How do you create an ongoing win/loss analysis?

First, don't think of Win/Loss as a project to be done at certain times of the year. It's like a lifestyle change that has be worked into your organization's priorities (like exercise or losing weight). Second, salespeople should never conduct W/L interviews. Never. The purpose of W/L is to figure out how buyers make a decision (in the aggregate) and salespeople are not the best resource in this regard. To get a sustainable W/L program you need to bring something to the table: reasons why you lo ...Read More

I recommend a weekly cadence of reaching out to prospects that have completed deal cycles in the prior week. It's okay to skip a week if priorities or holidays intervene. Interview those who respond. Ask consistent questions and don't hesitate to go "off-script" if you are learning something interesting. Report in a way that makes sense to your organization. Twice a year, launch a broader win-loss survey to the prospects that never responded to weekly outreach. Collect the data from the survey a ...Read More

W/L is a market research tool. It's not a sales performance tool. The goal of W/L is to understand - over a set of sales engagements - why you win, why you lose, who is involved in a buying decision, and how they make that decision.  W/L interviews should occur as quickly after the win or loss as possible, or you begin to lose important details. Salespeople are not the target of a W/L interview. Customers are.  W/L questions are open-ended and designed to flush out behaviors, biases, preferences ...Read More

For continuous win/loss insights, consider combining a once-per-year formal win/loss analysis (eg interviews and scorecarding with decision makers) with quarterly win/loss reviews. During the quarterly reviews you're with the sales team, debriefiing on each deal to find win or loss causes. To those reviews, bring as much deal data (prospect demographics, competitive, etc) as you can from your CRM to identify patterns. You act as the voice of the buyer (VOB), providing a counterpoint to the inter ...Read More

I haven't seen a method per se at my previous companies, but going forward, ideally a internal dashboard, collaborative wiki which has the details of why we won, why we lost would help everyone. I have not seen a good internal collaboration tool which also has a website/wiki kind of look / feel for editing/posts etc. Slack not so good, I am realizing. Linking this to SFDC would also be helpful. Ability to research by segment, region, competition etc. Remember that every region, Win/loss might be ...Read More

Creating an ongoing w/l analysis program can be exciting. There are many things to consider when building a program. I have outlined three below to get you started.  1. Gain stakeholder buy-in (leaders in marketing, sales, product, competitive)—Reach out to each leader to ask them what they would like to learn through the program. By doing this, you're gaining their buy-in and they become that much more interested in the outcome. 2. Craft an interview guide and online survey—Using the stakeholde ...Read More