You need these three key stakeholders on your side to succeed as a software company

 

The most important stakeholders in any software company are a) your customer base, b) your partner community, and c) your employees.  You absolutely need these three on your side if you are going to succeed as a software company. What does it mean for these stakeholders to be on your side? Let us take them one at a time and examine the primary and secondary measures of health.

Customer Base – the key measure of health is their referenceability.  Are they excited about your products and services and willing to recommend them to your peers? This means that they are actively using your solutions, have a positive experience in their interactions with your organization (e.g. sales or support), are getting quantifiable value from the solution and are willing to buy more from you.  You may call this as a high NPS (Net Promoter Score), or a high customer satisfaction index - but the bottom line is that they are delighted with you and your solutions and are happy to be a reference. This criterion also gives you a roadmap – issues you need to address if your customers are not there yet with you and your solutions.

Partner Ecosystem – the key measure of health is their growth.  Are they investing in their practice around your product and committing more resources to it, are they excited about your product vision and how it is going to address the operational challenges their clients (and your customers) face and are you actively reducing any potential conflict with them.  The partners must believe that the demand for your solutions and its unique positioning will help them grow their business faster if they invest more in their practice around your solutions rather than someone else’s. i.e. the Opportunity cost of not investing in you is high.  They must also know where you are going with your products (i.e. your product strategy) and believe in it. They also must understand that you do not plan to compete against them or add any friction in the system that impedes their growth.

Employees – the primary measure of health is engagement. Are they engaged and excited about working at your company (measured through employee NPS scores), is your attrition lower than the market, do the employees rave about the culture you have fostered and do they buy into the vision of the company. Imagine what engaged engineers can do for your product or engaged professional services employees can do for your customer care? They will go out of their way to get the job done and show up again tomorrow, excited to get going!  Successful startups typically have a very highly engaged workforce.

Yes there are many other things you need to be a successful software company such as:  you need industry analysts and key influencers on your side, you need to craft a solid positioning and a story in the market, you need to drive enough demand to feed your sales organization, your product must be easy to deploy and aligned with where the market is going, you need to ensure your balance sheet is healthy etc etc.  These and many other factors are all critical for your success.  But these all will come naturally (and more easily) if your customer base is excited and referenceable, your partner base is healthy and growing and your employee base is engaged.  If these three stakeholders are invested in your company, they will work together to ensure its success.

Is your Marketing Organization targeting the right prospects?

Sales-marketing alignment in any organization is critical if you want to hit your bookings targets consistently.   I talked about it in my previous posts and will continue to write about it my upcoming posts. One of the metrics of  sales-marketing alignment is what % of your SQLs are coming from your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)?  

An account in your ideal customer profile (ICP) is likely to be one of the following:

• A named target-account (with the right firmographic profile) that your sales organization is going after. 
• An non-named account that is likely to buy your products i.e. have an affinity for your products.  A non-named account is situated in one of your sales rep's territory and is likely to be from the industry and revenue band you are targeting. You can leverage account scoring technologies in products such as Data Fox or ZoomInfo to create your list of non-named regional accounts who have affinity for your products.  
• An existing customer, who you are trying to cross-sell one of your other products to.
• One of the accounts, where a key influencer purchased your products when they were at their previous company. They know your products, were successful with it before and hence are comfortable purchasing it again.  This is especially a good ICP criteria, if you have a cross-industry product.

If at least 80% percent of your SQLs/MQLs (depending on your org, it represents the status of the leads when they are sent from marketing to sales for acceptance and conversion to sales opportunities) meet the attributes listed above, then your marketing and sales organizations are aligned on go-to-market. And that is a very good sign.  The remaining 20% of the accounts being passed to sales can be  either from new industries you are looking to penetrate in future (and are testing water), or new use-cases you are trying to take to market (and hence don’t fit your ICP), or accounts that your channel partners are bringing to you because of their close relationships or perhaps from customers who are on the early adopter spectrum and are exploring new use cases for your technology, or accounts that are not in your marketing/sales database, but meet the ICP criteria.

