Win/Loss reporting
Post Decision Interviews AKA Win Loss Reporting
One of the reason SaaS business are so effective is they are driven by data, systems and continuous improvement. Post-decision interviews are one of the most critical SaaS systems of input and improvement for any company.
Why do this?
Win/loss analysis is one of the most cost-effective ways of generating insights and validating initiatives needed to increase effectiveness and grow revenue. It’s a rapid way to gather data and identify insights that improve outcomes. For prospects, perception is reality when it comes to buying behavior, they buy what they believe to be true. This makes collecting and acting on this information so critical to success.
Bottom line is it provides vital, accurate information that informs how to spend limited resources to maximize impact.
Themes
- Why did we win/lose this business opportunity?
- Why were we selected over our competition or vice versa?
- How are we perceived in the marketplace?
- How does our value proposition align with our prospects and customers needs?
- How do we differentiate ourselves from the competition?
Insights
- How sales and marketing can better align
- Whether our messaging is on track
- How we are perceived in the marketplace, how they are differentiating themselves
- How our competition is perceived in the marketplace
- How our value proposition is meeting the needs of prospects and customers
- How well we are differentiating yourself and your products from the competition
- What criteria prospects and customers are really interested in when selecting your or similar products and services
- How well our end-to-end sales processes are working
How do we do this?
First, decide who will conduct the interview
I suggest start by doing these in house to have direct access to the data vs. a 3rd party where it’s one step removed. At some point as you scale it may make sense to outsource this to an expert. Just getting the process started is most important so keep it as simple as possible. This might mean having a small group of people conduct the interviews where the quality controls can be higher – or alternatively it could be “crowdsourced” across more people and used to better connect executives and front line managers that don’t have the opportunity to hear directly from customers. Each have advantages and disadvantages. Hearing directly from a prospect why we win or lose can be a powerful motivator.
Determine the questions to be asked
Next we need to select the questions. I suggest defining the data that is most opaque or controversial and defining a set of questions that can help answer. While scripted, interviews take a life of their own and some may be cut short with one word answers where others we won’t be able to get off the phone. The key is having a repeatable guide and qualitative and quantitative answers. Here are some example questions we can consider:
- What pain were you (customer / prospect) trying to solve? Why? If solved what impact does this have on your business?
- Do you remember where you first learned about our company?
- What were your views about our companies ability to solve that pain? We’re we a fit at the beginning?
- Which other firms were considered? Why was our company included?
- Why did/didn’t we win the business? From 1 – 5, how good of a fit were we for your company?
- What was your perception of our sales team? What were you looking for from your sales rep?
- How would you rank the sales experience overall on a 1-5 scale?
- What did you think about our website? What information did you seek there? On a scale of 1-5 how did it meet your needs?
- How knowledgeable were they on a scale of 1-5
- Who else did you meet from our company during the process? What was your perception of them?
- What did you think of our sales presentation and messaging? How would you rank it from 1-5
- How did you feel about our product capabilities?
- What was most important? What was least important?
- What did you think about our pricing?
- Did you run into any challenges with a business case to fund this opportunity? What was the business initiative that paid for this purchase Who was the sponsor of that initiative?
- Optional if they called references: What did you learn when you called {reference company name}?
- What advice would you give us for working together (or if we get the chance to work together) in the future?
- Would you recommend our solution to others?
- Optional: If a win and not already covered, would you be comfortable participating in a case study, joint press release?
- Any other suggestions or ideas for us?
Logistics of the interview
i suggest scheduling these immediately post close won or close lost with a goal of completing within 2 weeks. It’s important to attempt via a phone conversation instead of a written survey. After the interview the interviewer can send a written thank you note. You might consider the post-decision interview a component of the sales process and add to workflow so close opportunities are closed after this step is completed. The workflow and reporting can be automated using your CRM so it’s easy to view a list of opportunities “ready for post-decision calls” and ones that are completed.
Analysis and Action – The Most Important Part
Performing a periodic or ad-hoc win/loss investigation might be interesting, but it provides no indication of improvement or degradation of performance. It’s important that this is integrated into your company’s “operating system” so trends, themes and improvements can be tracked over time. Use a combination of open and metric-based interview questions. What a prospect shares after a decision is often steeped in emotion. As a result, it is easier to secure a scale of how they feel about a subject than try and summarize a free-form conversation about the sale. You can also capture the free-form contextual comments which are just as valuable.
The data from each interview is compared against a running set of metrics, themes and action items. Decide the frequency of review – quarterly, monthly or weekly. At the review, use the findings to update your strategic goals and action plans with any new insights – or create new action plans for new issues.
Note: If you do not budget time for taking action on the data – don’t waste time collecting it.
Post Decision Analysis Meeting
Here are some ideas of a Post-Decisions analysis and action plan review. The format can be refined over time but key is to automate the data collection where possible and use a presentation template consistently over time for faster review and understanding. It’s an easy trap to change the format each time to fit the data and end up confusing the audience.
Meeting Agenda
Purpose: To ensure that we are taking action on the highest value initiatives that will accelerate our sales process and grow revenue.
- Definitions & Methods – a summary of above process used to gather information and explanations of terms we use so everyone is on the same page before the review. For example including the definition of target account, a summary of our verticals, competitor information. This could be an appendix once everyone is on the same page.
- Data from the last reporting period (weekly/monthly/quarterly) presented as trends over time with important notes, context and insights called out.
- Top initiatives that are funding our product purchases
- What buyers intend to do with our product – specific use cases
- Reasons we are winning / losing. Opportunity value
- Who we are winning / losing against. Opportunity value
- Sales perceptions over time
- Website perceptions over time
- Sales collateral over time
- etc (prioritized from above process)
- Important anecdotes or insights from individual conversations
- Review running summary list of top 5 issues adding friction to the sales process and action plan status.
- Discussion: Did we learn anything with the current set of data reinforce these or add something new? If yes, decide action plan, owner and timeline
- Summarize meeting and action items for sharing
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