Sample Size for Win / Loss Analysis

Sample Size for Win / Loss Analysis

Win Loss Interview

Note: This blog was written by Landon Fried, a Research Analyst at Anova, about how he helps clients decide on one of the most fundamental aspects of a win / loss program: the sample.

For companies new to implementing win / loss, figuring out the right sample size can feel like a shot in the dark. While quantitative research has widely accepted standards for determining sample size, qualitative research, such as win / loss analysis, has no rigid rules for defining a data set. Experts, such as the ones in this study by the National Centre for Research Methods, have responded “it depends” when asked how many qualitative interviews are enough.

“So, what are the factors to consider in order to determine the best win / loss sample?” The list of factors is seemingly endless, but many of them can fall into one of three categories: characteristics of the deals you want to interview, the degree of representativeness you want to achieve, and the timeframe you are trying to complete your program in. Altogether, these elements will determine the best sample size for your program.

Deal characteristics: How similar / different are your deal types?

As a rule of thumb, if you have many different deal types (e.g. different product types, different sales channels, different competitors, etc.) the more interviews you will need in order to confidently distinguish aggregate trends. A deal population that is more similar can yield actionable findings with fewer interviews.

Here are some deal-related factors to consider before settling on your target sample size:

How far did you get in the sales process? An interview for a deal that reached the finalist stage often has many more and many different insights from one that fell apart in the RFP stage. While Anova typically recommends choosing the former type of situation to do interviews on because there is much more to be learned, sometimes it is important to find out why you are getting eliminated earlier on in your sales cycle. Consider where in the sales cycle you think your team is struggling the most and target deals that fell apart in that stage to do interviews on.

How different are the sales processes across your deals? If your company utilizes different sales processes, perhaps for different product lines or geographic regions, you will likely need to adjust your win / loss program’s sample size or scope accordingly to capture feedback from the different deal types.

In Anova’s experience, there are a few different ways to account for the differences in deal types. One is by expanding the number of interviews conducted and then segmenting the aggregate data by the different characteristics as part of one large program.

Rather than increasing the number of interviews for one program, another way to account for these differences is to conduct multiple, smaller programs that target specific market segments. This concept is frequently used by one of Anova’s clients in the enterprise software space. This client prefers to utilize multiple, smaller programs for different market segments and conducts them separately from each other. By having multiple programs with more focused scopes, they can focus the feedback and learnings on specific segments of their business.

Representativeness of the sample

What deal flow volume does your company have? Does your company see hundreds or thousands of sales situations in a year? Or is your deal flow lower volume? The more deals your company is involved in, the more interviews you will need in order to have a sample that accurately represents your business. On the other hand, a lower volume pipeline will require fewer interviews to achieve a similar level of representativeness.

How important is each deal at the individual level? While lower deal flow may require fewer interviews to achieve an acceptable level of representativeness, it is also important to consider the importance of each individual deal.  If your company has relatively fewer deals, each deal is more significant and so it makes sense to include as great of a percentage of them as possible. Also consider doing multiple interviews for each situation. Since each deal is of greater significance, interviewing two or three people who were involved in making the decision can provide you with different perspectives on individual deals and increase your overall sample size.

Balancing Time Against the Number of Data Points

One of the primary tradeoffs in any win / loss program is between the size of the data set and the timeframe in which an organization is looking for aggregate results. While programs with a smaller sample size can get your company emerging trends relatively quickly, a more robust program with a larger sample will yield deeper insights.

More robust programs generally take a longer time to complete but provide greater confidence in the overall findings when compared to smaller programs. Additionally, a larger program can allow for segmentation and more precision when calculating numbers, which can be particularly useful in discerning trends over time.

However, some companies prefer to view results more frequently. Smaller programs have the advantage of a faster completion time. For some organizations, this is preferred given the nature of their business (e.g. companies in cyclical industries). Although smaller programs produce fewer data points, these programs can uncover insights quicker and can be particularly useful in rapidly changing industries where it is imperative to get actionable feedback as fast as possible.

