CRM Insights Blog

Sales Effectiveness: The Art & Science Of Win Loss Programs

This is a guest post is written by Robin Kahn.  She is the founder of R2 Strategy Partners and has over 20 years of experience in marketing and customer strategy in financial, consumer and technology sectors.

What better time to think about improving your company’s sales force effectiveness than now? As business growth is more unpredictable than ever due to a struggling economy, Win Loss may be just the way to help you gain a quick advantage over the competition. Surprisingly, Win Loss is a practice most companies don’t leverage.

Studies show that growing companies win roughly 50-60% of the deals they bid on. If you include customers who take no action, that number drops to 20%. Do you really know why you lost the recent deal, or why some customers keep coming back? While customers have these insights to share, they rarely do so in an unfiltered manner with your sales and service teams.

What are the benefits of Win Loss?

We are all busy. We process megabytes of data daily. Why another piece of analysis? First, Win Loss is more relevant to your company and customers than any piece of market research, because it’s specific to you. Second, what you learn can transform your business if acted upon effectively. In short: it provides the potential for a very large payback. Some customer feedback will be ‘low hanging fruit’ such as tweaking your marketing message, improving your sales process or reaching out to customers in different ways. Other findings will drive longer-term investment in product, services, and new market segments. The output will likely change your investment priorities and enable you to close more deals.

How do I conduct Win Loss analysis?

Win Loss requires an ability to ask your customers some tough questions and to listen with an open mind. Not everyone can do this. Think through the key issues you want to understand. For example, how do your customers make decisions about buying your products/services? What are their most important purchase criteria? How do they rate your company’s product and how do they rate competitors? You need to get to the bottom of these issues before you can truly address how your message or strategy needs to change.

Key Success Factors

There are a few key success factors we think every Win Loss effort should include:

• The interviews and analysis should be handled by an objective party: the interviewer can be internal or external to your company, but preferably not customer facing due to potential biases or interest in protecting the status quo. You need your customers to speak with you candidly.
• Data should be collected via a 1:1 dialogue, not a survey. Surveys (especially on-line) tend to be short and binary. To get to the ‘gray areas’ of unclear customer needs, you need to dig deeper and go beyond the obvious. Challenge the customer’s first line of answers to get to the real behavioral drivers. Surveys are not designed to do this.
• The analysis should be quantitative, actionable and measurable. To be defensible, output should be based on a large sample of quantitative, as well as qualitative, data. We emphasize the quantitative as it ties directly to investment decisions and calculating ROI.  While the analysis may not be straight forward, the data should lend itself to short-term and long-term recommendations that will ultimately lead to higher close ratios and improved profitability.
• Win-Loss Programs should be conducted with regularity. Companies should track, at least annually (and in some cases quarterly), progress along the agreed upon action items and goals. By making Win Loss an integral part of your business, you have the ability to harness the insights of customers and to greatly improve your company’s sales effectiveness.

Win Loss is a time-tested way to help you understand customer needs effectively. It gives you the ability to leap frog the competition by keeping a pulse on industry trends, the competition, and needed enhancements to the sales process, products, and services.  The opportunity to improve your sales and marketing success rates sits right at your doorstep. Why not take advantage of its benefits?

 For more information, or to request a free, one-hour consultation for your business, contact us at www.harvestsolutions.net/contact-us 

Harvest Solutions

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