If the ratio is below 80%, then your field marketing organization may have some work to do in three areas - getting alignment with Sales on ICP, creating the right sales target account list and marketing database of ICPs and then targeting the marketing programs towards that database. Otherwise you are likely to see either a lower conversion of SQLs to sales opportunities (so a lower ROI for your marketing spend), or a larger percentage of stalled opportunities in early-stages of sales cycle or a higher number of competitive losses to vendors you should not be competing with.  All of these affect the amount of healthy sales pipeline generated for future quarters.

Three key areas where marketing operations and sales operations need to agree on

Before we talk about the three alignment areas, lets ensure we agree on the general scope of marketing operations and sales operations. 

Marketing Operations is the function of the marketing organization (including people, process, technology, and data) that enables Marketing to operate efficiently and to scale with quality and consistency. Marketing Operations function typically owns the marketing technology infrastructure including marketing automation systems; customer marketing database; creation and execution of campaigns through the marketing automation system; marketing lead flow process; and marketing analytics and reporting.  

Sales operations, on the other hand own processes, technology, and resources to support, enable, and drive front-line sales teams to sell better, faster, and more efficiently.  These include sales forecasting; sales incentives; enablement including right messaging, product knowledge and sales methodology adoption; CRM system including its ownership, adoption and usage; sales territory planning/assignment; and sales reporting/analytics/dashboards.

While these two are distinct functions within most organizations, there are three areas where they need to work together and be aligned.  When the two organizations are not in sync, the result can be seen in poor pipeline. As a marketing consultant to the CMO in the last 15 years, this is where I used to spend a lot of my time to drive alignment and ensure pipeline issues get addressed.

• Process: The two organizations must agree on the end to end process for the lead life-cycle – MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) to SAL (Sales Accepted lead) to an opportunity.  They should also clearly define the re-qualification/re-nurture process, as well as SLAs (for how long sales should try to qualify a lead before it is returned back to marketing for nurture).  So much finger pointing happens when a lead crosses from marketing ownership to sales ownership and this SLA is not clearly defined – whether it is at SQL or SAL level – depending on your specific process. Marketing complains that sales is not acting on the leads it sends, while sales cherry picks the leads and the rest stay in the processing queue forever.  Finally, they should agree on how marketing is going to ensure they are building awareness and pipeline in the specific target accounts that the sales organization is going after in their go-to-market.  I have seen this to be an area of big disconnect – where sales is targeting specific accounts and marketing takes a geographic approach to marketing.

• Technology: The two organizations own their respective systems – the marketing automation system and the CRM system.  However, these systems are wired to stay in sync, so it is important that the two teams agree on a governance process for the data between the two systems. For example, how do you manage the process around sales reps wanting to upload lists of contacts in their target accounts that, then get synced to marketing system and potentially may violate GDPR rules?  How do you ensure sales does not email a contact without permission from them., if they have opted out of marketing emails?  Which system is the owner of the golden record about the contact and what is the process to protect its integrity? Finally, it is important that the sales and marketing analytics agree on the metrics and their results, so the two organizations don’t have a different version of the truth.

• Pipeline: How often do you hear marketing state that they met their pipeline generation targets, while sales complains of not enough pipeline. Challenge is often three-fold – a) the two organizations have a different definition of “pipeline” which needs to be resolved or b) they may be looking at different analytics that provide completely different answers and c) while marketing may be looking at aggregate numbers – but at the sales rep level there may be feast or famine.  The marketing organization needs to look at pipeline at the sales rep level and ensure each has at least 2.5X pipe at the beginning of the quarter in order to hit their individual numbers.  The actual multiplier needed may vary from company to company, based on the nature of the business.

These are the three key areas you need alignment at the operations level within the sales and marketing organizations to ensure good marketing ROI (in terms of business generated by the sales organization).  In the next blog posts, I will talk about some of broader areas of alignment needed between sales and marketing – not just at operations/systems level.