A smaller program can also serve to demonstrate the value of doing win / loss analysis. In Anova’s experience, companies new to win / loss often opt for a smaller sample size in their first program in order to receive aggregate results which help in securing internal buy-in and showing the value of win / loss. Once the organization sees the value, these companies often move to a larger, longer-term program.

Although there is no “one size fits all” method for determining the sample size your company will need, considering the factors above can help you to determine the ideal sample size for your company’s win / loss program. By taking the time up front to identify the best opportunities and decide on the right sample size, you can lay the groundwork for a successful win / loss program before even completing a single interview.

 

win loss interviewIn our last blog, we covered the benefits of using a formal interview guide when conducting a win / loss interview. Now, we want to go a level a deeper and discuss what types of questions you should be writing down before-hand, so you can be the most prepared going into the interview with prospects.

Search Criteria: One of the main reasons salespeople lose deals is they do not accurately understand the unique needs of their prospects. It is important in a win / loss interview to transport the respondent back to their thought process at the beginning of their search and ask questions like “What business problems were you trying to solve with the acquisition of a new solution?” and “What were the main attributes you were looking at to differentiate amongst vendors?” These questions help identify what areas the prospect was looking for your sales team to address during the sales process. By the end of the interview, you should make sure it is clear whether the prospect felt your team was able to address these unique needs.

Top-of-Mind Strengths and Weaknesses: Qualitative strength and weakness questions are open-ended questions designed to let the prospect think and answer in free-form. These questions can be as simple as “What were our strong points?” or “What could we improve on?” Be sure these are totally open-ended questions. Do not “lead the witness” with questions such as “Was our brand seen as a strength or weakness of the company?” You can ask questions like that later in the interview, but top-of-mind strength and weakness questions are important to determine the prospect’s true perceptions of your organization, with no outside influence.

Benchmarking / Competitive Intelligence: In addition to collecting open-ended, qualitative feedback, it is also important to use your win / loss interview to collect quantitative data. Having a section where you ask the prospect to rate your organization and a competitor on a number of rating scale questions not only gives you those quantitative statistics, but also provides a fair amount of competitive intelligence. In an interview on a loss decision, ask the prospects to rate your company to the winning provider. In a winning situation, do the same but for the runner up, or a specific competitor you are particularly interested in. Benchmarking questions should come towards the end of your survey because if the client senses the interview is coming to an end they might be more willing to give more information about the competition. It also may force them to focus on and assign ratings to specific attributes they had not thought of yet.

Decision Drivers: It is the most fundamental question of a win / loss interview: “Which vendor did you select and what were the top reasons for your choice?” In looking at the answers to this question, remember back to the question asking what the prospect was focused on at the beginning of the search, and see if anything changed throughout the search process.

These types of questions will give you the foundation for a successful win / loss interview. As you draft your interview guide, be sure to fill in with other questions focusing on the sales process, product / service offering, pricing, and deal-specific areas. But with these tips, you are well on your way to drafting your own interview guide for yourself!

blog imageWhen delivering a sales presentation to prospects, how frequently is “winging it” the strategy you use? Probably not very often. So, if you strategize and formalize your sales presentation, shouldn’t you do the same when it comes time to understand your prospect’s decision making?

Anova’s research has uncovered that only 25% of salespeople use a formal, written-down win / loss interview guide when conducting post-decision debriefs. In other words, 75% of sales debriefs are impromptu and do not adequately allow for obtaining complete and constructive feedback. Just as you would prepare for a presentation, it is important to strategize before the debrief so you can obtain the best feedback possible to learn and benefit from. Here are some of the benefits you will gain from having a formalized win / loss debrief guide:

