From Data to Decisions – Closing the Action Gap with Win/Loss Analysis

This blog post is written by Cameron Chambers, Analyst at Anova Consulting.

Introduction

In today’s fast-moving business landscape, sales teams have more data than ever — and more pressure than ever to prove they’re using it well. Dashboards glow on every screen, performance reports pile up in inboxes, and analytics platforms promise leaders a clearer path to growth. Yet despite the abundance, many companies still struggle to translate information into action.

The issue usually isn’t access. It’s interpretation. In other words: most organizations don’t have a data problem; their problem lies in understanding that data and turning it into action.

Where the Value Disappears (When Insight Doesn’t Turn Into Action)

Most sales teams aren’t short on data. Companies track everything: pipeline velocity, revenue, stage conversion, churn rates, NPS, win rates, marketing attribution, and sales activity. The intent is good: to be data-driven and reduce reliance on gut instinct. But data visibility is not the same thing as insight.

They know which deals stall late. They can point to common objections. They’ve identified trends in churn, buying behavior, and competitive pressure. The problem is rarely what the data reveals. It’s what to do with it.

A dashboard can tell you what happened. It rarely explains why it happened, what it means for the next quarter, or what specifically should change Monday morning. Without context, teams can spend hours reviewing KPIs, only to leave meetings with observations instead of clear decisions. Over time, the volume of available information can slow down decision-making by overwhelming teams with metrics that lack narrative, consistency, or direction.

Without a clear bridge from insight to action, valuable information tends to linger in reports, decks, and dashboards. Teams acknowledge the findings, agree they’re “important,” and then move on. Messaging doesn’t change. Qualification stays the same. Enablement isn’t updated. Strategy remains largely untouched.

This is where momentum breaks down. Sales keeps selling the same way. Marketing tells the same story. Product follows a roadmap disconnected from real buyer feedback. The organization technically knows more — but operates no differently.

That gap between insight and action is where value disappears. And it’s exactly where win/loss analysis comes in.

How Anova’s Win/Loss Analysis Bridges Insight and Action

One of the biggest challenges organizations face isn’t a lack of insight — it’s a reluctance to act on what they already know. In many cases, teams continue to gather more data not because they need it, but because it delays the harder work of making changes. Instead of moving forward by acting on existing insights, organizations wait for more certainty, more validation, or “the answer” that never fully arrives.

Effective win/loss analysis helps break that cycle. By equipping sales teams with direct, buyer-driven insight, win/loss enables immediate, practical action — small adjustments to messaging, qualification, and deal strategy that compound over time. The best sales organizations don’t wait for perfect information; they learn from every opportunity, test what they hear, and improve through consistent action rather than analysis alone.

Win/loss analysis is one of the most effective ways to close the gap between insight and action — especially when insights are delivered in a way that teams can consistently understand, trust, and apply. That’s where Anova Consulting Group’s approach stands out.

Most organizations already have strong visibility into their sales performance. Dashboards, CRM reports, and analytics platforms surface valuable signals about pipeline health, competitive activity, and deal outcomes. The challenge isn’t having access to information — it’s knowing how to interpret it, prioritize it, and turn it into meaningful change.

Anova’s win/loss programs are designed to complement and strengthen those existing data investments. Through structured buyer interviews and deal-level analysis, Anova captures buyer-validated, conversational intelligence that adds critical context to performance data. This insight helps explain why the trends teams see in their dashboards are happening — and what should be done about them.

Anova brings win/loss insights to life through its myView dashboard, that delivers real-time access to both qualitative buyer feedback, quantitative benchmarking, and competitive intelligence. This combination allows teams to ground decisions in buyer truth while tracking performance trends across deals, segments, and time. Supported by Anova’s expertise in the space, the myView dashboard becomes more than a reporting tool — it’s a shared source of understanding that helps organizations move from insight to action with confidence.

With this foundation in place, patterns turn into priorities:

• Deals don’t just stall — they stall for repeatable reasons that can be addressed.
• Customers don’t just churn — they disengage at identifiable moments that can be mitigated.
• Competitors don’t just win — they succeed with specific narratives and proof points that can be countered.