Marketing Analytics Revisited

There are many articles and even books written on the topic of marketing operations and analytics.  I will share my perspective on marketing analytics from having worked with several clients, as well as having been a CMO for multiple public and private enterprise software/cloud companies.  The information I share below is equally valid for large and small companies.

I put the marketing analytics in three broad buckets:

• Basic analytics:  This helps me understand the big picture – how many MQLs, SQLs, SALs, as well as $$ value of pipeline generated this month/quarter at aggregate level and by sales region and trend charts.  I also want to understand nurture volume (i.e. what is on the stove and will be ready soon) and trend charts (how long does it take historically for leads to exit nurture and become SQLs) etc. Finally, I want to understand the top 10 campaigns running this month/quarter, planned spend and expected output from them. To keep things simple I recommend using marketing created leads as a criteria – otherwise marketing wastes too many hours arguing with sales operations and partner operations over attribution to make their contribution numbers look better.

• Optimization analytics: This helps me understand how the various channels and campaigns are performing, so I can continue to optimize my allocation of program dollars. I want to understand the performance of campaigns by early indicators (MQLs, SQLs, SALs) – especially for campaigns driving top-of-funnel, as well as by lagging indicators (e.g. pipeline generated, by forecasted deals, by deals closed).  The performance should compare planned vs actual performance, so even the performance of campaigns that you are ‘trying out’ and are allocating ‘risk dollars’ to are measured in context of expected results.  Without this level of visibility, it is challenging to shift money between channels and programs to maximize your performance, or to try new but risky programs.

• Alignment analytics:  This is a very important bucket that most marketing operations teams miss.  It helps me understand how well marketing and sales is aligned and where are the opportunities to improve this alignment.  For example, most sales organizations have target accounts for their sales reps.  What is the penetration of marketing database in those accounts (i.e. coverage in each of those target accounts by desired personas)?  I call it the Swiss Cheese analysis to assess coverage and holes. What is the pipeline breakdown by sales rep in each region – aggregate pipeline analytics may look good, but some sales reps may be starving, putting them at the risk of attrition. How well is the re-nurture program working (to wake up stale opportunities).  Segment analysis of the marketing pipeline generated to ensure targeting of marketing programs is aligned with go-to-market – i.e. is the mix of SQLs different than GTM in terms of products/segments/industries (where SQLs are coming from vs. your strategy).

If we can get marketing analytics right, we can build the right foundation for improving marketing planning and execution, as well as ensuring marketing spend is optimized for best results.

Seven steps for a great ROI Model

If you are selling a business software solution, a good ROI model has always been an important part of the sales process.  It allows your customer to build a business case for buying your software. It is even more important now than ever before, when the budgets are tight and fewer projects are getting funded.  I have built several ROI tools for my clients in my 15+ years as a marketing consultant to software companies.  Here are some important tips:

1. Design your ROI model for use by pre-sales engineers in sales cycles.  This allows you to build a business case in nearly every deal, using the data they have gathered during the discovery process. 
2. Ensure the model can be driven with inputs that are not too difficult for customers to provide. For many customers, their current process may be manual and hence they may not have too many metrics around their process.  If you ask for a lot of details, you may not be able to get enough information from them to calculate ROI.  On the other hand, if your model is driven by very basic information, it may look too trivial or generic, and your customer may not take it's output seriously.  It is very important to have the right balance – I typically analyze several pre-sales discovery notes, speak to a couple of pre-sales engineers and post-sales consultants and interview 4 to 5 customers to understand the right balance before creating a ROI model for my clients.
3. When you are asking the user to enter current metrics in the ROI model, have the field default to industry best practices data (i.e. what you have seen at your other customers), which can be overridden by customer.   This ensures that if the customer cannot provide the right metric you are looking for in their current manual process or the improvement they expect to make by implementing your technology in their environment, you have a valid default number to plug in (that will be acceptable to the customer).
4. I have always seen less push back from customers, when you use a range (a high number and a low number) for either current metrics or for capturing future improvements from your technology, rather than a single number.  
5. The end goal is to quantify the inefficiencies from manual process, as well as capture the value of the benefits (revenue increase or cost reductions) from automated process, and the investments required, so you can use this data to show Net Present Value of savings from your technology.
6. Since the ROI model is in Excel, what I have seen works is the first tab contains all inputs, the next set of tabs contain costs and savings (or revenue increase opportunities), one tab for each process improvement opportunity area.  The last tab of the model contains a chart showing $$ value of savings over a 3-year period, as well as NPV.  Such a layout is easy to understand and also at a glance highlights the various benefits from your software.
7. Never send the ROI model to your customer to fill in the data – have your sales engineer work with the customer to create the ROI for their environment

