When delivering a sales presentation to prospects, how frequently is “winging it” the strategy you use? Probably not very often. So, if you strategize and formalize your sales presentation, shouldn’t you do the same when it comes time to understand your prospect’s decision making?
Anova’s research has uncovered that only 25% of salespeople use a formal, written-down win / loss interview guide when conducting post-decision debriefs. In other words, 75% of sales debriefs are impromptu and do not adequately allow for obtaining complete and constructive feedback. Just as you would prepare for a presentation, it is important to strategize before the debrief so you can obtain the best feedback possible to learn and benefit from. Here are some of the benefits you will gain from having a formalized win / loss debrief guide:
Now that you know the benefits of formally constructing a win / loss interview guide, you know what key ingredients to add to your survey to truly get the most out of your post-decision discussion!
Note: This blog was written by Brenna Foley, a research analyst at Anova, about her experience using benchmarking data to help her clients become more competitive.
Think about a sports team preparing for their season. The team spends all off-season practicing and preparing for action, but they never know how good they really are until they go up against their competition. The team needs a benchmark.
Benchmarking is also critical in the business world because it allows a company to better understand how their business compares to other providers in the market. By using industry benchmarks to see how their company ranks compared to competitors, business leaders can identify competitive advantages as well as areas for improvement and growth.
Now think about how benchmarking can impact a traditional win / loss program. In win / loss, interviews are conducted with a company’s prospects. The decision makers from the prospect give feedback and detail about what a company did right in the sales process and how that company can improve. Once multiple interviews are conducted and the results are aggregated, trends start to come out.
When doing win / loss, it is important for a company to evaluate its performance with broad context. While the data collected about the company allows the organization to understand its strengths and weaknesses within its own sphere, when industry-level data is added on top of this that sphere expands and the company can put its results into the context of the industry as a whole.
For instance, once the analysis is compared to a benchmark, the interpretation of the results begins to change. Now conclusions about what a company is doing well or not well can be verified by comparing results to how other competitors performed.
Let’s look at an example of this happening with an Anova client: a retirement services client completed a program and received relatively positive feedback on their participant website. Although some prospects considered the participant website a weakness, many more spoke positively about the ease of use and modern interface of the platform. Within the context of the program alone, it did not seem like the client needed to prioritize enhancing its participant portal.
However, when Anova’s industry benchmark was added to the analysis, the story changed. The Anova benchmark showed that mentions of the client’s participant website as a strength were 26% less than what Anova typically sees for similar clients. Although prospects noted the client’s participant website as being easy to use, there were very few mentions of the tools and functionality as a strength, especially compared to industry norms. Introducing Anova’s benchmark to the client’s findings allowed the client to understand their participant website was visually appealing, but the breadth of tools lagged compared to the competition.
This is one example of the importance of putting results into context. At Anova, our benchmarking data consists of feedback from over tens of thousands of interviews and 20 years of research with companies in financial services, technology, healthcare, and various other industries. Utilizing our benchmarking data allows us to provide our clients with a big picture view of their performance by comparing their results to what we have seen in other studies and provides a more comprehensive analysis than solely using program data.
Whether you conduct win / loss internally or partner with a third party, make sure you remember to not only look at your results in a vacuum, but also with as much context as you can.
Spring training is a baseball tradition that goes back as far as competitive baseball. For over 140 years, major baseball teams have been migrating to warm weather states like Florida and Arizona to practice before the season starts. What’s with all the preparation?
Spring training gives baseball teams time to prepare and get ready. It allows new players to try out for positions on the team and existing players to get in shape pre-season. It gives teams time to work out the kinks and practice the numerous different situations they may encounter when the lights come on and results matter. This is their time, coaches and players alike, to get in shape and win during the upcoming baseball season.
As baseball great Babe Ruth said, “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”
So then, what do spring training and sales training have in common? A lot. In fact, it can be argued that sales training aims to do precisely the same thing as spring training.
A successful sales training program gets sales teams ready and aligned by:
What better way to get your salespeople in shape and ready to win than sales training? The team leaves focused, ready, and prepared for the upcoming sales season.
Spring is a natural time of year for a sales organization to come together for training. Q1 is done, the organization has likely digested the previous year and has developed goals for the existing calendar, sales pipelines have been reviewed and cleaned up, and sales activity is becoming more and more important as teams head into April. Leadership is focused on wins.
Giving sales teams the proper preparation, knowledge, and motivation to hit sales goals is essential in today’s competitive sales markets. So, batter up and let the training begin!