This is the difference between simply viewing insights and using them. When win/loss analysis is supported by the right methodology, expert interpretation, and purpose-built dashboards, it becomes a living input — not a static report — and a powerful driver of future performance.

Conclusion: Don’t Just Collect Data — Learn From It

Data is a powerful tool, but only if it leads to understanding. The organizations that separate themselves in crowded markets aren’t the ones collecting the most information, they’re the ones transforming what they already have into insight, and insight into action. Because in the end, data doesn’t drive growth – understanding the data to make changes and drive action does.

Interested in learning more?

Anova Consulting Group offers real-time insights on our clients’ Win / Loss programs through the myView dashboard, a secure web portal that provides real-time access to research results and trends. If you’re looking to turn win/loss insights into tangible revenue impact, myView helps teams stay aligned, informed, and ready to act.

This blog post is written by Jeffrey Cheng, Analyst at Anova Consulting.

Clean Data, Clear Decisions: Why Clean CRM Data Drives Better Sales Performance

In a world where every business decision is expected to be data-driven, the truth is simple: the quality of your data determines the quality of your decisions. When sales data quality breaks down, it can have ripple effects throughout your organization, impacting future sales prospects and retention.

In our twenty years of experience, the team here at Anova has noticed replicable trends emerge from poor data hygiene. As an organization specialized in working with B2B sales teams, we have first-hand knowledge of the benefits of strong, trusted CRM data – and the consequences of bad CRM hygiene.

When Data Quality Breaks Down

Over time, many organizations experience what we call “CRM drift.” Duplicate records, inconsistent data entry, outdated contacts, and incomplete deal notes gradually erode accuracy and undermine confidence in the insights produced.

This degradation isn’t intentional – sales teams are rewarded for closing deals, not maintaining data hygiene. Yet the result is predictable: flawed data leading to flawed insights. Poor CRM discipline can distort forecasting, misdirect strategy, and weaken the credibility of customer feedback programs.

The Consequences of Data Breakdowns: Win / Loss and Voice of the Customer

One example where these concerns come to the forefront is Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs. These initiatives reveal the why behind performance outcomes – why deals are won or lost, and why customers stay or leave. Few inputs are more valuable for improving sales performance and strengthening competitive positioning than genuine feedback from prospects and customers.

But these programs rely on strong data quality.  When CRM hygiene breaks down, it can have huge impacts on sales programs, revealing major shortfalls and gaps that impact your bottom line.

Consider one real world experience the team at Anova encountered:

A client asked Anova to analyze a “new competitor” that suddenly seemed to be winning more business at an alarming rate.  After a few interviews, we discovered the problem wasn’t a competitive surge at all – it was a CRM error.  The supposed new competitor was simply the first name in a Salesforce dropdown menu.  Sales reps, unsure who had actually won or rushing to log a deal, picked the first option by default.

The result? The client had been channeling resources to fight a competitor they rarely encountered.

A simple data integrity issue had cascaded into a strategic distraction; a perfect illustration that small data problems can have big strategic consequences.

Data Discipline Reflects Customer Discipline

Beyond its impacts on sales strategy, across Anova’s client base, one insight has proved consistent: data discipline mirrors customer discipline. Organizations that take care to capture complete, thoughtful details about each opportunity tend to earn higher ratings from prospects for attentiveness and importance. Conversely, when data is incomplete or inconsistent, prospects often perceive a similar lack of rigor in their interactions.

Clean data, then, is more than an operational best practice – it’s a culture signal.  The same discipline that ensures CRM accuracy also signals to customers that their time, needs, and feedback matter.

How do you Ensure Data Quality? Developing Strong CRM Hygiene

Strong CRM hygiene begins with establishing clear data-entry standards and enforcing them consistently across the organization. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams should operate from a shared definition of core fields – such as opportunity stage, close date, lead source, competitor involvement, and reason codes. When everyone uses fields the same way, data becomes more trustworthy and more actionable. Organizations can reinforce these habits by embedding mandatory fields, providing brief in-app guidance, and performing quarterly data audits to identify duplicates, missing information, or outdated records.