A good ROI model can accelerate your sales cycles and help you improve your win rates.  Don't short change the creation process, but at the same time, don't make it too complex.

Three questions to help you sharpen your messaging

Having a differentiated message for your solution is critical to your success. It allows you to win your share of the deals, assuming your sales organization is choosing the right battles.  Having your message further sharpened to reflect why the customer needs to buy your product now is even more important in these times, when the budgets are tight.

A message house (collection of key positioning messages for your solution) is the starting point for all your marketing activities.  Once constructed, it helps your corporate marketing, field marketing and sales position the solutions consistently and correctly in all they do - their PR activities, customer conversations, sales pitches, industry presentations and collateral.  So much is written about the frameworks to create a message house, but they all go something like this:

• Who: who are the key personas you are targeting?
• What: For each persona, what are the key problems you are trying to address (in context of your solution)?
• How: For each problem defined above, how does your product address the issue and what are your key proof points.
• Unlike: How do point solutions, legacy solutions and other competitors try to solve the problem and the limitations in their approach

The important thing to remember is that messaging framework should allow you to answer two important questions – Why buy and Why buy mine?  But do not forget to answer the third question as you build your messaging framework – it has always been important, but is even more important now when customer budgets are shrinking – Why buy now?

So, make sure your messaging framework answers these three questions.  One test – after you have written your positioning messages, replace your company/product name with the name of your competitor/their products and see if the messaging statements still hold true.  If they are, then your message is too generic and does not capture the true value proposition of your products and solutions - you need to revise them.

If your sales team can articulate the answers to these three questions to the satisfaction of their prospects – why buy, why buy now and why buy mine, they can dramatically increase their win rate.  And, as a product marketing person, that is your challenge.  

How to improve your Customer Marketing during these times

In the Covid-19 era, it is easier to cross-sell (or up-sell) to an existing customer than trying to build an entirely new set of relationships with prospects when face-to-face meetings are still not possible, especially when you are selling into enterprises.   In this post, I will share with you the information your sales and marketing teams need  in order to execute a better customer marketing strategy, so you can build a strong pipeline within your customer base.  By the way, this exercise will also help you become more effective at marketing to prospects, who are similar to your existing customers.

What is my current customer profile?  You need to capture, within your CRM system, comprehensive information about your current customers.  This includes:

