How to Get Valuable Feedback to Improve Your Win Rates

Last summer, we did an informal survey on win rates. We spoke with business development leads at more than 60 professional services firms across a variety of verticals. We were shocked to find out that maybe a quarter of them had any sort of calculation of win rates (the number of pursuits they won as a percentage of all their pursuits).

Diving more deeply, even fewer of them had any sort of feedback on WHY they won or lost a pursuit.

?And going even deeper than that, most of the feedback they got wasn’t very useful.

So these firms have very little to go on if they want to make meaningful adjustments in how they pursue new business so they can win more often.

Many firms that do ask for feedback only do it when they lose. And even then, the feedback is nearly worthless.

Most decision-makers just won’t tell you the truth about their decision, especially if you were the losing agency. How do we know? Well, as I explain in my book – Winning is Better: The Journey to New Business Success – it becomes obvious when you compare what those decision-makers are telling the losing firms to what they’re telling the winning firms.

The losers often hear things like:

It was close.

It came down to price.

Their solution was a little better.

They had more relevant experience.

They’ve worked with us before.

Please try again.

...while the winners hear things like:

We love your passion.

You really understood what we want.

We were impressed with your commitment to us even before the RFP.

We loved your team.

Everyone was very comfortable with you and the team.

We like the way you communicated with us.

The losers get easily understood, rational reasons for the loss. The winners hear very compelling emotional reasons for winning. Someone’s not getting the truth. We think it’s the losing teams.

The Johari Window is a really interesting interpersonal paradigm that was identified in the mid-1950’s by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham.?It’s applicable to all our business and personal relationships.

Here is a simple version:

The Johari Window is vital to your ability to win more often. When the prospect doesn’t give you complete and accurate feedback, your Blind Spot remains large. Your mission for every new business pursuit is to shrink the Blind Spot to its smallest possible size. That means you have to get thorough, accurate feedback for every pursuit.

Yet, clients are reluctant to tell you the truth.

We have no truth serum that will always get you the answers you need. But we have approaches that will improve your chances of finding out those crucial truths and reducing that Blind Spot.

One way is to ask each decision maker to complete a quick survey. Survey Monkey is great because you can build confidentiality into the process, which will encourage more responses, and more open responses.

Would you like the sample survey that we use at Artemis? We've made it available for you here.

It takes less than a minute to complete, and it’s valuable because it leads to what we know about the REAL reasons that decision makers pick one firm over another... that is, the non-rational reasons.

Of course, best of all is an in-depth conversation about their decision, and how they viewed you. If you'd like to talk about how Artemis can help structure this interview or?gather the feedback for you, schedule a chat here.

When you have an outside party gather the feedback for you, your prospects might be more forthcoming, especially if they offer confidentiality on an individual basis. When we at Artemis do this for our clients, we never report specific things that individuals said - only key themes, takeaways, and indicated actions.

Don’t fall into that trap of assuming you have all the accurate feedback you need from your current clients.

If you want to improve your pursuit win rates, you need accurate, actionable feedback from your prospects so you can properly assess your business development activities. You won’t get it without asking, and how you ask really matters.