Sustaining CRM hygiene also requires cultural alignment, not just process alignment. Leaders should communicate why clean data matters: better forecasting accuracy, more effective Win/Loss Analysis, stronger Voice of the Customer insights, and clearer visibility into pipeline health. Highlighting the downstream impact – such as how incomplete fields undermine your ability to diagnose churn drivers, understand loss trends, or waste valuable resources chasing phantom competitors – creates accountability and buy-in. Pair that message with ongoing enablement, quick-hit training sessions, and automated reminders, and CRM hygiene shifts from a compliance task to a strategic differentiator.

The Competitive Advantage of Trusted Insight

As automation, analytics, and AI reshape competitive dynamics, the differentiator won’t be access to data – it will be confidence in data.  Clean, credible data gives sales programs like Win/Loss and VoC the foundation they need to deliver unbiased, actionable intelligence – the kind that drive sustained growth, alignment and resilience.

Our client work consistently reveals the same truth: the difference between reactive and resilient organizations often comes down to one thing – confidence in their data.  When data integrity, disciplined feedback, and objective analysis converge, insight doesn’t just explain performance, it improves it.

About Anova Consulting Group

Anova Consulting Group is a recognized leader in Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer research. Through expert-led executive interviews, actionable analysis, and our proprietary myView dashboard, Anova delivers the intelligence leaders need to strengthen sales performance, improve retention, and refine competitive positioning.

Learn how Anova can help your organization transform customer feedback into a measurable business advantage.

This blog was written by Harriet Peabody, Senior Research Analyst at Anova.

Introduction

In today’s fast-moving business landscape, outsourcing has become more than a cost-cutting strategy – it is a strategic move to consolidate specialized skills, scale quickly, and stay agile. From customer support to IT services, marketing to finance, companies are increasingly turning to third-party providers to handle non-core functions. A recent uptick in outsourcing across industries reflects a growing need for flexibility, efficiency, and global expertise.

But as outsourcing becomes more prevalent, it brings new challenges, particularly with respect to maintaining high levels of client satisfaction.

When services are outsourced, companies lose direct control over how customer interactions are handled and how services are delivered. There’s often a physical and cultural disconnect between the service provider and the end customer. This disconnect can lead to misaligned expectations, fragmented communications, and minor problems sitting unnoticed until they turn into major pain points.

Gartner reported that in 2024, 84% of surveyed organizations reported working with at least one business‑process outsourcing (BPO) partner, and 56% said improving those relationships is a moderate or significant priority. Gartner also warned that 60% of companies outsourcing customer‑facing functions would suffer client defections or hidden costs outweighing the savings.

Voice of the Customer Research and Outsourcing

This is where Voice of the Customer (VoC) research becomes essential. VoC is the process of collecting and analyzing feedback from clients to understand their needs, experiences, and expectations. For companies that outsource services, VoC insights can bridge the gap between the business, its service partners, and the end client.

By integrating VoC research throughout the outsourcing process before, during, and after transitions, businesses can:

• Identify pain points early: Are clients frustrated by slower response times after a service was outsourced? Are communication handoffs creating confusion? VoC highlights issues quickly, allowing companies to address them before they impact satisfaction or loyalty.
• Identify client priorities: Feedback can help clarify what clients truly value, enabling better alignment with outsourcing partners from the start.
• Ensure consistency in customer experience: Even if multiple vendors are involved, VoC insights and ongoing feedback ensure companies make data-driven decisions about whether a partner is meeting expectations and take corrective action if needed.

In short, companies that rely solely on internal KPIs or vendor reports to track how their clients feel about their outsourcing are operating in the dark.

That’s why organizations that outsource must invest just as much in listening as they do in logistics. Ultimately, outsourcing can drive efficiency and growth, but only if client satisfaction keeps pace. Voice of Customer research gives organizations the insight needed to manage outsourced services more effectively and ensure that clients don’t just tolerate the changes but benefit from them.