• Product information: what products they use, what versions (if not a SaaS application)
• Key contacts: List of key contacts at the customer (by personas, such as business buyer, technical buyer, influencer etc.), as well as key contacts for the account internally (account manager, customer success manager, executive sponsor etc.).  If the customer bought from you more than two years ago, your key contacts information within the CRM system may be stale and needs to be updated.  Valid and active contacts in your system are likely to be their accounts payable admin (you send invoices to) and their users (who call the support line), not the business buyers and influencers.  If your product is implemented by your partners, ensure your CRM system captures the name and contact information of the partner, and their current status (i.e. if they are still active in that account.).  Even if they are not active, they may provide valuable context about the account esp. when your old account team has moved on.
• Customer satisfaction: Capture information if the customer is referenceable and if possible, include a link within your CRM system to their recent support issues.  Your sales rep needs to know if they are currently a happy or an unhappy customer before they call them.  Their recent CSAT score and responses, if they responded to the survey, would also be a good thing to capture within your CRM system.
• Overages: If your solution is sold based on number of users or is usage based, it would be good to capture overage information within your CRM.  This information can be automatically updated in your CRM system if your solution has monitoring tools.  Overages provides sales rep an opening to call the customer and upsell, and perhaps, cross-sell other products.
• Key assets:  It is a good practice to add links for press releases, internal announcements, and case studies to the account record of your CRM system, as you publish those assets. Similarly, it is a good practice to ensure your sales rep adds the sales presentation, RFP responses, contracts, discovery notes etc. when the deal is closed and marked as won within the CRM system.  This provides a lot of context about the account when your current account manager approaches the account for an up-sell or cross-sell opportunity, months or years after the initial transaction was closed and the team that worked on that account is long gone.  For old accounts, see if you can get an intern to add these assets to deals won in the last 2 to 3 years.

This 360-degree information about your customers allows your sales rep to look for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities more easily within their territory. If most of the information is added as searchable and reportable fields within your CRM system, the process becomes a lot easier.  Today, account teams waste a lot of time profiling their target accounts within the installed base, and hence, may end up targeting only a small % of the possible accounts.  Similarly, in absence of such specific information, marketing teams run generic campaigns into the customer base rather than a targeted ABM (Account Based Marketing) approach, leading to very low conversion rates.

But more important, this treasure-trove also allows you your sales reps to more quickly understand why customers purchased your solution and use this information to quickly create customized and relevant pitches for similar customers in similar segments (industry, geography and size) – accommodating for changes to your products over time, evolution of your messages and changes in your competitive situation.  

So, an investment in customer profiling not only makes it easier to upsell/cross-sell into the installed base, but it can also help you open more doors within your target prospects.  And that is a huge advantage in these times.

Account Based Marketing during Covid Times

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has always been a great idea.  It allows your sales and marketing to be aligned.  Your sales organization typically has a target set of accounts (typically 20 to 30 per salesperson) that they are going after.  If your marketing does not have specific programs to target those ‘named accounts’, then there is a clear mis-alignment between go-to-market among your sales and marketing organizations.

ABM does not just mean that your marketing database includes these accounts, as you build your marketing database. Clearly that is important.  But two additional things need to happen:

·       --  A clear focus on developing a list of contacts with multiple target personas (you sell to) across each of the target accounts within your marketing database.  Create a swiss cheese model of each target account, then try to find as many holes and fill them, while respecting local privacy laws.  

·      --  Create content that is very specific to the personas and their industry.  Messages will resonate well if it speaks to their issues/pain in context of their industry.  Many marketers create generic cross-industry content for their ABM campaigns, so they can target many accounts in one campaign, but then end up with very poor response rate.  The need for multiple content pieces to support targeted marketing is what makes ABM challenging, but it delivers great results.  However, you need to do it and do it well, so you can map to how your sales organization is going to market.

In these days of Covid, a third criteria needs to be added.  The messaging in the content needs to articulate ‘why they should evaluate your product category now’ and how your solution can either drive more revenue (preferable) or help reduce costs.  A lot of top-of-the-funnel content that is used in ABM campaigns was developed pre-Covid and does not articulate the urgency with which your prospects would evaluate your solutions.  In the days of tight budgets, if your messaging does not articulate urgency, the initiative containing your product will likely not get funded.

Since developing a new relationship in Covid era of lockdowns and remote work is more challenging, you are likely to have more success with cross sell and upsell into existing accounts.  Shifting your ABM program to grow existing accounts (i.e. ABM based customer marketing) will yield more positive results.

If you have questions or comments, keep the conversation going.