  • Increase Your Close Rate: Anova’s research has shown sales personnel who take the time to organize and plan their questions have a 15% higher close rate than those who do not use a planned interview guide.
  • Maximize Feedback and the Keep Conversation Focused: If you use a formal win / loss interview guide, you will come across as more professional. Interviewees will take the survey more seriously because they will understand that you took the time to prepare something useful and thorough, and will want to return to you useful and thorough feedback in-kind. You will feel confident in asking the right questions and probing for more reasoning if those points are written on the page in front of you. Additionally, the guide will be your map to stay focused on the topics you want to cover and hit on the key takeaways you want to know more about.
  • Hand-written Notes: Printing out the win / loss template and taking hand-written notes is a crucial part of a thorough and complete feedback session. When you take hand-written notes, you do not distract the interviewee (or yourself) with the sound of typing. You are also not tempted by other distractions, like email or social media. Moreover, if your notes are organized, you can see the path that your prospect took to come to their decision and can use it in the future if you interact with the prospect and/or company again.
  • A Tool For Life: Once you have a win / loss interview guide that you are comfortable with and that gets you the responses you are looking for, you can use it for the rest of your career. Even if you change companies, or even change industries, you simply need to adjust the existing win / loss survey for the new products and/or services. Additionally, you can help new salespeople get ahead of the game by sharing with them past interviews so they can avoid common mistakes.

Now that you know the benefits of formally constructing a win / loss interview guide, you know what key ingredients to add to your survey to truly get the most out of your post-decision discussion!

Note: This blog was written by Brenna Foley, a research analyst at Anova, about her experience using benchmarking data to help her clients become more competitive.

Think about a sports team preparing for their season. The team spends all off-season practicing and preparing for action, but they never know how good they really are until they go up against their competition. The team needs a benchmark.

Benchmarking is also critical in the business world because it allows a company to better understand how their business compares to other providers in the market. By using industry benchmarks to see how their company ranks compared to competitors, business leaders can identify competitive advantages as well as areas for improvement and growth.

Now think about how benchmarking can impact a traditional win / loss program. In win / loss, interviews are conducted with a company’s prospects. The decision makers from the prospect give feedback and detail about what a company did right in the sales process and how that company can improve. Once multiple interviews are conducted and the results are aggregated, trends start to come out.

When doing win / loss, it is important for a company to evaluate its performance with broad context. While the data collected about the company allows the organization to understand its strengths and weaknesses within its own sphere, when industry-level data is added on top of this that sphere expands and the company can put its results into the context of the industry as a whole.

For instance, once the analysis is compared to a benchmark, the interpretation of the results begins to change. Now conclusions about what a company is doing well or not well can be verified by comparing results to how other competitors performed.

Let’s look at an example of this happening with an Anova client: a retirement services client completed a program and received relatively positive feedback on their participant website. Although some prospects considered the participant website a weakness, many more spoke positively about the ease of use and modern interface of the platform. Within the context of the program alone, it did not seem like the client needed to prioritize enhancing its participant portal.

However, when Anova’s industry benchmark was added to the analysis, the story changed. The Anova benchmark showed that mentions of the client’s participant website as a strength were 26% less than what Anova typically sees for similar clients. Although prospects noted the client’s participant website as being easy to use, there were very few mentions of the tools and functionality as a strength, especially compared to industry norms. Introducing Anova’s benchmark to the client’s findings allowed the client to understand their participant website was visually appealing, but the breadth of tools lagged compared to the competition.

This is one example of the importance of putting results into context. At Anova, our benchmarking data consists of feedback from over tens of thousands of interviews and 20 years of research with companies in financial services, technology, healthcare, and various other industries. Utilizing our benchmarking data allows us to provide our clients with a big picture view of their performance by comparing their results to what we have seen in other studies and provides a more comprehensive analysis than solely using program data.

Whether you conduct win / loss internally or partner with a third party, make sure you remember to not only look at your results in a vacuum, but also with as much context as you can.

blog imageSpring training is a baseball tradition that goes back as far as competitive baseball. For over 140 years, major baseball teams have been migrating to warm weather states like Florida and Arizona to practice before the season starts. What’s with all the preparation?

Spring training gives baseball teams time to prepare and get ready. It allows new players to try out for positions on the team and existing players to get in shape pre-season. It gives teams time to work out the kinks and practice the numerous different situations they may encounter when the lights come on and results matter. This is their time, coaches and players alike, to get in shape and win during the upcoming baseball season.

As baseball great Babe Ruth said, “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”

So then, what do spring training and sales training have in common? A lot. In fact, it can be argued that sales training aims to do precisely the same thing as spring training.