In a world where service delivery is often one step removed from the business itself, VoC becomes the direct line between companies and the customers they serve.  And in an age of outsourcing, maintaining that connection is more valuable than ever.

Interested in learning more?

Anova Consulting Group offers real-time insights on our clients’ Win / Loss and Client Loyalty programs through the myView dashboard, a secure web portal that provides our clients with real-time access to their research results. Click here to learn how myView can help your organization win and retain more business.

This blog was written by Philip Trevisan, Consultant at Anova.

In an increasingly quantitative world, nearly every program we use spits out data in some form. Sales leaders naturally want to wrangle that raw data into something digestible – and one of the most common ways is on a dashboard. Before entering the market research space, I worked in management consulting, where I saw clients frequently ask for dashboards to help them make sense of complex, disparate, or overwhelming amounts of data. Oftentimes, they just wanted to see their data displayed – but dashboards are important for so much more than that.

Dashboards are a core part of a successful Win / Loss program. Beyond just displaying quantitative data in an easy-to-understand way, they offer several larger benefits:

• Dashboards foster transparency and equal access
  • When a whole team uses a shared Win / Loss data dashboard, everyone operates on the same page. A shared dashboard fosters transparency and equal access – there is room for interpretation and discussion of the data, but your entire team is basing these conversations on a shared, universal set of information.
• Dashboards focus your team on improvement
  • A well-designed Win / Loss dashboard gives your team immediate insights on how to improve. It is difficult to tease out actionable improvements from raw data – building a visual display of the information allows your team to immediately identify insights and areas for improvement in your sales process.
• Dashboards improve real-time decision-making
  • When you get an unexpected request from a prospect or are trying to determine how you size up against a competitor before a meeting, well-designed dashboards give your team real-time data you can act on.

Successful dashboards have a few key characteristics. At Anova Consulting, we’ve built the myView dashboard, a web dashboard around these principles:

• Ensure it focuses on actionable data
  • Successful dashboards drive your team to action and enable change.  If a dashboard isn’t providing data that helps you act, then it’s just a medium for digital noise, overloading you and your team with another set of KPIs to monitor.
  • Identify and display actionable metrics; for instance, key reasons your sales team are winning and losing, the most common reasons for your prospects’ decisions, and other areas that matter most to your team.
• When rolling up qualitative data into quantitative displays of information, ensure everyone is speaking a shared language – build a set of categories and priorities and stick with it.
  • For instance, if a prospect shares they went with a competitor due to their willingness to negotiate on price, one of your teammates may identify that as a loss due to pricing, and another may identify it as a loss due to poor sales execution – neither are ‘wrong’, per se, but now your dashboard data are muddled.
• Make sure it updates in real-time – automate as much as possible
  • In an increasingly fast-paced business environment, having access to real-time data that updates regularly is key for winning business. A dashboard that requires manual updating can quickly become outdated, potentially imperiling decisions that require the most up-to-date data.
  • Explore automating data entry – uploading interview summaries that auto-populate the relevant charts, for example.

Interested in learning more?

Anova Consulting Group offers real-time insights on our clients’ Win / Loss programs through the myView dashboard, a secure web portal that provides our clients with real-time access to their research results. Click here to learn how myView can help your organization win more business.

This blog was written by Philip Trevisan, Consultant at Anova.

Businesses across the United States and the world are facing unprecedented uncertainty. Tariffs, a shaky labor market, and the ever-shifting potential impacts of AI leave leaders uncertain of how to react and plan their strategies for the next quarter, let alone next year. In periods of intense uncertainty, you need to have an accurate understanding of the sentiment of your potential and current clients to grow and sustain your business. Win/loss and voice-of-the-customer (VoC) analysis helps that happen.