Win-Loss Analysis - Part III

Win Loss Analysis – Part 3

In my last post we talked about the quantitative analysis within your win-loss analysis program.  In this post I will dive into the details of the qualitative aspect of the program.  Analysis from your CRM system gives you a lot of good information on metrics and their trends.  But it needs to be complemented with interviews (qualitative aspect of the program) – both with salespeople & pre-sales, as well as with customers, so you can get a holistic view into your wins and losses. 

As I mentioned in my last blog, the response rate on request for calls with salespeople and customers is higher when the opportunity was recently closed.  Also, the quality of information you get is better, if you can talk to the salesperson and customer soon after the deal was won or lost.  From my experience, response rate from salespeople is about 100% for deals you won and between 50% and 75% for deals you lost.  

Of course, there is some bias in the responses from salesperson.  Many a times I hear from them that the deal was won because they did such a great job with building a relationship with the client and convincing them of the value proposition OR the deal was lost because either our price was too high or product has some feature missing or the customer had a bias towards the competition.  By doing a 360 degree on the internal team on the account (i.e. speaking with sales engineers and anyone else involved with the account), you can begin to get a more complete story. 

The other key aspect of qualitative analysis is interviews with customers.  From my experience, response rate from customers you won is about 1 in 2 (to 1 in 3) and from losses is about 1 in 4 (to 1 in 6).  Key is to interview both the influencer, as well as decision maker, so you get two different perspectives.  Make it clear that you are not associated with sales and the intent for this interview is for your company to learn from them what is resonating, what is not working and continue to improve.

For both internal and external interviews, it is important to ask as many open-ended questions as possible and let their responses lead you in the interview (rather than have a pre-determined script).  In both sets of interviews, I start with trying to understand what the customer’s key issues were that they were trying to address and why did they want them to be addressed now rather than later?  Another area I want to explore is what they liked about our solution and why, as well as where they expressed concerns and why? This also gives me an opening into delving with the customers about the competitors - if they are willing to go there.  I also try to understand from customer their perception about the vendor before they started the sales cycle and if (and how) that perception changed during the sales cycle and feedback on what the vendor should do differently?  I ask the salesperson similar question about what they would do differently (or what additional support they would ask for) if they were to run the sales cycle all over again. 

You will surprised how much you can learn about what aspects of your messaging is resonating and what is not, where the competition is out-positioning you, the opportunities in sharpening your message (why buy, why buy now, why buy mine), the additional sales enablement needed to get your salespeople to tell the right story, your product strengths and gaps, how well your brand is resonating with your customers/prospects, how well/poorly run your sales cycles are (and opportunities to correct them), how well your sales methodology is being used in sales cycles etc

Hope this post answers some of your questions re: the qualitative aspect of the win-loss analysis.  If you have questions or comments, keep the conversation going.

Win Loss Analysis - Part II

In my last post we talked about the overall scope of the win-loss analysis program.  In this post I will dive into the details of the quantitative aspect of win loss analysis. 

For a recent SaaS client, who is growing at a very rapid clip, we wanted to track the following quantitative information (win-loss was focused on new customers):

• Overall win rate for the quarter, as well as win rate against each competitor
• Number and $ value of wins and losses against each competitor, as well as number and $ value of wins in non-competitive deals (i.e. no competitor was in the deal)
• Trend chart of overall win rate against each competitor
• Trend chart for win rate by each sales region for top 4 competitors
• Trend chart for win rate by each segment (e.g. enterprise, mid-market etc.) for top 4 competitors
• Trend chart in non-competitive deals (aggregate, by sales region and by segment).  This statistic spoke to the reach of marketing programs, as well as brand equity.
• Number and $ value of non-competitive losses (i.e. opportunity closed lost due to a number of reasons such as customer non-responsive or no budget etc.

The data in the last bullet is critical to improving the opportunity qualification process.  Once the opportunity is qualified and pursuit starts, expensive pre-sales and other resources are applied to that pursuit.  Even 10% improvement in opportunity qualification allows you to divert resources to the most qualified (and likely to close) opportunities, improving your overall win rate and quarterly bookings.  By closing the loop of this analysis with sales operations, you can improve the use of current sales methodology in the sales organization.

