup/Recovery | Network Security Management | Storage Management |
Business Activity Monitoring | Pricing Optimization and Modeling | Supplier Relationship Management |
Business Process Management | Enterprise Portal | Web Content Management |
Content Management (ECM) | Professional Services | Web Globalization |
Compliance Management | Procurement | Web Services |
Converged Systems | Records Management |
With over 30 years of experience, Richard H. Case is an expert in the field of high-tech market research. A former Gartner Vice President, Richard created PSP Enterprises to directly address the shortfalls in the industry. By using IT professionals and leveraging his own decades of knowledge, Richard H. Case has redefined market research in a way that leads to direct, actionable results.
Principal
Ken manages all aspects of peer interviews and win/loss analysis for high technology clients. Ken draws from his 25 years of experience in enterprise IT sales, marketing, product development, and service delivery at HPE/SimpliVity, Pegasystems, GE Digital, and Progress Software.
We always use executive-level interviewers to conduct interviews of your customers. Senior-level decision-makers respond to and appreciate the meaningfulness and efficiency of our peer-level interviews. A consultative, peer-to-peer style puts our respondents at ease and encourages them to talk freely about their experiences with an equal. We have honed our interviewing methodology to obtain as much valuable information as possible from respondents.
We conduct both blind and non-blind interviews. Wherever possible, we recommend the use of blind and anonymous interviews because they are the most objective source of customer opinion available. With respondent permission, we record the interview and you get a verbatim transcript of what was said. It’s as if you were a fly on the wall, listening to two executives discuss the detailed reasons why they picked you or your competitor.
Rigorous analysis of interviews in aggregate unambiguously identifies the statistically significant factors causing wins and losses, and highlights the most important actions you can take to improve your competitive win-rate. Our graphs and charts make it easy to understand and communicate important findings.
PSP Builder analyzes and organizes respondent scores and comments collected in PSP customer interviews. It will help you thoughtfully interpret what customers are saying and to build persuasive cases for change in your organization that will improve future outcomes.
Each PSP customer interview first identifies the selection criteria that respondents used to judge vendors’ solutions. Then, the interview explores the importance of each of these criteria. Finally, the respondent rates each vendor vis-à-vis these criteria. Respondents' comments about why they rated you above or below the competition help you understand how they justified these ratings.
PSP Builder analytics combine all of these into a set of charts for interpretation and communication of findings throughout your organization. Here is a sampling of the most important ones.
The following example charts are for a fictional company called Active Consulting. The transcripts are based on real interviews conducted by PSP in the past, used with client permission. Vendor names have been changed to protect confidentiality.
The Weaknesses and Strengths chart shows your strengths in wins and weaknesses in losses. The left and right sides of the Weaknesses and Strengths chart shows you the reasons you lost and won deals in rank order of their impact on lost and won outcomes respectively. Impact is measured as a % contribution to the outcome shown, or a revenue amount. To compute revenue impact, you need only enter your forecast revenue assumptions and win-rate.
The width of a bar is a probabilistic measure of its impact on the outcomes in aggregate. The impact of any given criterion represents how much it contributed to the won or lost decisions in the chart. Impact is based on:
As you scan the chart from top to bottom, the criteria move closer to the center and represent less extreme prospect opinions. The higher a selection criterion, the more that issue impacted the prospects’ decisions.
The bar chart's fill color shows the statistical confidence for each criterion. The deeper the color, the greater the statistical significance of the impact it represents. A deep green or red color is statistically significant to the 99% level. Pale colors have less statistical significance. A bar filled with white is less than 80% statistically significant. If the number of criteria exceeds the limits set for this chart, the lowest bar combines the remaining criteria and shows their combined impact and statistical confidence.
The Opportunities and Threats chart shows your strengths in losses and weaknesses in wins. It exposes the latent strengths and weaknesses that represent opportunities and threats for you.
These charts help answer the questions: "What if we were to counter the strengths of your competitors?" and "What if our competitors were to counter our strengths?" In conjunction with the Weaknesses and Strengths Chart, it provides a comprehensive SWOT analysis.
If criteria from Strengths and Weaknesses are different from those of Opportunities and Threats, it may mean that your losses are to customers whose needs are very different from those of your wins—i.e., they belong to a different market segment. Reversing these losses may require a strategic shift or investment. By contrast, if the criteria from these two charts are largely the same, it probably means that you lost for execution reasons (either product, communication, or both).
The BattlePlan chart combines and simplifies the Weaknesses and Strengths chart into this single chart of net weaknesses and strengths by subtracting weakness impact percentages from strength impact percentages. The net percentages are then sorted by absolute value to rank order the criteria. The resulting chart shows, in priority order, the standout criteria you should address to increase your win rate.
Plan your offense by addressing weaknesses and maintaining your strengths. Plan your defense with the Threats and Strengths Chart: Protect wins by maintaining your strengths and addressing latent weaknesses.
Use the BattlePlan in your presentations to focus attention on the issues which are your standout strengths and weaknesses across all deal outcomes. This chart, annotated with supporting customer quotes, is a persuasive tool to effect change in an organization.
PSP Builder can show you the customer quotes associated with the scores that they gave you and your competitors. Use these quotes to understand the reasons behind the ratings and to exemplify the actions you recommend in your reports and presentations. Nothing is more powerful than customers speaking in their own words, especially when stated in a blind and anonymous interview.
If you click on any bar in any chart, PSP Builder will open up adjacent windows to the right and display the customer quotes associated with that criterion.
In this example, we are drilling down into customer comments associated with the criterion "Proposed Solution" in the client's wins. Quotes in the top-right window are those expressing positive comments about the client. Quotes in the bottom-right window are those expressing negative comments about competitors. You can filter comments about competitors by any one or more competitors. This makes it easy to do competitive research.
The quotes are in green to show their connection with the wins. Had we clicked on a bar from the loss side, the quotes would be colored in pink.
Conventional win/loss stops with an analysis of what happened in the past. PSP analytics forecast the revenue impact of competitive changes in the future—and help you optimize the competitive impact of your product and marketing investment.
The PSP Builder WhatifiTron is a predictive analytics tool that projects future win rate and bookings based on past results modified by adjustments you make for future conditions. You can use the WhatifiTron to estimate the economic impact of a competitive change—made by you or by competitors—in your marketplace.