Voice-of-the-client (VoC) research is a structured methodology where a trusted third party conducts in-depth interviews with your existing clients, potentially including your recently departed ones, to surface what they actually think, feel, and need.

The result? Honest feedback your clients would never deliver directly, turned into intelligence you can act on.

Anova Consulting has specialized in this work for over twenty years, and across hundreds of client satisfaction and churn programs, certain patterns emerge with striking consistency. Here are five of the most important for service leaders in 2026:

1. Responsiveness is the #1 thing clients say they want and the #1 thing providers underestimate.

Our research consistently shows that when clients are asked to name what they value most in a provider relationship, responsiveness tops the list, across industries, company sizes, and service types.

What’s striking is what our research also shows on the other side: providers almost universally believe they are performing well on responsiveness, even when their clients disagree. This gap between assumed and actual satisfaction is where relationships quietly erode. Anova’s research enables you it before clients start taking meetings with your competitors.

2. Account team turnover is a significant driver of dissatisfaction and churn.

Time and again, Anova’s client satisfaction and churn research surfaces the same painful sequence: a key contact left, the handoff was poorly managed, and the client, already unsettled, starts to evaluate alternatives. In program after program, across a range of our client’s industries (financial services, technology, PR, and professional services), poorly handled personnel turnover ranks as the leading preventable cause of lost relationships.

The word “preventable” matters here. Clients who churned due to turnover rarely left because of the departure itself. They left because no one managed the transition well enough to rebuild their confidence. Turnover happens – it’s unavoidable, and particularly in periods of job market turnover like the “great resignation” in 2022, can appear endemic. But there’s a difference between service organizations that properly manage turnover through tight transition plans, strong change management, and client check-ins, and those who don’t. Our research shows that clients will forgive turnover when continuity protocols are strong. Are yours?

3. Lack of proactivity is a silent churn accelerator.

Anova’s research consistently shows that clients who churn rarely point to a single catastrophic failure. In the majority of cases, they describe a slow fade: a provider that was available when contacted, but never truly present. No strategic check-ins. No ideas offered unprompted. No evidence that the provider was thinking about their business between deliverables.

Over time, that absence compounds. What begins as a minor irritation becomes a reason to take a competitor’s call. The providers who retain clients longest, our research shows, are the ones who show up before they’re asked to.

4. Clients who feel ignored become competitors’ easiest wins.

Our research shows the window for a competitor to poach a neglected client is shorter than most providers assume. In case after case, the decision to switch wasn’t driven by the competitor’s pitch alone. It was driven by the contrast between that attention and their current provider’s absence or lack of proactivity (see above). By the time a client is entertaining alternatives, the relationship is often already over in their mind.

5. Demonstrating ROI is now a client retention strategy, not just a sales tactic.

As we explored in a recent post, Anova’s research shows 2026 is the year of ROI justification in both sales and client satisfaction research. Budget cycles are tighter. Procurement scrutiny is higher. And our research shows that many of our clients are not responding to this shift. Interview after interview in 2026, across clients, we see respondents say “I’m dissatisfied with Provider X because their account management team is not helping me understand the value of my investment.”

That’s a retention risk. In the majority of churn cases we’ve studied where budget was cited as a factor, the underlying issue wasn’t cost. Rather, the client couldn’t justify the spend internally, whether due to opaque reporting – or more likely, a lack of assistance from the account management team. Service teams that proactively help clients tell that story internally are far more likely to survive the next budget cycle. Those that don’t are quietly building the case for their own termination.

The Bottom Line

Anova’s research, accumulated across two decades of VoC and churn programs, points to a consistent truth: clients will tell you exactly what you need to do to keep them, but only if you ask in a way that makes honesty easy. Third-party interviews, conducted by neutral professionals, surface the feedback clients won’t deliver directly. Acted on, that feedback is what turns at-risk relationships into loyal ones. And in our current business climate of uncertainty, this feedback has only become more critical.