One question typically gets asked is if you should count every lost opportunity in win-loss analysis.  My answer is no.  Many opportunities get closed (as lost) in early stages when the salesperson is qualifying it.  By including in win-loss analysis, you will distort your counts.  My recommendation is to only include those opportunities that reach a stage in your sales process where resources have been applied and pursuit has started.

Another question on your mind is perhaps – should you do this analysis at the end of the quarter?  It all depends on the linearity of your bookings, but I would assume that 30% to 40% of deals may be closing in the first two months of the quarter.  Since you want to combine quantitative analysis with qualitative analysis (based on surveys and calls with salespeople and customers), the response rate on request for calls  from customers and salespersons is higher when the opportunity was recently closed.  Also, the quality of information you get is better, if you can talk to them soon after the deal was won or lost.   But to identify such conversation opportunities, you need your quantitative analysis to be continuous.  If you only do your analysis once a month, you will end up batching all the calling opportunities until after the end of the month and would lose out on the quality of information from such calls.

Hope this post answers some of your questions re: the quantitative aspect of the win-loss analysis.  If you have questions or comments, keep the conversation going. 

Win Loss Analysis - Part 1

Working as a demand generation and product marketing consultant for SaaS and Enterprise companies for over 15 years, I have done a fair share of win-loss analysis engagements for my clients.  I decided to share my experiences and recommendations on this topic through multiple posts.  In this first post, I will share a high-level perspective on win-loss analysis.  In subsequent posts, I will do a deep dive on several subtopics related to win loss analysis.

#1. Win loss analysis must be comprehensive.  It must cover the entire portfolio of wins and losses in the quarter and must cover both – quantitative and qualitative information.

• The quantitative information must cover quarterly view, as well as quarter-over-quarter trend charts.  You should be able to visualize the analysis at an aggregate level, by competitor or further sliced by region, segments or even channels.    (for example, your win rate against all competitors in EMEA region in all accounts or just against Oracle in EMEA, or against Oracle by EMEA in enterprise accounts, as well as how this has trended quarter over quarter). Your CRM system would be the primary source of such information.  I will share more on this topic (things to watch out for, example trend charts etc.) in a future blog post.
• The qualitative information provides you some key nuggets – what messages are working and/or not working, what type of sales campaigns the competition is running, where is the friction in the sales cycle,  are there any new purchasing drivers that should be packaged into your messaging etc. This information is obtained from emails and phone calls with sales and pre-sales where you won or lost a deal, as well as conversations with some of the customers who recently selected you or decided to go with the competition.  In a future blog post, I will share with you some of the open-ended questions I have asked sales, pre-sales or customers, that gave us some deep insights, which could be immediately packaged by product marketing into campaigns and messages.

#2. One of the most important deliverable in win-loss analysis is a report that should not only show these charts and summary of interviews, but more important, make it actionable for various audiences – sales, field marketing, product management etc. Each of them is looking for something different from the analysis.  For example, for one client, I discovered through customer interviews that selling into universities with a specific value proposition (because of a very unique feature) would yield them a huge advantage over the competition. Their field marketing team used that insight to launch a campaign into an industry that was not even on their radar before that analysis.  Yes, those trend charts are interesting, but what is more relevant is what each of these stakeholders can do with this information. This is what makes win-loss analysis a strategic investment, otherwise it is just a recurring reporting activity that needs to be done at the end of the quarter.  More on this topic in a future blog post.

#3. Win-loss analysis and competitive analysis are two different sides of the same coin.  They should be done on an ongoing basis and not left to the end of the quarter analysis.  Insights gleamed from win-loss analysis informs the competitive analysis.  Similarly, competitive insights can explain changes in trend charts/win rates and can be further validated with seller and customer interviews.  

I look forward to sharing many details on this and other topics around demand generation, product marketing, content development or marketing operations in my blog.  

Your thoughts?  Keep the conversation going.