We are excited to announce that Anova recently hired two exceptional research analysts to support our growing business. We also hired an enthusiastic and inquisitive summer intern.
Ryan Ashe recently graduated from Middlebury College with a double major in economics and psychology. While at Middlebury, Ryan was a member of the varsity ice hockey team, the Sustainable Investment Club, and an Economics Research Assistant. Ryan will be running in the 2021 Boston Marathon in support of Boston Children’s Hospital. Ryan will be working on clients with Zach Golden.
Will Young recently graduated from Williams College with a major in economics. While at Williams, Will was the captain of the varsity cross country and track teams and a member of the Lehman Community Engagement club. Will is running in the 2021 Boston Marathon in support of the American Liver Foundation. He will be working on clients with Sarah DeFreitas.
Shuami Odolomerun is a rising junior at Prospect Hill Academy in Cambridge, where he is an avid basketball player. Shuami has been helping Anova with technology, operations, and client research.
Anova believes in giving back to the community in a way that ties to our overall company values and stresses the importance of feedback. For the past few years, Anova has been partnering with the Boys and Girls Club of Boston’s Ready to Work program and at the YMCA of Greater Boston’s Training, Inc. program. We help job seekers with mock interviews, simulated job experiences, presentation practice, mentoring, and training.
In previous posts we looked at how win / loss is a tool for getting 360° feedback in terms of commentary on all parts of an organization. Win / loss can also lead to a different kind of holistic feedback: research that touches all parts of a client lifecycle.
Below are examples of how companies can increase the value of their research by adding an additional feedback type, or a third leg of the stool, to their win / loss program:
Post Implementation
Win / loss works best in high-dollar value sales situations. When a company brings on a high revenue client, that new customer represents an even higher potential Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). The projected revenue of a new customer is not a straight-line calculation either. Each new client represents cross-sell, up-sell, and referral opportunities as well. Given the potential revenue that each new client represents, it is critically important to make sure each relationship starts off on the right foot.
Unfortunately, Anova’s research has indicated that about one-third (36%) of new clients cite post-sales issues as a pain point in win interviews. However, within the win interview the respondent is covering so many other different topics (e.g. sales performance, impressions of the solution, competitive rankings) that the post-sales feedback may not be as detailed as companies need to truly understand the client’s onboarding experience.
That is why many Anova clients institute a post implementation program that runs in congruence with the win / loss program. The PI program captures feedback specifically on the implementation process, giving companies richer detail about client pain points and allowing them to take well-informed corrective steps to improve their onboarding processes.
By ensuring that new clients have a seamless onboarding experience, companies set themselves up for unlocking substantial future revenue.
Client Satisfaction
Similar to ensuring the implementation process goes well, it is critical for companies to deeply understand the health of their existing client base. Though many companies rely on web surveys to keep tabs on their client satisfaction, for complex client situations it is imperative to go beyond NPS® ratings and into actionable, detailed feedback in order to ensure clients’ needs are being met.
An example of this is illuminated by one of Anova’s clients which is in the corporate travel space. Many of the situations submitted for the company’s win / loss program are rebid opportunities. During aggregate reports, Anova often segments the results by rebid vs. new business situations. In past years, Anova pinpointed that in those unsuccessful rebids, clients were lamenting that the company did not address ongoing service concerns in the renewal discussions. The company knew it had to improve the level of knowledge their account teams had about the ongoing relationships before the renewal discussions so the team could work to address the issues either in practice or with a plan moving forward.
By implementing a client satisfaction program to collect feedback about the relationship before the client’s decision, and then react to the feedback accordingly, the client was able to achieve their highest retention rate in recent years.
Churn
Another common use case for incorporating a third type of research into win / loss programs is through churn interviews. Similar to loss debriefs, an interview with a departed client puts the spotlight on why customers did not choose to continue a relationship with a company. Additionally, the interviews provide unparalleled competitive intelligence by capturing feedback as to why a rival firm was selected instead.
By doing churn interviews along with win / loss, companies can better understand how consistent their client experience is from the perceived (feedback from new business prospects before they begin working with the company) to the actual (feedback after a relationship existed and ended). 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.
Intermediary Perception
The last, but certainly not least, piece to the client lifecycle is intermediaries. Whether it is in the form of a search consultant, advisor, channel partner, or VARS, third parties are common in sophisticated B2B marketplaces.
Because of the influence these intermediaries have, gathering their feedback can unlock potential holes in the win / loss feedback loop. For example, in the defined contribution space interviewing plan sponsors provides some feedback, but it is an advisor who often controls the playing field and evaluation criteria. Interviewing advisors can provide more meaningful details to supplement a data set. Additionally, these advisors have a broader, more advanced understanding of the marketplace from their work with different providers and on other searches. By adding advisor perception interviews to the win / loss program, one Anova client was able to gain a more holistic understanding of how their firm was being perceived and was able to increase its win rate over 15%.
More and more companies are graduating from asking “why should we do win / loss?” to “how do we make our win / loss program best in class?”. Rounding out the feedback loop with additional perspectives from the customer’s lifecycle is a highly impactful way of taking research programs to the next level.
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.
Companies often reach out to Anova for guidance on starting a formal win / loss program at their organization. One of the most important things to remember for a company starting win / loss for the first time is to not rush the kickoff of a program.
An airline pilot follows a thorough checklist of necessary steps and makes sure all the instruments on their dashboard are working before taking off. Similarly, it is imperative to not skip steps during the launch of a win / loss program. Once the program is “in the air”, it can be difficult to turn around and go back to do those early actions that lead to program success.
