Why do enterprise software sales teams win and lose deals? Traditional thinking would hypothesize that for high-dollar value, complex software platforms, the strength of their solution drives wins while losses are driven by a perception of higher price points and more difficult implementations, especially compared to less robust, cheaper, point solutions. Does the difference between winning and losing truly come down to price and a perception of being easy to work with? If that thinking holds true, how can enterprise software companies win despite being perceived as more expensive and more difficult to implement than their competitors?
This report explores how in enterprise software deals, winning in these competitive situations is predicated more on demonstrating value rather than absolute cost or perception of effort involved. In order to fully examine this, Anova analyzed findings from thirteen win / loss programs conducted between 2022 and 2023 focused on complex, high value enterprise software deals. Our goal was to understand what winning sales teams do differently to set their solutions apart and ultimately win more. Company names in this case study have been scrubbed and will be referred to as the Client.
Better Understanding the Price / Value Dynamic
In those thirteen programs, one of the most interesting findings was that when our Client won, in just over half of those winning situations their newly acquired customer was actually more satisfied with a competitor’s price point. Despite being at a pricing disadvantage, the Client was able to win because they proved their solution would drive superior value for the customer. Conversely, when we looked at the inverse loss data, 100% of the time when our Client lost, customers rated themselves as more satisfied with both price point and expected value of the winning solution.
Figure 1 illustrates one specific situation representative of this finding. When this Client won, satisfaction with its value exceeded that of its top competitor (75% versus 50%), even though it fell behind its competitor in terms of satisfaction with price levels (50% versus 100%). In contrast, when the Client lost, the winning vendor outperformed it in both value satisfaction and pricing satisfaction.
Figure 1 Satisfaction with Price Levels and Value in Wins and Losses Between Clients and Competitors
Additionally, in our Clients’ winning situations, an average of just 48% of prospects were satisfied with their expected ease of implementation. Said another way, more than half of newly won customers expected to be dissatisfied with their selected vendor’s implementation process yet recognized that the value of the implemented solution would outweigh the pain of installation.
Driving to Value
It becomes clear that the expectation of high value can outweigh pricing and implementation concerns. So, the question then becomes: how can software sales teams become successful at proving their value to their customers?
Click here to read the full case study.
Everyone loves a good spy story. But unless you’re at the movies or picking up a book, it’s hard to transport yourself into the world of espionage. That was, until competitive intelligence became a key component in the realm of business.
Some corporations go to great lengths to obtain competitive intelligence about rival firms. In a recent article on CNBC, Eamon Javers detailed some practices which he coined “corporate espionage.”
The article centered around one story (really an “operation”) which included undercover employees collecting data on a competitor. The employees collected intelligence by attending a rival’s conference and eavesdropping on key personnel at the bar or hiding out in the bathroom waiting to overhear any conversations. After they identified a key meeting of rival senior directors, the competitive intelligence team snuck into the conference room after the meeting to gather leftover notes and materials.
If this seems like something straight out of a spy thriller, it may be because the company was using ex-CIA operatives who had actually written spy novels to manage their corporate espionage missions. While it is not uncommon for corporations to have competitive intelligence activities, the lengths that some companies go through to collect information on the firms they compete against can be eye-opening.
But it doesn’t always have to read like a Tom Clancy novel. Competitive Intelligence (CI) can be gathered a number of different ways, and CI is a key component of Anova’s research programs. In Win Loss analysis (also mentioned in the article as a CI practice), using a third party to learn how the competition behaved during a sales situation and how they compared to your own sales effort is a major objective of the research. Departed Client analysis similarly aims to understand why your clients left for a competitor. Intermediary Perception studies gather competitive data as advisors, consultants and resellers often times have more holistic market perspectives and can evaluate one offering against a number of firms.
A lot of the best competitive intelligence can come just from talking to who it matters most: your prospects and customers. Using a third-party to get unfiltered feedback and insights about your offering compared to the competitive landscape is critical in today’s sales and service environments. Whether you play the theme song to James Bond while you read the results is entirely up to you.