Note: This blog was written by Michelle Martin, Senior Research Analyst at Anova. Michelle works with a number of clients who have made the choice to begin partnering with a third-party win / loss firm for the first time, and shares her thoughts on the benefits that come with that decision
At some point in your life, you have turned to a coach to provide you with objective feedback to help with a sport, a musical interest, a skill, or a career move. For the same reasons you would hire a coach to help you excel in these areas of your life, organizations hire win / loss experts to coach them on how to be more competitive in sales situations. Companies look to the experts because an independent win / loss firm can apply its knowhow to install a consistent feedback loop, eliminate bias, effectively gather feedback, and deliver actionable insights.
INSTALLING A CONSTANT FEEDBACK LOOP
It is common for organizations to ask their salespeople to record a “reason for win/loss” in their CRM when closing out a deal. However, salespeople do not consistently understand why prospects made their decision. Only 19% of sales reps set up separate calls to perform post decision debriefs. This means the vast majority of decision data in a company’s CRM is the sales rep’s interpretation of what happened.
The reason that only 19% set up separate debriefs is because many salespeople quickly move onto their next deal. Salespeople allocate their time to focus on new sales opportunities, as opposed to spending time thinking about deals that have already closed. Unfortunately, this means salespeople do not invest in learning things they did not do well and can improve on, as well as things they did do well and should replicate in the future.
Because companies know that salespeople want to focus on selling the next deal, some organizations “insource” the feedback collection mechanism to another department. If an organization is doing win /loss internally, it is best to have a separate department, such as competitive intelligence or product marketing, run the program. However, there are challenges that come with running a win / loss program internally involving time, expertise, and focus. Keep reading below in the “Effectively Gathering Feedback” section for more detail.
Unlike other companies that are focused on their own product offering, post-decision debriefs are the product of win / loss analysis firms. Win / loss companies need data to operate, and their principal focus is collecting the primary research needed to help their clients. They can allocate resources to focus solely on debriefing with prospects. This makes sure that the feedback is consistently collected and includes specific details that will help organizations sell more effectively. Focusing and devoting so many resources to collecting feedback allows a third-party win / loss firm to help build a consistent feedback loop for their clients.
ELIMINATING BIAS
Let’s say your sales team is made up of reps who are in the 19% of salespeople who conduct a debrief with their prospects. There is still a concern about the accuracy of the feedback the salesperson was able to collect. Based on Anova’s research, salespeople only get the complete truth 40% of the time.
One of the reasons for this low number is because salespeople are not able to get the complete and honest truth from prospects. Prospects sometimes do not feel comfortable delivering bad news to someone who they have built a relationship with. Think about a couple going through a break-up. Does one party always tell the other the exact reasons why they are breaking up with them? Not often. It is more likely they will tell their friends, or even go down the street and tell the bartender the whole story. They just don’t want to hurt the feelings of a person with whom they had a relationship. The same human nature applies to business decisions.
Another reason the number might be low is because salespeople don’t like to admit failure. Anova’s research has discovered salespeople believe they are at fault for losing a deal only 25% percent of the time, but believe they are the primary reason for winning deals 75% of the time. This is because salespeople are only human, and it is human nature to blame failures on external factors but accredit successes to internal factors such as experience, skills, and effort.
So, what does this all mean? If an organization is using data on why they are winning and losing to make decisions, and that data is incorrect, the organization will be making poorly informed decisions and will struggle to improve in the marketplace. On the other hand, an independent third party is in an objective position to receive a prospect’s feedback about the sales process. When speaking to a third-party, prospects are more forthcoming with their true opinions of how a sales team performed and are more likely to share constructive commentary that organizations can use to improve gaps in its offering and sales approach. Third parties will ask all the right questions and remove bias from the debrief stage, and as a result the feedback is more accurate and allows for more confident decision making when the data is aggregated.
EFFECTIVELY GATHERING FEEDBACK
When win / loss is done internally, the job of debriefing with the prospect falls on somebody who lacks the training and experience to effectively probe for details. Without a trained interviewer, an organization will be left with incomplete feedback and there will be holes missing in the data. On the other hand, the specialized interviewers who work for a win / loss company have gone through training to effectively debrief with prospect decision makers and have experience conducting hundreds of interviews. When speaking with a decision maker, it is important for the interviewer to have an engaging, senior-level discussion about the prospect’s buying process.
In addition to the skills needed to conduct a robust interview, there is also a large time commitment required to schedule, conduct, and write up an interview. An average win / loss interview takes around 30-40 minutes. If you factor in the time it takes to schedule and write up the interview, a single interview can require multiple hours of work. For individuals who have other responsibilities, such as salespeople or product marketers, carving out time to do multiple interviews can be a daunting task. However, win / loss firms have trained teams that focus on conducting and analyzing interviews, which increases efficiency.