One of the biggest steps in launching a successful win / loss program is getting buy-in throughout the organization. Though the program often is run by product marketing or sales enablement, win / loss is a tool that can be used throughout an organization: both horizontally across departments and vertically by different levels of the business. To unlock the most value from win / loss, organizations should ensure all of these different areas have access to the feedback.
Cross-Departmental Value
Sales: While almost all departments can benefit from win / loss feedback, sales has the most opportunity to act on the feedback. It takes a considerable amount of time for marketing to begin to change the perceptions of their brand or for product to develop enhancements to the solution, but a salesperson can receive feedback they need to be more clear in their presentations and begin acting on it immediately. Additionally, salespeople are the ultimate stewards for an organization. A prospect’s perception of how a solution compares to the competition or whether something is expensive or not is often a biproduct of how the salesperson differentiated and articulated the solution’s value. Said another way, even product and pricing feedback is often feedback about the sales performance.
Marketing: Win / loss enables marketers to gather feedback on their company’s brand awareness, reputation, and effectiveness of marketing collateral. Additionally, like sales, there is crossover to other areas that marketers should pay attention to as well. At Anova we hear all the time in interviews that our client is missing a particular tool from its platform, but in reality that functionality actually does exist. While on paper missing functionality sounds like a product issue, it is really an opportunity for the product marketing team to create messaging and content around that tool to increase awareness.
Product: Of course, sometimes product gaps do exist. The feedback from win / loss interviews is central to product managers because the information will highlight the solution’s strengths and weaknesses. This data can be used to fine-tune a company’s roadmap or product enhancement plans.
Pricing: A company’s price is much more complex than just a number on a proposal. There are list prices and discounting practices, structures and models that explain different components and add-on fees, comparisons between competitive price points, and of course the overall ROI an organization expects to achieve. As such, pricing feedback generally falls into three categories: price point, pricing transparency, and overall value. Win / loss can help identify potential issues in any of these areas, as well as help an organization gain a greater understanding of how competitors are pricing their solutions.
Competitive Intelligence: Win / loss is not just an introspective exercise. It is a critical competitive intelligence tool that allows CI professionals to benchmark themselves against their rivals and gain a competitive edge.
Value Up and Down the Org Chart
Senior Management: Leadership can utilize the feedback from win / loss to facilitate clearer decision making and de-risk investments. The Voice of the Prospect data from a win / loss program is captured via an independent, third-party source by interviewers who are highly skilled and experienced. This allows senior leaders to trust the data is without bias and can feel confident in using it to fuel their decision-making, particularly regarding prioritizing areas of investment.
Team Leaders: Managers need to have a pulse on how their teams are performing, and they can’t be in the room with their employees for every meeting or to help with every decision. The feedback in an individual transcript, particularly for sales managers, can be used as a training and coaching tool to help reflect on what happened in an individual situation and how to either replicate or improve that salesperson’s performance on the next deal.
Individual Contributor: Much like having a personal trainer for achieving fitness goals, win / loss can be a career trainer for sales reps who are reviewing the feedback from an interview and using it to hone their skills and sharpen their saw. Others throughout an organization, from product marketers to customer support reps, also benefit from getting a more thorough understanding of how the marketplace is perceiving their company.
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In addition to asking about how to effectively start a win / loss program, companies often ask Anova “how do we get the most value out of a program?”. That answer starts with making sure there is broad, cross-departmental exposure to the feedback. The programs that deliver the most value are ones that facilitate strong internal alignment on how a company can compete more effectively. To achieve that internal alignment, all parties must be represented. Anything less just limits the potential learning a program can provide.
Note: This piece is written by Lisa Hession-Kunz, Executive Interviewer at Anova. Having performed hundreds of client debriefs, Lisa shares her perspective of a Departed Client program and the impact that such research delivers to organizations and to the departed clients.
A client has just dumped you. They left you for another business provider who promised better service, more functionality, or cost savings.
Maybe they left due to forces beyond their control. Maybe this was a result of an acquisition or merger, or a new directive based on a personal relationship, and there was nothing you could have done.
More often however, a client leaving a business relationship has gone through a frustrating experience. Perhaps they felt you didn’t listen to them or value their business. Perhaps they tried to resolve an issue for a long time and even if the problem was satisfactorily addressed, they still do not feel valued as a customer.
Even though they are leaving, they are willing to do so with a few parting words of insight and advice. So, what can you do?
Give them the final word.
Have you wanted to give a company a piece of your mind? Having an opportunity to vent and knowing that someone is listening, taking notes, and reporting back to senior management is cathartic.
From the Executive Interviewer’s perspective, we are there to listen. We listen to stories about service issues, product functionality gaps, pricing concerns, and outside forces. We listen to the real story that led to the dissolution of the relationship. The customer doesn’t have to be polite; they just say what is on their minds.
If there was a negative experience, customers often long to complain to someone who will listen. We let them do just that and then probe deeper to better understand the root causes, asking questions such as:
Customers also often offer solutions that fit within your company’s structure. The departed customer knows the communication channels, key contacts and can often pinpoint the breakdown that lead to their decision.
Finishing the conversation on this note takes interviewees into a more positive place, a proactive thought process reflecting on what went right to begin with and how their experience may differ with their new provider. A departed client interview can leave your customer feeling better about your company despite the departure. In fact, many clients say that they would do business with you again and provide actionable insight for your team to avoid costly mistakes and another departed client. You just need to give them the voice to do so.
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.
In 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!
When 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:
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.
Spring 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:
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?
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