This blog was written by Harriet Peabody, Research Analyst at Anova.
The fundamental attribution error is a cognitive bias that leads people to overestimate the influence of personal factors and underestimate the influence of situational factors on others’ behavior, while doing the opposite when assessing their own behavior. In other words, we attribute our own failures to the situation we were in rather than taking personal accountability due to our self-serving bias, while placing blame on others for their failures.
This bias can have a significant impact on our decision-making, both in our personal and professional lives. For example, if we win a big sale, we may attribute our success to our own superior skills and abilities. But if we lose a sale, we may blame the customer for being difficult or unreasonable. This attribution error prevents us from effectively learning from our losses and improving.
This is where win/loss comes in. Win/loss analysis can help organizations avoid the fundamental attribution error by providing a more objective and systematic way to evaluate performance. With voice of the customer data, organizations can read real feedback as to why they won or lost a deal. Rather than attributing wins to the sales team’s strength and losses to the unique situation they were in, organizations can identify points of strength and areas for improvement directly from the source. By carefully analyzing the factors that contributed to each win and loss, organizations can gain a better understanding of the true drivers of success and failure and can then develop a plan to replicate their successes and improve upon the factors contributing to failures.
To develop this plan, organizations need a more realistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. When it comes to strengths, organizations may use wins as confirmation that their team is executing well and should keep doing what they are doing. In reality, there are always areas for improvement, even in wins, and win/loss analysis helps to identify those as well as the strengths that drove the win. Even more helpful is the identification of weaknesses in lost deals. Rather than looking at the situational factors that may have contributed to a loss, a more productive process is to look at what you did have control over and could do better next time. Win/loss analysis is the best way to learn what the customer thought you could have done better, and course correct going forward, thus avoiding the fundamental attribution error.
Here at Anova, not only are we committed to helping our clients avoid the fundamental attribution error through data collection and identification of actional insights from their customers, but we are also committed to avoiding this bias within our own organization. One of our company values is ownership, something we often refer to as “less fingers, more thumbs,” meaning that instead of blaming the situation or others for any difficulty we are having, we take accountability for what we can control and take action to improve the situation. Recognizing that we do have this cognitive bias is the first step, and the next step is operationalizing a plan to counteract it. Choosing to establish a win/loss initiative at your organization is a great plan for avoiding the fundamental attributional error and therefore learning from your losses and achieving more wins.
Note: This piece is written by Zach Golden, a Consultant for Anova, about his first-hand experience in seeing the importance of giving customers a voice.
A few months ago, I was sitting in a meeting with the Head of Service for one of Anova’s clients, a large retirement services organization with thousands of clients across the country. We were discussing the current state of their customer base including satisfaction and retention.
The Executive was talking about the steps his organization was taking to determine which clients were loyal, referenceable customers, and which ones were at risk of leaving. His response was relatable to many companies. He said, “We do pulse checks of our customers multiple times throughout the year, almost whenever there is an interaction with one of our service reps. We send them an online survey to fill out asking for an NPS® score, and all the answers come back with great responses. But then we lose a bunch of clients at the end of the year and our salespeople want to know why we can’t retain the customers they sold.”
This problem is indicative of a trend that has overtaken the marketplace: the over-simplification of customer satisfaction research.
The Net Promoter Score® is meant to be a relationship metric, not transactional. However, so many organizations get sucked in to trying to quantify the interactions with their customer base. These organizations tend to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Some organizations obsess over each touch point, but fail to understand how the overall relationship with their client is being perceived.
In the case of our retirement services customer, the friendliness of their call center representatives resulted in high NPS® scores because their clients were pleased with the cheerfulness of the service personnel. However, these same customers were dissatisfied with the overall relationship because there was little proactive communication or help offered to them, particularly during tax and reporting season.