Importance of Win / Loss and Churn Analysis in Periods of Uncertainty

Win/loss analysis is crucial for business and sales leaders to navigate periods of uncertainty like the one we now face. Win/loss analysis is the systematic review of closed sales opportunities, both wins and losses, to uncover the real reasons behind customer decisions. This process goes beyond surface-level feedback, digging into the factors that truly influence buying behavior, such as sales approach, product features, pricing, customer experience, and competitive positioning. Here’s why it matters in times of uncertainty:

Why Win/Loss Research is Critical in Uncertain Times:

1. Respond to market shifts: Win/loss analysis helps sales teams identify and respond to rapidly evolving market situations. Without it, your team is flying blind. In normal market conditions, that’s not ideal, but in periods of uncertainty, this presents a serious risk to your pipeline. Regular win/loss interviews help you keep abreast of new customer pain points and shifts in industry expectations. Additionally, in times of uncertainty, competitive intelligence becomes a requirement. Win/loss analysis doesn’t just show you how you win or lose, but also why your competitors are winning. In an uncertain market, learning how your competitors are standing out from the crowd can help you respond and better position yourself to win business.
2. Navigate a buyer’s market: Periods of uncertainty often lead buyers to take a step back and adopt a much more selective mindset when buying products and services. Why commit to an expensive and risky contract when the market could look totally different tomorrow? In this tight environment, you need every competitive advantage on your side to win. Armed with actionable win/loss analysis, your team will be better positioned to execute and win in a tough market.
3. Focus resources where they matter: Win/loss interviews give you actionable information on where your team can improve. In periods of uncertainty, your team is more likely to have fewer resources, so it’s critical to use them where they matter. Win/Loss interviews are a gold mine for delineating between what sales reps think happened during the process vs. what actually happened. Instead of investing your limited resources in hunches or anecdotal data, Win/loss interviews enable you to turn real customer feedback into tailored coaching and improvement for your team.

In addition to loss debriefs, an interview with a departed client (a churned client) puts the spotlight on why customers did not choose to continue a relationship with a company.

These churn interviews provide many of the benefits of loss interviews, with a few additional benefits. If, for example, missing functionality on a platform is a key reason why a company is both losing new business and experiencing churn, that clearly highlights a competitive gap in their solution. If a key feature of the platform is being cited as a strength in win interviews but subsequently shows up as a churn driver, that indicates a lack of consistent experience around that tool, either because of unrealistic expectation setting from the sales team or insufficient follow-through on the CX side.

Importance of Voice-of-the-Customer Analysis in Periods of Uncertainty

Win/loss analysis is critical to winning new business in periods of uncertainty, but how do you retain your existing customers? This is where voice-of-the-customer (VoC) analysis enters the picture. VoC feedback is a way to collect and analyze customer feedback to better understand their needs, expectations, and pain points. By listening to VoC feedback, you can identify addressable areas of your product and service with direct benefits to your customers. Important in normal business environments, VoC analysis becomes essential in periods of high uncertainty.

Why VoC Research is Critical in Uncertain Times:

1. Identify at-risk accounts: In periods of uncertainty, your clients may be more likely to end an engagement or not renew over an experience that would not have prompted the same response in a normal environment. VoC research helps you identify at-risk accounts, determine the sources of their dissatisfaction, and make course corrections to retain their business.
2. Hone strengths and address weaknesses: VoC analysis helps you identify the areas of your product or service that resonate the most with your customers, and the areas generating the most pain points, especially blind spots that you can’t see internally. You can use the strengths to bolster your sales approach and mitigate your weaknesses to help retain clients. Additionally, VoC analysis helps to solidify future priorities. While it might seem all-encompassing now, economic turmoil will abate in the future. When normalcy returns, the insights gained from VoC analysis can help direct future investment and priorities.
3. Identify opportunities for upsell or cross-sell: Client acquisition is difficult in times of uncertainty. In addition to the sales advantages of win/loss analysis described above, VoC analysis gives your sales team key insights into upsell and cross-sell opportunities at your clients. In VoC interviews, clients frequently express pain points outside of the engagement being analyzed, giving you a unique, direct perspective to pitch them on new work.

Interested in learning more?