A successful sales training program gets sales teams ready and aligned by:

  • Reviewing and learning new products
  • Discussing marketing messaging and positioning strategies
  • Building cohesiveness and rapport between new team members and existing salespeople, as well as between managers and individual reps
  • Planning the goals and approaches for delivering on those goals for the upcoming fiscal year

What better way to get your salespeople in shape and ready to win than sales training? The team leaves focused, ready, and prepared for the upcoming sales season.

Spring is a natural time of year for a sales organization to come together for training. Q1 is done, the organization has likely digested the previous year and has developed goals for the existing calendar, sales pipelines have been reviewed and cleaned up, and sales activity is becoming more and more important as teams head into April. Leadership is focused on wins.

Giving sales teams the proper preparation, knowledge, and motivation to hit sales goals is essential in today’s competitive sales markets. So, batter up and let the training begin!

Note: This blog was written by Michelle Martin, Senior Research Analyst at Anova. Michelle works with a number of clients who have made the choice to begin partnering with a third-party win / loss firm for the first time, and shares her thoughts on the benefits that come with that decision

At some point in your life, you have turned to a coach to provide you with objective feedback to help with a sport, a musical interest, a skill, or a career move. For the same reasons you would hire a coach to help you excel in these areas of your life, organizations hire win / loss experts to coach them on how to be more competitive in sales situations. Companies look to the experts because an independent win / loss firm can apply its knowhow to install a consistent feedback loop, eliminate bias, effectively gather feedback, and deliver actionable insights.

INSTALLING A CONSTANT FEEDBACK LOOP

It is common for organizations to ask their salespeople to record a “reason for win/loss” in their CRM when closing out a deal. However, salespeople do not consistently understand why prospects made their decision. Only 19% of sales reps set up separate calls to perform post decision debriefs. This means the vast majority of decision data in a company’s CRM is the sales rep’s interpretation of what happened.

The reason that only 19% set up separate debriefs is because many salespeople quickly move onto their next deal. Salespeople allocate their time to focus on new sales opportunities, as opposed to spending time thinking about deals that have already closed. Unfortunately, this means salespeople do not invest in learning things they did not do well and can improve on, as well as things they did do well and should replicate in the future.

Because companies know that salespeople want to focus on selling the next deal, some organizations “insource” the feedback collection mechanism to another department. If an organization is doing win /loss internally, it is best to have a separate department, such as competitive intelligence or product marketing, run the program. However, there are challenges that come with running a win / loss program internally involving time, expertise, and focus. Keep reading below in the “Effectively Gathering Feedback” section for more detail.

Unlike other companies that are focused on their own product offering, post-decision debriefs are the product of win / loss analysis firms. Win / loss companies need data to operate, and their principal focus is collecting the primary research needed to help their clients. They can allocate resources to focus solely on debriefing with prospects. This makes sure that the feedback is consistently collected and includes specific details that will help organizations sell more effectively. Focusing and devoting so many resources to collecting feedback allows a third-party win / loss firm to help build a consistent feedback loop for their clients.

ELIMINATING BIAS

Let’s say your sales team is made up of reps who are in the 19% of salespeople who conduct a debrief with their prospects. There is still a concern about the accuracy of the feedback the salesperson was able to collect. Based on Anova’s research, salespeople only get the complete truth 40% of the time.

One of the reasons for this low number is because salespeople are not able to get the complete and honest truth from prospects. Prospects sometimes do not feel comfortable delivering bad news to someone who they have built a relationship with. Think about a couple going through a break-up. Does one party always tell the other the exact reasons why they are breaking up with them? Not often. It is more likely they will tell their friends, or even go down the street and tell the bartender the whole story. They just don’t want to hurt the feelings of a person with whom they had a relationship. The same human nature applies to business decisions.

Another reason the number might be low is because salespeople don’t like to admit failure. Anova’s research has discovered salespeople believe they are at fault for losing a deal only 25% percent of the time, but believe they are the primary reason for winning deals 75% of the time. This is because salespeople are only human, and it is human nature to blame failures on external factors but accredit successes to internal factors such as experience, skills, and effort.