Customers need to be heard from. They need a platform to voice their satisfaction and dissatisfaction about all aspects of the relationship. They need someone to listen to them and ask questions about specific pain points. A simple NPS® metric cannot deliver that detail.
In-depth phone conversations serve as a contrarian approach to gathering feedback from today’s overly web-surveyed customers. They allow the person to feel more valued because their feedback is actually being heard, instead of being lumped in with all the other web surveys they receive after every transaction at the supermarket, coffee shop, or car wash. The conversations let customers voice their opinions on a wide range of attributes impacting their entire relationship.
It is estimated that it costs 7 times as much to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. At that cost, keeping current clients as satisfied as possible is a necessity for companies looking to improve their bottom line. What is the most effective way at ensuring clients are satisfied? Actually listening to what they have to say.
Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.”
If you are in sales, you are most likely goal-oriented and performance-driven. Your ability to win business – to convert leads into closed business situations – becomes your report card. And if you are a successful salesperson (or working to become one), you most likely focus on your new situations and pipeline, constantly working the sale and finding the path to closing that piece of business.
How would you like to put yourself ahead of the rest?
Win / Loss Analysis is a game changer. No longer are you just looking at a scoreboard – how many deals did you close and how many did you loss? Win / Loss takes you beyond the score and moves into your performance, helping you learn the real reasons that drove a prospect to a certain decision.
This is information you need to know. The most important way to close more business is to learn what your clients and prospects are thinking at every stage of the sales experience. With this intel, you can move ahead of your competition by using real, actionable feedback to improve your performance in the next opportunity.
A Win / Loss program will help you:
In the current competitive market, success goes beyond simply keeping score of wins and losses. Sales professionals aiming to stay ahead of the curve are turning to Win / Loss Analysis for a deeper understanding of their performance. A Win / Loss program not only helps improve messaging and effectiveness but also sheds light on competitors’ successes and identifies drivers for closing new business. This approach encourages continuous improvement across the entire sales process, from initial rapport-building to sealing the deal, empowering sales professionals to enhance their performance and increase their chances of winning business. Consider how elevated your sales activity could be if you were receiving in-depth, post-sales debriefs after each and every decision in your pipeline.
So how can you best use Win / Loss for sales success? Try some of these helpful resources:
From a Good Sales Call to a Great Sales Call
This blog was written by Harriet Peabody, Research Analyst at Anova.
Status quo bias is a cognitive bias that leads people to prefer the current state and resist change. This bias can be seen in many different areas of life, from personal decision-making to organizational decision-making.
In the context of organizations, status quo bias can lead to several problems, including:
A failure to innovate. Organizations that are stuck in the status quo are less likely to develop new products and services, or adopt new ways of doing things, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.
A failure to meet customer needs. Customers’ needs and expectations are constantly changing. Organizations that don’t listen to their customers’ feedback and make changes accordingly are at risk of losing their customers to competitors.
A failure to adapt to change. The business world is constantly changing, and organizations that don’t adapt to change are likely to fall behind their competitors.
Voice of the customer (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, organizations can identify addressable areas that will directly benefit their customers.
VOC feedback can help organizations avoid status quo bias in a number of ways:
It provides a fresh perspective. VOC feedback comes from customers with different perspectives than employees, helping organizations identify areas where they are falling short of customer expectations.
It identifies areas for improvement. VOC feedback helps organizations identify weaknesses and implement improvement plans that address customer needs.
It provides evidence for change. VOC feedback provides crucial evidence to support the need for change, helping overcome potential resistance from employees and other stakeholders.
Anova helps clients avoid status quo bias not only by providing VOC feedback in the form of win/loss, customer satisfaction, and customer churn programs, but also by generating actionable insights from the VOC data. Clients learn directly from the customer what they need to do to stay competitive, coming away with ideas on how they can begin making improvements. Additionally, Anova’s competitive benchmarking data helps clients prioritize areas for improvement by comparing client results to others in their industry. Keeping up on competitor innovation drives organizations to innovate themselves to avoid falling behind.