Anova Consulting Group offers industry-leading Win / Loss and VoC analysis for businesses across a range of industries. Through our myView dashboard, you and your team can unlock real-time insights from our research. Click here to learn how Anova can help your organization navigate this period of turbulence and uncertainty.

This blog was written by Brendon Attridge, Sr. Engagement Manager

In the fast-paced world of technology, understanding why you win or lose deals is more than a sales concern, it’s a strategic imperative. And while insights into the performance of your sales team might be the first thing you think of when it comes to Win/Loss research, the fact that win/loss programs often sit with, and are managed by product marketing teams, means tech companies are well positioned to use win/loss feedback to inform and shape their product roadmaps.

What Is Win/Loss Analysis?

Win/loss analysis is the systematic review of closed sales opportunities—both wins and losses—to uncover the real reasons behind customer decisions. This process goes beyond surface-level feedback, digging into the factors that truly influence buying behavior, such as product features, pricing, customer experience, and competitive positioning.

How Win/Loss Feedback Helps Product Managers

1. Prioritizing Features That Matter

Product managers often face a flood of feature requests and ideas. Win/loss feedback helps cut through the noise by revealing which features actually impact buying decisions. If a missing capability is consistently cited in lost deals, it becomes a clear candidate for prioritization on the roadmap.

2. Understanding Competitive Dynamics

By tracking which competitors you lose to—and why—you gain a nuanced view of the market. Is a rival’s new mobile app or integration capabilities tipping the scales? These insights allow you to benchmark your product, identify gaps, and make informed decisions about where to invest development resources.

3. Spotting Market Trends and Shifts

Regular win/loss interviews highlight emerging trends, such as new customer pain points or shifts in industry expectations. Early feedback enables tech companies to anticipate changes, adapt their offerings, and avoid being blindsided by disruptive technologies.

4. Building a Customer-Centric Roadmap

Win/loss brings the voice of the customer directly into product planning. Reviewing and analyzing actual buyer feedback, instead of relying on internal assumptions, enables product teams to validate their strategies and ensure the product roadmap aligns with current market realities.

How To Put Win/Loss Insights Into Action

Use Win/Loss to Foster a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Win/loss programs help foster a culture of learning and adaptation. This culture starts from the top. With sufficient support from the C-suite and senior Product leadership, a focus on market feedback helps ensure that product development is always listens to prospects and customers and stays current with the latest market realities.

Key Steps in this process:

• Make win/loss analysis a continuous, automated process—not a one-off project.
• Involve multiple teams (product, sales, marketing) to ensure insights are shared and goals are aligned.
• Look for trends across customer segments, industries, and regions to uncover hidden opportunities.

Conclusion

For tech companies, win/loss analysis is a powerful engine for product innovation and market success. By systematically capturing and acting on buyer feedback, organizations can build roadmaps that reflect real-world needs, outpace competitors, and deliver products that win in the marketplace.

This blog was written by Harriet Peabody, Senior Research Analyst.

Understanding why customers leave is just as important—if not more so—than understanding why they stay. Churn interviews are a powerful component of Voice of the Customer (VoC) analysis, giving businesses a direct line into the motivations, frustrations, and unmet needs that drive customer departure.

But conducting these interviews effectively is an art and a science. Done well, churn interviews can uncover goldmines of insight to fuel product improvements, retention strategies, and stronger customer relationships. Done poorly, they risk sounding like post-mortems or half-hearted attempts to win back goodwill.

So, how do you do them right? Let’s break it down.

Why Churn Interviews Work

Churn interviews tap into a unique psychological moment: your customer has already decided to leave. While that might seem like a closed door, it’s actually an open window. They often feel freer to be honest, less concerned about politeness or loyalty, and more willing to share the truth—raw and real.

These insights go deeper than what surveys can provide. They help you understand root causes rather than surface-level symptoms, and they reveal patterns that even your happiest customers might not articulate.

When to Conduct a Churn Interview

Timing is everything. Here’s how to time your outreach for maximum impact:

Within 7-14 Days of Churn

Right after a customer churns, their experience is still fresh. Emotions may still be raw (especially if they had a bad experience), but that immediacy allows for more accurate recall and richer detail.