So, what does this all mean? If an organization is using data on why they are winning and losing to make decisions, and that data is incorrect, the organization will be making poorly informed decisions and will struggle to improve in the marketplace. On the other hand, an independent third party is in an objective position to receive a prospect’s feedback about the sales process. When speaking to a third-party, prospects are more forthcoming with their true opinions of how a sales team performed and are more likely to share constructive commentary that organizations can use to improve gaps in its offering and sales approach. Third parties will ask all the right questions and remove bias from the debrief stage, and as a result the feedback is more accurate and allows for more confident decision making when the data is aggregated.

EFFECTIVELY GATHERING FEEDBACK

When win / loss is done internally, the job of debriefing with the prospect falls on somebody who lacks the training and experience to effectively probe for details. Without a trained interviewer, an organization will be left with incomplete feedback and there will be holes missing in the data. On the other hand, the specialized interviewers who work for a win / loss company have gone through training to effectively debrief with prospect decision makers and have experience conducting hundreds of interviews. When speaking with a decision maker, it is important for the interviewer to have an engaging, senior-level discussion about the prospect’s buying process.

In addition to the skills needed to conduct a robust interview, there is also a large time commitment required to schedule, conduct, and write up an interview. An average win / loss interview takes around 30-40 minutes. If you factor in the time it takes to schedule and write up the interview, a single interview can require multiple hours of work. For individuals who have other responsibilities, such as salespeople or product marketers, carving out time to do multiple interviews can be a daunting task. However, win / loss firms have trained teams that focus on conducting and analyzing interviews, which increases efficiency.

DELIVERING ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

When it comes time to aggregate results and look at trends and findings, outsourcing win / loss to specialized firms has key advantages compared to running a win / loss program internally. Win / loss firms have proprietary technology, benchmarking, and can deliver stakeholder presentations that will help organizations uncover insights and drive to action.

Win / loss firms often have proprietary technology that includes client dashboards. The dashboard makes it easy for a company to manage their program and view emerging trends in real-time. Having these capabilities readily available on a platform will help organizations keep track of how a program is progressing and what themes are developing as interviews are completed.

Win /loss firms also have the ability to provide benchmarking, which allows organizations to understand how their results fit in a broader context. Say a company does 20 loss interviews and half of them mentioned issues with their sales team as a reason why they were not selected. Is a 50% sales defect rate normal? Is it above average? A win / loss focused firm will be able to answer those questions because it will have the experience of doing several different studies across different clients and industries. Instead of viewing results in a vacuum, a win / loss firm can help an organization understand its data on both an absolute and a relative basis.

Another key advantage win / loss firms have is the ability to deliver findings to an organization’s senior decision makers as a trusted source. Company executives don’t often see all the problems facing their organization because they are not in the room when the sales pitch happened. Win / loss provides executives with visibility into what prospects think about the organization and the presentation of aggregate findings is a great means for pulling out the most salient insights. While some of the commentary will be negative, it is easier to have a third-party deliver this constructive feedback because they are completely independent and do not have a stake in the game. By receiving this unbiased truth, executives can have clarity when making strategic decisions.

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Win / loss will provide your organization with the feedback you need to sell more effectively. In order to unlock as much value as possible from win / loss, companies should rely on an expert third-party organization to help build a consistent feedback loop, gather unbiased feedback, and use their skills to deliver the feedback in the most effective way possible. You’ve hired coaches to help you improve in other aspects of your life, why wouldn’t your organization hire win / loss experts to learn how to compete more successfully?

win / loss for product marketingConsider this: In a survey conducted by BrightTALK, 42% of B2B marketing professionals state that a lack of quality data is their biggest barrier to lead generation. At the same time, 70% of marketing professionals indicate that their biggest marketing goal is converting leads to customers. Anyone see the problem?

Marketers are charged with creating and converting qualified leads but are lacking the quality data in which to do so.

To solve this problem, we need to take a step back. Any successful organization will tell you that product marketing and sales working together is critical. It is, in fact, essential to sourcing prospects, converting those prospects to clients, and retaining existing clients. One cannot have success without the other. It just doesn’t work.