DELIVERING ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
When it comes time to aggregate results and look at trends and findings, outsourcing win / loss to specialized firms has key advantages compared to running a win / loss program internally. Win / loss firms have proprietary technology, benchmarking, and can deliver stakeholder presentations that will help organizations uncover insights and drive to action.
Win / loss firms often have proprietary technology that includes client dashboards. The dashboard makes it easy for a company to manage their program and view emerging trends in real-time. Having these capabilities readily available on a platform will help organizations keep track of how a program is progressing and what themes are developing as interviews are completed.
Win /loss firms also have the ability to provide benchmarking, which allows organizations to understand how their results fit in a broader context. Say a company does 20 loss interviews and half of them mentioned issues with their sales team as a reason why they were not selected. Is a 50% sales defect rate normal? Is it above average? A win / loss focused firm will be able to answer those questions because it will have the experience of doing several different studies across different clients and industries. Instead of viewing results in a vacuum, a win / loss firm can help an organization understand its data on both an absolute and a relative basis.
Another key advantage win / loss firms have is the ability to deliver findings to an organization’s senior decision makers as a trusted source. Company executives don’t often see all the problems facing their organization because they are not in the room when the sales pitch happened. Win / loss provides executives with visibility into what prospects think about the organization and the presentation of aggregate findings is a great means for pulling out the most salient insights. While some of the commentary will be negative, it is easier to have a third-party deliver this constructive feedback because they are completely independent and do not have a stake in the game. By receiving this unbiased truth, executives can have clarity when making strategic decisions.
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Win / loss will provide your organization with the feedback you need to sell more effectively. In order to unlock as much value as possible from win / loss, companies should rely on an expert third-party organization to help build a consistent feedback loop, gather unbiased feedback, and use their skills to deliver the feedback in the most effective way possible. You’ve hired coaches to help you improve in other aspects of your life, why wouldn’t your organization hire win / loss experts to learn how to compete more successfully?
Consider this: In a survey conducted by BrightTALK, 42% of B2B marketing professionals state that a lack of quality data is their biggest barrier to lead generation. At the same time, 70% of marketing professionals indicate that their biggest marketing goal is converting leads to customers. Anyone see the problem?
Marketers are charged with creating and converting qualified leads but are lacking the quality data in which to do so.
To solve this problem, we need to take a step back. Any successful organization will tell you that product marketing and sales working together is critical. It is, in fact, essential to sourcing prospects, converting those prospects to clients, and retaining existing clients. One cannot have success without the other. It just doesn’t work.
Gathering and using competitive / market intelligence data is one way product marketing and sales can align. Why did one piece of potential business close and another is lost to a competitor? Speaking of competition, what are they doing and saying that perhaps your marketing and sales team don’t know about? What gaps exist in the marketplace that your organization can fill? It is not important enough these days to keep up with the competition; a winning strategy means you stay ahead of them.
Sun Tzu, the author of the famed Art of War, knew this truth even in 500 B.C. in saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.”
Win / loss research helps you with both. Knowing yourself and knowing your competition.
Win / loss reviews are an exercise whereby organizations gather feedback on their sales process and sales team efforts, typically by interviewing new clients and/or prospects after the buying decision has been made, regardless of whether the deal was won or lost. The primary purpose of a win / loss review is to serve as a learning tool – one that is focused on driving continuous improvement.
That learning can come in multiple forms. An individual transcript can help a product marketer or salesperson understand why he or she won or lost a specific opportunity, and aggregate reporting can help organizations better understand overall trends driving decisions and why they are winning or losing across all opportunities. This reporting allows product marketers to know the competition more accurately, make better decisions, and ultimately increase win rates.
Some key elements that help product marketers in win / loss reporting are:
Product marketing begins the customer’s buying process and sales completes it. Win / loss is one way to bring success to that continuum and keep those two teams aligned toward their common goals.
Which company has the better outlook: one whose leaders think they already know everything about their business, competitors and marketplace, or one with a culture rooted in constant learning and improvement? While it’s possible the former may be able to achieve some success, Anova believes the answer for achieving long-term, sustainable growth is with actions and strategies attained from consistently-sought after feedback. In order for a company to embrace the challenges that come with accepting it still has room to grow, it has to have the right mindset.
In her bestselling psychology book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck, Ph.D. introduces two different mindsets – the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Dweck explains that people with fixed mindsets believe their success and qualities are essentially set in stone. They believe they are born with a certain set of skills, intelligence, and aptitudes. People with a fixed mindset tend not to seek out feedback and typically do not work on themselves because they simply do not believe they can change much. Their world and its trajectory are essentially set at birth.