Not Immediately After Cancellation

Give it a little breathing room. Immediately following the cancellation, the customer may be too frustrated—or simply not interested in engaging. Waiting a few days shows respect for their decision and gives them time to cool down, which can lead to a more thoughtful conversation.

Schedule Considerately

Ask for a brief 15-30 minute call, and position it as a feedback conversation—not a sales pitch. Make it clear you’re not trying to win them back on the spot; you’re trying to understand and learn.

What to Ask: Powerful Questions That Reveal the Truth

Here are some proven churn interview questions that go beyond the generic:

1. “Why did you ultimately decide to leave?”

This open-ended question allows the customer to frame their own story, giving you context before you dive into specifics.

2. “What problem were you trying to solve when you started using our product/service?”

Understanding their initial goals can help you pinpoint where expectations started to misalign.

3. “At what point did you start thinking we might not be the right fit?”

This question helps isolate the moment things started to go wrong—critical for understanding preventable churn.

4. “Was there anything that might have changed your mind?”

This helps you assess which retention levers (better support, feature rollout, pricing tweaks) might have mattered most.

5. “What are you using now, and why?”

This question is key to collecting competitive intelligence. Understanding what drew them elsewhere tells you what your competitors are doing better—or simply communicating more effectively.

6. “Have we missed anything, or is there any other feedback you would like to provide?”

This question acts as a catch-all to collect any important information that may have been missed by the previous questions and shows the respondent that you value any insight they have to provide.

Best Practices to Make It Work

Even with the right timing and questions, churn interviews can fall flat without the right approach. Here are some tips to increase success:

1. Be Human, Not Scripted

Treat it like a conversation, not an interrogation. Customers can sense canned questions or hidden sales agendas from a mile away.

2. Don’t Defend or Debate

The goal isn’t to correct them or explain what went wrong. Just listen. Validate their feelings—even if you disagree. This isn’t about blame; it’s about learning.

3. Record and Analyze

With permission, record the call to review later or keep detailed notes. Use qualitative analysis to uncover trends across multiple interviews.

4. Close the Loop

Thank the customer for their honesty, and let them know how you plan to use their feedback. It shows respect and might even soften their perception of your brand, leaving the door open for future re-engagement.

Turning Churn into Change

Churn interviews aren’t just a box to check in your VoC program—they’re a strategic tool for growth. When you consistently gather, analyze, and act on churn feedback, you can:

• Improve customer onboarding and activation
• Identify weak spots in your product or service
• Refine your messaging and positioning
• Prevent future churn by solving the root cause

In short, you stop guessing and start knowing.

Losing a customer always stings. But with the right churn interview strategy, that loss can fuel something far more valuable than a quick winback: clarity. And clarity is the foundation for building products, services, and experiences that truly resonate.

Part 4: Acting on Win / Loss Data: Moving from Insight to Impact

After win / loss data has been collected, getting value from the research will ultimately come down to what is done with the research. There are many ways to do this, stretching from short term to ongoing, long-term actions.

In the short term, use individual data points as coaching opportunities. Feedback from individual situations can be used to color in blind spots of what happened in a specific deal so that sellers can learn and improve for their next opportunities.

In the medium term, after multiple interviews have been completed, identify and discuss emerging trends. When discussing these aggregate findings, do so in a cross-functional environment so that team members from product, sales, marketing, and other parts of the organization can share their perspective on why certain trends are beginning to appear. There may be initial findings with deeper truths, or they might be red herrings, but the cross-functional discussion will help promote collaboration and alignment across teams no matter what the finding is.

Over the long term, as sample sizes reach levels where the findings can be acted on, look not only to uncover insights, but identify key takeaways. Assign action owners responsible for driving change based on key takeaways. As more interviews are completed, look to see any changes in sentiment from prospects that will indicate whether or not you have moved the needle.

