Win-Loss Channels

Once a sales opportunity has closed, you have the opportunity to gain valuable information from the buyer and the seller regarding why you won or lost the deal. Depending on your win-loss program, you can have one or many forms of win-loss feedback. At Clozd, we collect feedback through buyer interviews, buyer surveys, sales rep interviews, and sales rep surveys. For more insight, we can also import data from your CRM.

This article contains the following sections: 

• Win-Loss Analysis
• Choose the Right Channels
• CRM Data
• Buyer Interviews
• Buyer Surveys
• Sales Rep Interviews
• Sales Rep Surveys

Win-Loss Analysis

Before choosing the right feedback channels for your organization, it's important to have a solid understanding of win-loss analysis. In short, win-loss analysis is the practice of systematically capturing and analyzing the reasons why you win and lose sales opportunities.

Rigorous win-loss analysis can help an organization confirm and prioritize the strengths and weaknesses of its overall product or service, thus enabling its leaders to improve product strategy, increase marketing effectiveness, boost sales productivity, and foster org-wide strategic alignment.

Choose the Right Channels

After learning about win-loss analysis and determining that it's the right fit for your company, it's important to determine which sources of win-loss data to incorporate into your win-loss program. For most organizations, using a combination of all the feedback channels is most beneficial and provides the deepest level of value.

The richest insights always come from buyer feedback. However, each channel has something unique to contribute. You must strategically decide which feedback channels would be the best fit for your organization. Clozd offers the following win-loss channels: 

• Buyer Interviews
• Buyer Surveys
• Sales Rep Interviews
• Sales Rep Surveys
• CRM Data

Work with your Clozd consultant to decide which forms of feedback you would like to utilize in your win-loss program.

CRM Data

The most basic source of win-loss data is your CRM. If your sales organization practices decent
CRM hygiene—such as inputting key fields, logging each sales opportunity, marking opportunities
as won or lost, and more—then CRM data can act as a useful starting point for win-loss analysis.
Depending on the quality of your CRM data, you can answer basic questions about what is
happening with your sales pipeline, such as:

• What is our win rate?
• What is our win rate by region, segment, product line, team, etc.?
• What types of opportunities are we most likely to win?
• What types of opportunities are we most likely to lose?
• How many opportunities do we win and lose each period?
• What is our average deal size?
• What is our average sales cycle duration?
• How are these metrics trending and changing over time?

Clozd will use this data to develop reports and dashboards that answer these questions in real time for key stakeholders. The insights you glean will help you be more effective in how you use the other
channels of win-loss insight.

Buyer Interviews

A buyer interview is the best way to uncover what really drove the outcome of a specific sales opportunity. The quality and depth of insight from a buyer interview is considerably higher than any other method or channel, including buyer surveys. That’s why every organization should incorporate interviews into their win-loss program on an ongoing basis. In fact, many organizations build win-loss programs based entirely on buyer interviews. However, depending on the volume of closed opportunities you have, it may be cost-prohibitive to interview every closed opportunity. Some companies choose to deploy buyer interviews on a targeted basis to better understand key opportunities and/or key segments of their pipeline.

Clozd consultants will conduct these interviews as an unbiased and skilled third party, which leads to accurate responses. Each interview will last 20-30 minutes on average and will be recorded and transcribed. Then, the most prevalent Decision Drivers will be tagged and a summary of the interview will be written. Once completed, Clozd will publish the deal for your organization to digest the learnings. If you would like more information on how the completed deal will appear, please take a look at the Deals page.

Buyer Surveys

The second method for collecting buyer feedback is through surveys.

Buyer Surveys are more affordable than interviews and can be applied across your entire sales pipeline. They are useful for tracking high-level trends that can help determine areas of focus for buyer interviews. As a best practice, use Buyer Surveys to solicit feedback from any buyers that you do not plan to interview.

Survey feedback isn’t as rich as interview feedback because surveys are shorter in duration, the questions are predefined, and participation rates are much lower (3-5% for surveys vs. 20-30% for interviews). However, as outlined above, surveys can be used to complement your interview strategy.

By keeping the feedback form simple and brief, you can still allow buyers to select multiple Decision Drivers, comment their feedback, and show who the main competitor was for the deal. For more information, see the Buyer Surveys page.

Sales Rep Interviews

Similar to buyer interviews, Sales Rep Interviews are the most valuable form of sales rep feedback. Win-loss experts have long promoted buyer feedback over sales team feedback for the sake of accuracy and depth, but you have to acknowledge its benefits.

Sales team feedback is virtually free, plus the executive team can enforce it. This gives you full data coverage of your entire sales pipeline. There is also value in comparing the sales team’s feedback to that of buyers. For these reasons, an ideal win-loss program incorporates both sales team feedback and buyer feedback.

Some best practices to apply when capturing win-loss feedback from your sales team include:

• Require it for every closed opportunity (won or lost).
• Automate and connect the feedback process with your CRM.
• Keep the feedback form simple and brief.
• Allow reps to select multiple Decision Drivers for each opportunity.
• Allow reps to rate positive and negative drivers for each opportunity.
• Allow comment box questions for relevant Decision Drivers.
• Confirm the primary competitor.
• Confirm the primary contact (to facilitate buyer feedback).
• Build a culture where sales reps embrace win-loss feedback.

Sales Rep Surveys

To figure out why you win and lose sales opportunities, it's helpful to capture feedback from both of the parties that were involved in the sales process: the sales team and the buyers. These surveys are an opportunity for your sales reps to provide essential feedback needed for your organization to improve.

Sales Rep Surveys are more affordable than interviews and can be applied widely across your entire sales pipeline. Just like Buyer Surveys, Sales Rep Surveys are useful for tracking high-level trends that can help determine areas of focus for Buyer Interviews.

One additional value-add for this type of survey is the chance for sales reps to contemplate their deals and think about what they did well or what they could have done better. This opportunity to reflect alone leads to personal improvement for your sales reps.

Questions?

For questions about the right feedback channels for your Clozd win-loss program, please contact your Clozd consultant.

For additional questions, please contact support@clozd.com.