Contrarily, people with a growth mindset believe their qualities and knowledge are only a starting point and that everything can be developed through learning and continuous improvement. The growth mindset is based on the theory that anything you do can be improved through hard work and effort. People with this mindset tend to have a passion for learning, feedback, and stretching themselves. Their world and its trajectory are continuously growing.
This psychological theory has dramatic implications in the business world. All businesses begin as a collection of people (and their mindsets). Each person on a team brings his or her own mindset to each area of focus. In fact, senior management teams often have a variety of mindsets amongst them. For example, the Head of Marketing may want to perform Win Loss Analysis to better understand buyer preferences and the competitive landscape. They are interested in learning and growing the company’s knowledge with the end result being improved market outcomes. This is the perfect example of a growth mindset. On the other hand, the Head of Sales may believe that he or she knows the answers to these questions already. He or she does not see the value or need in investing in measures to find out why the company is winning and losing. This fixed mindset inhibits their company from gaining valuable feedback.
What seems like a no brainer investment to one person is a waste of energy and resources to another. How does this conflict in mindsets play out?
Some decision makers decide not to collect data on how the company could improve and thus they lower the company’s ability to become self-aware. Ultimately, the company may fall further and further behind a competitor that is willing to get the feedback and learn.
It’s not always the company that starts out the best and fastest that wins the race. But the best companies are ones who create a culture where a growth mindset exists, where opportunities grow, and learning can foster true long term success.
Sales training is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry. Between blogs, books, videos, seminars, and individual coaching, there are countless avenues for organizations and individuals to pursue additional training to help them develop sales skills to become more effective at their jobs.
Often times, however, the best examples of how to most effectively sell your product or service comes from within. The star producers on your team have methodologies and tricks that are proven to work. There is no better use case than seeing the solution you are trying to sell yourself be marketed clearly and persuasively.
But there are several reasons why most companies rely on outside consultants or trainers who aren’t responsible for selling themselves to do the coaching. Most notably, the top salespeople in companies need to be out doing what they do best: selling.
It is a resource constraint to try and ask the top producers to also impart their wisdom and tricks of the trade throughout the organization. It is especially difficult to ask those experts to repeatedly carve out time for training others.
Win / loss has many benefits, but among them is the ability to proliferate best practices to all members of a team.
Win / loss isn’t just about personal learning and growth, it is also about helping others learn.
The completed transcript that is written after a post-sale debrief interview contains invaluable context about the deal, strategies used by the sales team, how those tactics were received by the prospect, and any competitive comparisons to rival salespeople. The completed transcript allows the person reading the debrief to learn how and why the rainmaker in your organization was able to reframe the prospect’s business problem in a way that helped them see the value of your solution or articulate the differentiate against other vendors in a tightly contested RFP.
And that completed transcript allows anyone to become a student of the sales team, most notably other salespeople who are looking up to your top performers for tips on how to raise their game.
Think of the power of not only distributing relevant descriptions of your top sales peoples’ performance, in the voice of the customer, to everyone on your team to learn from. Some of Anova’s clients take it a step further, and carve out time on a monthly call or other team meeting, for the actual individual who was praised by the prospect to explain in more detail why they approached a situation the way they did and what tactics they used that were received so well by the customer. In those cases, the ability to combine both voices, the buyer and the seller, to demonstrate best practices is some of the best coaching available.
Win / loss may seem simple: close a deal, call the buyer, find out why they selected you or a competitor. At a high level these steps may seem straightforward, but they are a lot more complicated than what meets the eye.
While debriefing with every single opportunity is a noble objective, it is unrealistic. If you have the right best practices though, you can select the right prospect organizations and the right contacts to engage with, and get on your way to developing a strong feedback mechanism. The following best practices can get you started:
At the Deal / Opportunity Level
There are a multitude of ways to segment or filter your deal-flow by in order to decide which of your prospects to call on. Here are some of the most beneficial to successful win / loss programs:
At the Contact Level
After deciding which deals to focus on, it is critical to make sure you speak with the right person at the prospect organization. Often in complex sales situations there is one key buyer, but many influencers from numerous different departments: the relevant line of business, IT, finance, and of course, procurement.
To gather the best win / loss feedback, remember to not get stuck in procurement. While the procurement department may have influence, they are often limited in the level of detail they can provide when describing the prospect’s full buying criteria and evaluation process. Getting in touch with the ultimate decision maker is the absolute best practice, as they will be able to provide access into their mindset throughout the sales process and ultimate decision.
