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.