Part 3: Choosing Internal vs. Third-Party Interviewers

On your win / loss journey, once you know who you are going to talk to (prospect identification) and what you are going to talk to them about (interview guide design), the next decision is who will be talking to them.

The most fundamental question is whether to use internal resources or to rely on third-party interviewers. Each option has benefits. To decide which is the best option, consider these elements:

• Product expertise: The goal is to have the interviewee feel like they are having an intelligent conversation with someone who understands their business. No one will know your product more than internal resources, but highly trained third-party interviewers are often preferable as they are unbiased and therefore less likely to distort or influence the buyers perspective.

• Interviewing expertise: Interviewing is an art form. With the ultimate goal of collecting the breadth and depth of information necessary to take action, deploying interviewers who are skilled in asking questions and encouraging respondents to provide more detail can be the difference between a program that “checks the box” and one that can be used to drive strategic decisions. Among these skills are probing, being curious, using silence as a way to get the interviewee to fill the space and provide more detail, and also making the interviewee comfortable enough so that they do open up and provide more than surface level answers.

• Bandwidth: Particularly when thinking about a robust program consisting of dozens of interviews, bandwidth is an important consideration. It is not just the time to conduct the interviews either. Having dedicated time to reach out to schedule interviews is necessary to ensuring strong response rates. Writing up the transcript also takes time. Even if you are using AI to help with the transcription, the dialogue should still be reviewed and edited for clarity. This is where third parties can be a major value-add, as completing the interviews is their sole focus, as opposed to internal resources who likely have other competing priorities.

• Objectivity: Lastly, but perhaps the most important factor to consider, is objectivity. Anova’s research indicates that 60% of the time a salesperson does not get the full and accurate truth as to why they won or lost a deal if they debrief with a prospect themselves. This doesn’t mean a salesperson is doing anything nefarious. Prospects may be reluctant to give the person direct and honest feedback. Having someone internal who is removed from the situation (e.g., product manager / marketer) is a good way of increasing objectivity, and using a third party is the best way to obtain unbiased, independent feedback.

Part 2: Designing the Right Interview Guide

Critical to win / loss program success is capturing the right information. Win / loss is a powerful tool in part because of the breadth of customer feedback it can collect. It is normal for feedback to cover sales, product, pricing, services, brand / market positioning, and of course competitive comparisons.

In a perfect world companies would be able to collect as much feedback as possible across all these areas in each interview, however respondents don’t have unlimited time to give. This makes interview guide design really an optimization exercise.

To maximize a program’s value, questions should be aligned to the biggest areas of focus that were identified by stakeholders in the buy-in stage. This will ensure that above all else, feedback is maximized in those influential areas that are most responsible for driving wins and losses.

Beyond concentrating on those critical areas of focus, interview guide design should also achieve a balance between the following types of questions:

• Qualitative vs Quantitative: Qualitative feedback will collect depth and detail that is essential for making the information actionable, while quantitative questions can provide the roadmap for prioritizing pieces of feedback (e.g., lowest scored element of your sales process will identify where the team needs training) as well as head-to-head competitive comparisons.
• Leading vs Top-of-Mind: Within the sphere of qualitative feedback, it is important to ask both leading and top-of-mind questions. Leading questions should align to those areas of focus your organization has. For example, if your organization has recently rolled out a new feature to its product, asking “What were your thoughts on feature X? Did you believe it would meet your needs? Why or why not?” will capture depth of feedback on a specific area of focus. Top-of-mind questions can be useful for uncovering what is important, not to you, but to the customer. Seeing how often buyers bring up that new product feature, for example, without being prompted will give you a sense of how much the feature resonated with them. If no one is bringing it up top-of-mind, more can likely be done to make it stand out during your sales process.

One last thing to consider: the interview guides shouldn’t be set in stone. As you collect feedback and/or your business priorities change, adapt the guide so you are constantly optimizing your feedback loop.

Ultimately, win / loss interview guides can take all shapes and forms. With a little thought into areas you want to focus on, and a balanced approach for collecting feedback, the guide can be a vital tool for collecting actionable feedback.