The Anova value of a growth mindset means that we as a team are ‘content but never complacent.’ Rather than sticking to the status quo and an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mindset, we push ourselves to continuously improve and better serve our clients. This involves being receptive to feedback as well as pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone to embrace change. Using VOC data combined with a commitment to being open to change, data driven, and customer centric, Anova aims to ensure our clients are well-positioned to remain competitive and win more deals by virtue of avoiding intrinsic status quo bias.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the way businesses operate, with remote work becoming a defining trend. Sales teams are no exception, as they’ve increasingly turned to videoconferencing for meetings and presentations. While remote sales may have been on the horizon, the last few years accelerated this shift, leaving teams to adapt to virtual interactions without as many traditional face-to-face connections.
According to a HubSpot report published in September 2022, 68% of sales leaders are planning to adopt either a hybrid or fully remote sales model. In this changing landscape, sales teams must uphold traditional sales principles like responsiveness, consultative approaches, and demonstrating expertise. However, they also need to acquire new skills to build rapport and relationships through a screen.
Here are key tips for effective remote sales calls:
Preparation and rapport building: Small talk, which naturally occurs in in-person meetings, may take time to develop on video conferences. To foster this, come prepared with relevant topics for your audience. For new prospects, research their professional and personal interests from sources like LinkedIn and company bios. For existing clients, consult the team servicing them for insights.
Balancing content and conversation: Keep your camera on to establish a personal connection and use visuals like slides and images to convey your message effectively. Alternate between sharing content directly related to your sales story and turning off sharing during more conversational moments to mimic face-to-face discussions.
Amplify non-verbal cues: On videoconferencing, the focus is often limited to the speaker’s face. Use body language, gestures, and hand signals to enhance your message and presentation. If possible, position yourself further from the camera to ensure your hands are visible. Bring your hands closer to your face when emphasizing points or counting down agenda items.
Active listening: Virtual presentations can sometimes feel one-sided. Pause at regular intervals to encourage questions and revisit previously covered areas. This not only engages the audience but also addresses any questions or concerns they might have.
Multiple voices: A single-voiced presentation can lead to audience disengagement over time. Assign different sections of the sales presentation to various team members. If possible, bring in experts from your team, like implementation or client support members, to address specific communication points.
The shift toward remote sales is here to stay, offering benefits such as increased reach, flexibility, reduced travel expenses and decreased carbon footprint. To succeed in this changing landscape, sales teams must adapt and evolve. While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, these tips can help B2B sales teams adjust their strategies to optimize remote presentations.
There are many different methods to go about analyzing and understanding the overall satisfaction of your client base. But beyond this overall score, which is rating a vast number of your clients, are the sentiments of individual customers.
Would you want to know exactly which of these clients are the unhappiest and why?
Most likely, your answer to the question above is affirmative. After all, these are the clients that are most at risk for leaving you, and as Bill Gates said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
But how do you find out which clients fall into the At Risk category and what specifically is behind their dissatisfaction? The answer is right inside your client satisfaction program approach. By taking your client satisfaction study one step further, you can identify who these clients are and respond with personalized service that can save that potential ambulatory revenue from walking out on you.
Consider, perhaps, a couple new techniques. One technique is to ask a series of questions gaging your clients’ satisfaction with different attributes regarding the relationship. For example, you can ask them to rate how they feel about the value of your products and services relative to the fees paid, how they are treated as an important client, and their willingness to recommend your organization to someone else.
By uncovering and seeing your clients’ sentiments regarding these attributes, you will be able to determine who is not feeling satisfied with pivotal aspects of the relationship and who would consider leaving for someone else. The responses to these questions can also dig deeper into areas that the client may not have considered when rating their overall satisfaction.
Another technique is to openly ask your clients to rank their likeliness to continue the relationship with your company on a sliding scale. While slightly more brazen, it will be easy to decipher these more direct answers and understand which clients are At Risk.