In some scenarios there are heavy influencers or more than one decision maker, for instance a consultant may have been involved, or both IT and the line of business in a software sale. In these situations, it can be beneficial to interview multiple constituents to obtain the most well-rounded feedback possible.
After identifying who to contact for your interviews, remember some of the best practices for actually having the conversation with them. But by following the best practices above, you’ve already completed half the battle of conducting a win / loss interview.
It is natural to want to learn from failures or lost sales situations. Companies spend a lot of time and effort training, preparing, and selling their products and services in competitive environments. When a deal is lost, it makes great sense to want to learn why. In fact, we see this all the time in new sales conversations with our own prospects at Anova. Nine out of ten times when we ask companies interested in win / loss what they are trying to get out of a research program, at least one of the organization’s objectives is to learn from their losses.
But what about the wins? Are there valuable teachings beyond knowing why you won?
Absolutely. In fact, recent Anova research revealed that 36% of win situations experience a post-sale issue. Put another way, even though the decision was a win, just over one-third of new clients have an experience that jeopardizes the long-term relationship.
These relationships begin on fragile terms and need help sooner rather than later. Do any of these common post-sales issues sound familiar?
Think of client relationships that may have encountered any of the above problems. It becomes incredibly difficult for organizations to then turn the customer into a satisfied, loyal, referenceable client after a post-sale issue. When the cost of obtaining a new customer is estimated to be 7x as high as retaining an existing one, and after the sales team has just recently undergone the effort to win the deal, it pays to make sure the relationship starts off on the right foot.
Instead, as Anova’s research shows, sales teams are often guilty of closing the deal, tallying the win, and moving on. However, that transition between prospect and client is paramount and all too often can make or break the overall success of that client engagement.
The ability to uncover which clients may be starting off a relationship on rocky grounds, and what issues may be plaguing them, are why collecting win data is so important for successful organizations. Learning from winning sales situations provides organizations with valuable insights into new client relationships and can play a critical part of the new client’s onboarding process, providing information such as:
Just because a deal is won does not mean it will be a win forever. Organizations need to have a tool available to them to ensure the transition from prospect to client is handled with the care any long-term relationship deserves.
Think of a win transcript as a point-in-time client satisfaction measure. Is the client starting off on the right foot with the organization or are there already issues and missed expectations that need attention? We can’t forget that in most wins, there was a runner-up that is one email or call away.
Here we are. It’s fourth quarter and your sales goals mean everything right now. It’s go time. Are you wishing this task was easier?
You’re not alone. Recently Salesforce published an eye-opening statistic: 57% of sales reps missed their sales quotas last year. What a huge impact falling short has on salespeople, sales teams, and entire organizations. Jim Rohn, one of America’s most regarded entrepreneurs and motivational authors, offered a different perspective on the problem when he said, “Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better.”
The truth is sales is hard. It is not easy to find a prospect, establish rapport, understanding your prospects business and needs, and then pitch your solution against your top competitors. Many people just reading that narrative would walk away. But salespeople are called to the challenge and the best salespeople and best sales organizations want to get better and better at selling. They just need the means in order to do so.
Win / loss analysis will help you sell better. Consider a case study of one of Anova’s clients which demonstrates how a sales team reached its goals by learning what they needed to improve:
Anova’s client was a large, institutional financial service provider, but was experiencing a declining sales win rate. The firm was receiving informal feedback that it was losing in new business situations because its sales efforts were lacking compared to those of its primary competitors. Senior management wanted to establish the legitimacy of this feedback and understand the true depth and contour of any associated sales process problems so it could make the necessary adjustments.
The company utilized Anova’s Win / Loss Analysis program to re-vamp its sales training and to re-engineer its approach to sales presentations. The interview transcripts were used as an ongoing feedback mechanism and coaching tool for sales personnel. Additionally, the company changed how it structured and prepared presentation content by formalizing an internal review process, which included “dry runs” with senior executives, who offered critiques and advice to the company’s sales staff on presentation style, flow and how to respond to tough questions by prospects. Competitive intelligence gained from the program helped the company train its sales force on how to position, package and promote the firm’s capabilities and value proposition against top competitors. Within two years, the frequency with which the company’s sales team and sales approach were identified as a major factor in lost business fell by more than 30 percent.
As the Salesforce studies indicates, too many sales teams are falling short of their ultimate goal. In order to better enable them to hit their targets, organizations should be providing them with the invaluable feedback and coaching made possible by capturing the voice of the prospect in post-decision debriefs.
Win Loss Analysis will not make selling easier, but it will make you better at selling.
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