Gathering and using competitive / market intelligence data is one way product marketing and sales can align. Why did one piece of potential business close and another is lost to a competitor? Speaking of competition, what are they doing and saying that perhaps your marketing and sales team don’t know about? What gaps exist in the marketplace that your organization can fill? It is not important enough these days to keep up with the competition; a winning strategy means you stay ahead of them.

Sun Tzu, the author of the famed Art of War, knew this truth even in 500 B.C. in saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.”

Win / loss research helps you with both. Knowing yourself and knowing your competition.

Win / loss reviews are an exercise whereby organizations gather feedback on their sales process and sales team efforts, typically by interviewing new clients and/or prospects after the buying decision has been made, regardless of whether the deal was won or lost. The primary purpose of a win / loss review is to serve as a learning tool – one that is focused on driving continuous improvement.

That learning can come in multiple forms. An individual transcript can help a product marketer or salesperson understand why he or she won or lost a specific opportunity, and aggregate reporting can help organizations better understand overall trends driving decisions and why they are winning or losing across all opportunities. This reporting allows product marketers to know the competition more accurately, make better decisions, and ultimately increase win rates.

Some key elements that help product marketers in win / loss reporting are:

  • Analysis of your company’s key strengths and areas for improvements (as perceived through the eyes of its prospects)
  • Key drivers for closing new business in your marketplace, including competitive intelligence and insights
  • Identification of areas for improvement within your company’s sales and marketing process
  • Identification of unmet client needs and new product development opportunities
  • Tracking of key trends over designated time periods and other demographic variables

Product marketing begins the customer’s buying process and sales completes it. Win / loss is one way to bring success to that continuum and keep those two teams aligned toward their common goals.

pen-idea-bulb-paper win loss analysisWhich company has the better outlook: one whose leaders think they already know everything about their business, competitors and marketplace, or one with a culture rooted in constant learning and improvement? While it’s possible the former may be able to achieve some success, Anova believes the answer for achieving long-term, sustainable growth is with actions and strategies attained from consistently-sought after feedback. In order for a company to embrace the challenges that come with accepting it still has room to grow, it has to have the right mindset.

In her bestselling psychology book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, Ph.D. introduces two different mindsets – the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Dweck explains that people with fixed mindsets believe their success and qualities are essentially set in stone.  They believe they are born with a certain set of skills, intelligence, and aptitudes. People with a fixed mindset tend not to seek out feedback and typically do not work on themselves because they simply do not believe they can change much. Their world and its trajectory are essentially set at birth.

Contrarily, people with a growth mindset believe their qualities and knowledge are only a starting point and that everything can be developed through learning and continuous improvement.  The growth mindset is based on the theory that anything you do can be improved through hard work and effort. People with this mindset tend to have a passion for learning, feedback, and stretching themselves. Their world and its trajectory are continuously growing.

This psychological theory has dramatic implications in the business world. All businesses begin as a collection of people (and their mindsets).  Each person on a team brings his or her own mindset to each area of focus. In fact, senior management teams often have a variety of mindsets amongst them.  For example, the Head of Marketing may want to perform Win Loss Analysis to better understand buyer preferences and the competitive landscape. They are interested in learning and growing the company’s knowledge with the end result being improved market outcomes. This is the perfect example of a growth mindset. On the other hand, the Head of Sales may believe that he or she knows the answers to these questions already. He or she does not see the value or need in investing in measures to find out why the company is winning and losing. This fixed mindset inhibits their company from gaining valuable feedback.

What seems like a no brainer investment to one person is a waste of energy and resources to another.  How does this conflict in mindsets play out?

Some decision makers decide not to collect data on how the company could improve and thus they lower the company’s ability to become self-aware. Ultimately, the company may fall further and further behind a competitor that is willing to get the feedback and learn.

It’s not always the company that starts out the best and fastest that wins the race. But the best companies are ones who create a culture where a growth mindset exists, where opportunities grow, and learning can foster true long term success.

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blog imageSales training is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry. Between blogs, books, videos, seminars, and individual coaching, there are countless avenues for organizations and individuals to pursue additional training to help them develop sales skills to become more effective at their jobs.

