Win Loss Analysis – some thoughts

A few of you have recently reached out to me regarding win-loss analysis. I had written multiple posts on it a while back, but wanted to revisit a few points.

Why is it essential?

• It helps set strategic priorities by providing you with key data to help understand where you are performing well / not performing well.
• It provides you the information you need to improve sales performance.
• It helps with product prioritization, in terms of product features needed for attracting new customers (from the new deals win-loss analysis), as well as to retain existing customers (renewals win-loss analysis)
• It is a great source for competitive intelligence.
• It enables product marketing understand buyer behavior (including sharpening their persona pain points and messaging), as well as shape their content marketing plans.

If you don’t have a formal win-loss program, I recommend getting started as soon as possible.  If you have one, consider this maturity curve to advance it

• Stage 1: Use data in your CRM system to understand why you are winning and losing. This is a good place to get started.  The problem is that the sales reps don’t always categorize the data correctly, deals are marked as closed-lost in the cleanup process and no-decisions are also marked as closed-lost. So, it is very hard to get a clear picture from the CRM data alone, since it can be very noisy. But it is a good place to get started.
• Stage 2: Have sales operations standardize the process so the CRM data becomes clean and less noisy and can be used for better analysis.  Also, in this stage, add customer interviews of both wins and losses for new deals, so you have qualitative information about why you are winning/losing new business.  You can get insights on why they selected you (or selected someone else), their perceptions of you and your products before the sales cycle and why/how they changed during the sales cycle, your pricing, your product features that are great or were not competitive, your sales process, your messages or your competition’s messages that resonate/don’t resonate etc.
• Stage 3: Do everything in stage 2 plus add interviews of wins and losses in renewals.  Your current customers know your products far better your new customers, who bought your solution based on perception, demos, references and perhaps a proof-of-concept. You will really get deeper insights from interviews of wins/losses of renewal opportunities – such as whats good/bad/ugly about your product, your services capabilities, and your customer success/support processes etc. Also in this stage, you should scale your interviews new wins by including customers from each geography, industry, and segment you play in, since there are always some unique differences among them, which you want to capture to ensure you are shaping your strategy well.

Here is a link to my three-part old posts regarding win-loss analysis, which gets into more details. Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.  The Part 2 post goes into specific details about analysis. If you have more questions or need some help getting started with such a program, please reach out to me via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/applicationsmarketing/