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Thursday, May 1, 2025

The Anatomy of an Effective Win/Loss Program: Part Two

Part 2: Designing the Right Interview Guide

Critical to win / loss program success is capturing the right information. Win / loss is a powerful tool in part because of the breadth of customer feedback it can collect. It is normal for feedback to cover sales, product, pricing, services, brand / market positioning, and of course competitive comparisons.

In a perfect world companies would be able to collect as much feedback as possible across all these areas in each interview, however respondents don’t have unlimited time to give. This makes interview guide design really an optimization exercise.

To maximize a program’s value, questions should be aligned to the biggest areas of focus that were identified by stakeholders in the buy-in stage. This will ensure that above all else, feedback is maximized in those influential areas that are most responsible for driving wins and losses.

Beyond concentrating on those critical areas of focus, interview guide design should also achieve a balance between the following types of questions:

• Qualitative vs Quantitative: Qualitative feedback will collect depth and detail that is essential for making the information actionable, while quantitative questions can provide the roadmap for prioritizing pieces of feedback (e.g., lowest scored element of your sales process will identify where the team needs training) as well as head-to-head competitive comparisons.
• Leading vs Top-of-Mind: Within the sphere of qualitative feedback, it is important to ask both leading and top-of-mind questions. Leading questions should align to those areas of focus your organization has. For example, if your organization has recently rolled out a new feature to its product, asking “What were your thoughts on feature X? Did you believe it would meet your needs? Why or why not?” will capture depth of feedback on a specific area of focus. Top-of-mind questions can be useful for uncovering what is important, not to you, but to the customer. Seeing how often buyers bring up that new product feature, for example, without being prompted will give you a sense of how much the feature resonated with them. If no one is bringing it up top-of-mind, more can likely be done to make it stand out during your sales process.

One last thing to consider: the interview guides shouldn’t be set in stone. As you collect feedback and/or your business priorities change, adapt the guide so you are constantly optimizing your feedback loop.

Ultimately, win / loss interview guides can take all shapes and forms. With a little thought into areas you want to focus on, and a balanced approach for collecting feedback, the guide can be a vital tool for collecting actionable feedback.