Often times, however, the best examples of how to most effectively sell your product or service comes from within. The star producers on your team have methodologies and tricks that are proven to work. There is no better use case than seeing the solution you are trying to sell yourself be marketed clearly and persuasively.

But there are several reasons why most companies rely on outside consultants or trainers who aren’t responsible for selling themselves to do the coaching. Most notably, the top salespeople in companies need to be out doing what they do best: selling.

It is a resource constraint to try and ask the top producers to also impart their wisdom and tricks of the trade throughout the organization. It is especially difficult to ask those experts to repeatedly carve out time for training others.

Win / loss has many benefits, but among them is the ability to proliferate best practices to all members of a team.

Win / loss isn’t just about personal learning and growth, it is also about helping others learn.

The completed transcript that is written after a post-sale debrief interview contains invaluable context about the deal, strategies used by the sales team, how those tactics were received by the prospect, and any competitive comparisons to rival salespeople. The completed transcript allows the person reading the debrief to learn how and why the rainmaker in your organization was able to reframe the prospect’s business problem in a way that helped them see the value of your solution or articulate the differentiate against other vendors in a tightly contested RFP.

And that completed transcript allows anyone to become a student of the sales team, most notably other salespeople who are looking up to your top performers for tips on how to raise their game.

Think of the power of not only distributing relevant descriptions of your top sales peoples’ performance, in the voice of the customer, to everyone on your team to learn from. Some of Anova’s clients take it a step further, and carve out time on a monthly call or other team meeting, for the actual individual who was praised by the prospect to explain in more detail why they approached a situation the way they did and what tactics they used that were received so well by the customer. In those cases, the ability to combine both voices, the buyer and the seller, to demonstrate best practices is some of the best coaching available.

blog imageWin / loss may seem simple: close a deal, call the buyer, find out why they selected you or a competitor. At a high level these steps may seem straightforward, but they are a lot more complicated than what meets the eye.

While debriefing with every single opportunity is a noble objective, it is unrealistic. If you have the right best practices though, you can select the right prospect organizations and the right contacts to engage with, and get on your way to developing a strong feedback mechanism. The following best practices can get you started:

At the Deal / Opportunity Level

There are a multitude of ways to segment or filter your deal-flow by in order to decide which of your prospects to call on. Here are some of the most beneficial to successful win / loss programs:

  • Revenue size: Establish a “floor” of deal size for which you will only inquire feedback for opportunities above that level. Doing this will filter out the smallest deals, which often did not receive the full extent of your resources to begin with.
  • Specific Competitor(s): Debriefing on deals in which you were up against your top competitors will give you valuable insights into how your rivals are positioning themselves and connecting with prospects. After you have built up a few data points from situations against a specific competitor, you can begin to construct “battle cards” to arm your sales team with so they can outperform the competition in the next heads-up sales situation.
  • Specific Sales Personnel / Teams: Have a new salesperson starting? Looking for data to help in coaching an underperforming individual on your team or want to learn from your most successful reps? Collecting feedback from the most recent deals completed by a salesperson and their team can provide you with a full debrief on their performance from the prospect’s point of view.

At the Contact Level

After deciding which deals to focus on, it is critical to make sure you speak with the right person at the prospect organization. Often in complex sales situations there is one key buyer, but many influencers from numerous different departments: the relevant line of business, IT, finance, and of course, procurement.

To gather the best win / loss feedback, remember to not get stuck in procurement. While the procurement department may have influence, they are often limited in the level of detail they can provide when describing the prospect’s full buying criteria and evaluation process. Getting in touch with the ultimate decision maker is the absolute best practice, as they will be able to provide access into their mindset throughout the sales process and ultimate decision.

In some scenarios there are heavy influencers or more than one decision maker, for instance a consultant may have been involved, or both IT and the line of business in a software sale. In these situations, it can be beneficial to interview multiple constituents to obtain the most well-rounded feedback possible.

After identifying who to contact for your interviews, remember some of the best practices for actually having the conversation with them. But by following the best practices above, you’ve already completed half the battle of conducting a win / loss interview.