What's your experience with getting participants to speak to you for win/loss interviews?

We ran a program at my last company and were able to get about 125 interviews with buyers per year. Our tips were:

• Timing is critical. Reach out right after the deal closes. Immediately. Every day lowers your chance of getting an interview. If you can, build some automation from your CRM (we created a trigger from Salesforce that would notify us the minute a deal was closed). If you wait until after the implementation, they will be biased by their implementation experience (good or bad). The goal of win/loss needs to be to learn about the buyer journey. You can always run a second (shorter) interview after implementation.

• The sales rep should be the one sending the email. You can provide them a template for them, but people will respond better to someone they know

• The exception to the above is if it was a negative experience. Then you need a third-party to reach out. Maybe even mention "I know you may not want to speak to [XYZ], but we want to help them improve."

• Subject line should ask for them to share their perspective, advice, feedback. Make them feel like they are contributing something.

• Mention the gift card amount in the subject line. I start with $100 and go up to $150 or $200 from there in follow-up emails. You can try and do $50 as a thank you, but you'll have less success.

I have found that customers are more willing to share their experiences in win-loss interviews than you might think. The keys are to:

• Make it clear that you're not going to sell them. Make sure that the outreach doesn't sound like another outbound email. 
• Position yourself as neutrally as possible. The purpose is to help improve the product, more than improving marketing or sales. (That information will come anyway if you ask the right questions.) 
• Respect their time. Ask for 20-30 minutes (depending on the nature of the sale and your audience) and stick to it. Be prepared with the right questions and background information from your CRM. 
• Have a few open-ended questions ready. I have gotten some surprising answers in win-loss interviews.