As noted, after identifying these At Risk customers, it is important to follow-up with a personalized discussion. Look at the ratings for all the other attributes in your survey to identify which are the lowest, and (most likely) driving their dissatisfaction, and speak to how you plan on improving their experience regarding their pain points. Having the personalized discussion will show you care, have paid attention to their dissatisfaction, and are committed to improving the relationship.
Engaging a third-party to gather feedback from clients can be an invaluable strategy to obtain honest and unbiased insights. Having an external, investigating party provides a level of objectivity that clients may feel is lacking in internal surveys, making them more comfortable sharing their genuine thoughts and concerns. Third-party feedback is also often seen as credible and impartial, which can encourage clients to be more open in their responses. You can ensure that your survey is being conducted by people who are skilled at analyzing the data and transforming it into actionable recommendations. This invaluable insight enables your business to take swift and effective action to address client needs, enhancing overall satisfaction and client retention. The objective perspective and expertise of a third-party service can be a game-changer in creating a more client-centric approach to your business.
Given that a large majority of sales processes and presentations are now conducted virtually, with call recordings readily available, “game tape” review is an easy addition to team training efforts.
Watching yourself on screen or listening to your own recorded voice in the company of colleagues can be a daunting experience, but game tape sessions are invaluable. There is a lot you can learn by watching your own performance, but incorporating outside viewpoints can lead to even more fresh insights and opportunities for improvement.
While the specific approach to conducting game tape sessions may vary among organizations, here are some essential tips for facilitating them effectively:
Foster trust and openness: At the outset, emphasize that game tape sessions are designed to facilitate improvement and enhance team success. This approach will help team members feel comfortable and minimize unease.
Embrace constructive criticism: Although receiving praise is always nice, the true benefit of these sessions lies in identifying areas for improvement. Recognize that no interaction is perfect, and welcome constructive feedback on parts of the interaction that could have gone better, in addition to reinforcing behaviors to repeat and emphasize.
Apply lessons learned: Implement the insights gained from these sessions in your future interactions, both in terms of what to do and what not to do. Adjust your talking points and visual aids. View these lessons as building blocks toward achieving more polished interactions.
Maintain continuity: Establish a continuous feedback and improvement cycle. At Anova, these sessions are a regular part of our internal processes because we believe in craftsmanship. There is always room for enhancement and growth, and we have found that everyone on the team benefits by reacting to their teammates’ performance; it accelerates their learning, as well.
Similar to how professional athletes and sports teams rely on game tape sessions to optimize their performance, implementing such sessions in a sales organization fosters a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.
“If I only knew then what I know now.” Have you ever thought that? Most likely your answer is yes. We all have. This common phrase is usually used when talking about life lessons such as relationships, opportunities, and decisions. But it also applies to business, an experience that is full of life lessons – yes – relationships, opportunities, and decisions.
Consider your clients, both past and present. Could you learn from your past clients that have left you for a competitor? What if you knew that 1 out of every 4 departed clients had no intention of leaving your organization at the onset of looking at another provider? In truth, not all departed clients were looking to leave.
In its purest form, Customer Churn research helps an organization understand why clients have left their organization for a competitor. Why does the story have to end there though?
When an organization uses Customer Churn research to develop insights and strategies that will retain existing clients, the ultimate benefit of such a program occurs. And if organizations are retaining clients, they are fueling corporate goals and adding to their bottom line.
You may be asking, “What’s the cost connection between retaining existing clients and saving my organization money?” Simple: It costs roughly 7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. When you factor in the cost of marketing, sales efforts, and onboarding for new clients, it becomes clear that retaining your existing client base is not only beneficial but cost-effective.
So, look back and discover how you can know now what you did not know then. Your past, present and future clients will appreciate it and so will your organization’s leaders. By retaining existing clients, you’ll not only safeguard your organization’s reputation but also save resources that can be redirected towards growth and innovation.
To read more about the benefits of Customer Churn analysis, check out other Anova Blog posts:
The Doctor is In: How Departed Client Analysis is Like Getting an Annual Physical
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