Is Your Win/Loss Program Delivering Actionable Results?

Many organizations conduct win/loss analysis (either formally or informally) to collect valuable sales intelligence. But how effective are those programs and how valuable are the insights they provide? The structure and methodology of these programs can have a significant impact on the results they deliver.?

What is Win/Loss Analysis?

Win/Loss analysis, sometimes also referred to as “deal reviews” or “post-mortems”, is the process of capturing insights around the reasons for the buyer’s ultimate decision with respect to a particular sales opportunity. This information is critical to help organizations understand the factors that are contributing to their sales success (or lack thereof). A well-designed win/loss program will provide the necessary data to support changes in sales approaches/tactics, messaging, product/solution features and functionality, packaging, pricing, and a whole host of other elements. ?

Deal outcomes can take several forms – wins and losses, most obviously. But there are also situations where a customer may only want to move forward with a partial solution (perhaps carve out a particular service line), or where they may elect to stay with the status quo and not select any of the various solutions they are considering. Understanding the buyer motivations and decision factors in each of these situations can yield extremely valuable information.

How is Win/Loss Analysis Conducted?

There are several different methodologies for conducting win/loss analysis, that depend in part on the level of formality of the program, the type of services or solutions being sold, and the nature of the sales process. A brief overview of three predominant versions of win/loss are outlined here:

• Ad-Hoc/Internal Post-Mortem - Typically a debrief conducted internally by key sales organization personnel (i.e., regional and/or executive sales leadership and the sales representatives/account management responsible for the account. Often these are only conducted when a deal is lost to the competition.
• Semi-Standardized/Quantitative Win/Loss - Usually involves a software-facilitated, standardized questionnaire being administered to customer decision-makers/influencers by a third-party organization after a deal is concluded. Results are tracked across deals and can be quantified over large volumes of deals.
• Consultative Win/Loss - Administered by a third-party consulting firm with deep industry and subject matter experience. Consultants engage both the sales team members and executive-level customer decision-makers on a peer level, through nuanced, conversational interviews that explore all facets of the decision-making process in depth.

Each of these approaches has its strengths and weaknesses, and it is important to understand these trade-offs when evaluating which format will be optimal for a given organization.

Ad-Hoc/Internal Post-Mortems

Internal post-mortems are generally not an ideal method of collecting sales intelligence. It is best viewed as a last-resort effort to capture some deal insights when there is little strong connection or interaction with the customer (arms-length/transactional relationship) and/or the customer is unlikely to participate in a formal win/loss program facilitated by a third party. But due to its informal nature and inherent bias, it is difficult to leverage the results of these deal reviews to enact necessary change.

• Pro: Convenient and easy to conduct with short turnaround times
• Pro: Lowest cost/most economical approach (only cost is the sales team's time)
• Con: Prone to sales team bias based on their limited view into the customer's decision processes/factors and what competitors were proposing.
• Con: Any customer feedback is limited to what the customer is willing to share directly with the sales team and may be incomplete or misrepresentative. Buyers often hesitate to share uncomfortable or critical feedback directly or may decline to provide feedback if they do not have close relationships with the sales team.
• Con: Findings are generally not aggregated and tracked over time and across deals to identify patterns that may indicate persistent problems that need addressing or opportunities that are not being capitalized on
• Con: Tend to focus primarily on identifying what went wrong in losses, while de-emphasizing successful tactics employed in won deals that can be replicated with other accounts

Semi-Standardized/Quantitative Win/Loss

This approach is well-suited to organizations that value tracking a defined set of performance metrics and indicators over time, rather than conducting deep-dives into individual customer situations. It is an approach most effectively applied by organizations that: 1) do high numbers of deals annually, 2) sell relatively uncomplicated and/or lower-cost products or solutions, and 3) sell primarily to non-senior executive decision-makers. The format allows for quantification and comparison of findings across many deals while allowing for structured, qualitative/open-ended feedback.

• Pro: Removes bias from the process and captures more transparent feedback from the customer.
• Pro: Provides tools for tracking how the company's sales performance is changing over time according to standardized metrics.
• Pro: Software-enabled data visualization can be a powerful tool for representing performance feedback.
• Pro: Net promoter score (NPS) questions can be incorporated and changes tracked over time.
• Con: Emphasis on completing standardized questionnaires in full can inadvertently cause less time to be spent discussing key decision factors and more time "checking the box" on immaterial deal components.
• Con: Limited follow-up/probing opportunities can sacrifice the depth and value of the feedback and insights captured on key decision elements.
• Con: Senior executive-level decision-makers can find the process of speaking with call center interviewers who are not fully briefed on their situation and responding to generic questionnaires with rating scales and rank-order questions to be frustrating and tedious.

Consultative Win/Loss

Consultative win/loss is an excellent approach when deals are strategic/high visibility, high value, and/or highly complex, either due to the nature of the solutions being sold or the decision-making process itself. These deals can often involve large, executive-led sales teams with significant supporting personnel, and there can be multiple customer decision-makers, often at the most senior levels of the organization.

• Pro: Consultants can engage customer stakeholders in nuanced, peer-level conversations that uncover their underlying motivations, influences, pain points, and the complex interrelationships of different factors in the evaluation and decision process
• Pro: Consultants develop a deep understanding of the industry and solutions and will prepare by gathering information and context about the deal. This enables them to ask more pertinent probing questions and capture more granular and immediately actionable insights.
• Pro: When done effectively, the consulting firm will gain the advocacy of the sales team in the process by engaging with them directly, soliciting their feedback, perspectives, questions, and hypotheses, and then demonstrating the value of the program by sharing answers and immediately actionable information.
• Pro: The consulting organization will engage with customer stakeholders in a format that is respectful of their time and communicates the value of the deep knowledge and input they are contributing. These interactions can help to address perceived problems and build bridges to future opportunities with that customer.
• Con: Due to the unique nature of each conversation, this approach does not lend itself to tracking performance changes in a quantifiable manner, although key themes and trends will still be easily identified.
• Con: Consultative win/loss can be more costly and time-consuming to execute on a per-deal basis.

Evaluating Win/Loss Program Effectiveness

To assess whether your organization's current win/loss program is set up effectively and is providing optimal value for your organization, consider the following questions:

• Is your organization consistently capturing and utilizing information from its won and lost deals? If not, why?
• Is your organization defining specific criteria/parameters for including deals in a win/loss program? Or is done more on an ad-hoc basis (e.g., high-profile losses)?
• Is your sales team an advocate and active participant in the win/loss process? Or are they resistant to participating or having their deals included for review?
• Are you getting the level of insight you need to support meaningful change? Or are your stakeholders frustrated by vague or surface-level findings that lack actionability?
• How are themes and takeaways from won and lost account reviews communicated to senior leadership? Do they find value in this information? Do they use it as a key input in their decision-making?

A thoughtfully structured and well-executed win/loss program should be highly engaging and viewed as valuable by all participants and stakeholders - including sales leadership, sales and account management teams, executive leadership, and - most importantly - the customers. Is your existing program meeting all of your expectations?