Ready to find out what your clients are really thinking? Reach out to your Anova account team at support@anovaconsulting.com 

The post What Is Voice-of-the-Client Research — and Why Do You Need It in 2026? appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

2025 was the year of “we don’t have the budget for this.” So far, 2026 is the year of “Why are you worth the spend?”

Pricing Narrative

2025 was a year of extreme economic uncertainty. Anova’s research found many businesses were hesitant to spend when a new tariff or AI development could upend their entire strategy for the year. In our interviews, price objections were often blunt and budget-driven: respondents simply could not get internal approval for the expenditure, even if they liked the features or functionality of the product.

This year, however, the story has evolved beyond simple price sensitivity to a more nuanced – yet exacting – spend justification. In other words, vendors now need to make crystal clear their ROI – or they’ll be left on the curb.

In 2025, Anova’s programs heard a lot of: “We do not have this as part of the budget.” [i] In 2026, this has evolved to: “While higher engagement with [the product] would have made an easier case, at the end of the day, [ending the relationship] was a financial decision.”

What’s Driving This Shift?

While every buyer’s situation is different, the macroeconomic trends affecting the U.S. economy offer the key to this broader puzzle. Uncertainty has remained elevated since 2025, but buyers cannot afford to sit in a holding pattern forever. Vendor selections must be made and budgets set before tariff timelines and AI-driven disruption cycles reach renewal thresholds. Furthermore, a buyer’s competitors may already be moving — buyers don’t exist in a vacuum.

Buyers are responding to this dynamic – “I can’t wait forever, but things are still very uncertain” – by demanding crystal-clear value articulation from their vendors. The question is no longer just “can we afford this?” but “how quickly can we justify this and the associated risk?”

More important than simply proving value, vendors need to prove it quickly. Speed to ROI has surpassed total ROI as buyers are facing increased internal pressure for value to be justified quickly. With uncertainty expected to remain elevated for the foreseeable future, buyers do not want to see long timelines to positive ROI – they need it quickly.

What Does This Look Like in Practice?

Across Anova’s client base and industries, the shift is showing up in concrete ways. Procurement cycles that once stalled on budget approval are now advancing – but with and more pointed questions about measurable outcomes. Finance teams are more involved earlier in the process. Legal and compliance reviews are tightening. And vendors who rely on relationship equity alone are finding it isn’t enough to close or renew.

Buyers are also making sharper trade-off decisions between cost and capability. A product that does more but costs more is no longer a straightforward upgrade model. It needs to demonstrate that the incremental investment pays off within a defined timeframe. Vague promises of “efficiency gains” or “strategic alignment” are falling flat. Specific metrics, benchmarks, and case studies tied to comparable use cases are increasingly table stakes.

How Do You Respond?

Vendors must articulate and demonstrate ROI proactively – especially in renewal and competitive situations. Transparent pricing and value storytelling are increasingly critical. The vendors gaining ground in 2026 are those who come prepared: with data, with customer proof points, and with a clear narrative connecting their product’s capabilities to the buyer’s specific business outcomes.

In 2026, the conversation has matured. Sales teams are no longer selling into a budget-constrained environment, but a confidence-constrained one. Buyers are looking for solutions that pay for themselves – and quickly.  The sales teams that will win in 2026 will be the ones that can build clear, coherent, and compelling ROI narratives. The bar for value justification has risen, and it’s not coming back down.

[i] Quote from real Anova interview

[ii] Quote from real Anova interview

The post Price Constraints to ROI Scrutiny: How the Buyer-Side Equation Has Evolved Since 2025 appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

This blog is the fourth and final in a series exploring the top themes identified by Partner Andrew Cloutier dominating Anova’s voice-of-the-client research in 2026.

86% of global B2B buyers reported a purchase process stall in 2024. (Forrester) If your sales team is spending more time chasing decisions that never come, you’re not alone – and the forces driving this trend are only intensifying.

In our win/loss research, Anova tracks two types of variables: those faced by each individual sales team (their company’s unique buyer needs, specific platform features, industry-specific factors), and general trends encountered by every sales team no matter the industry or product. One of the general themes we’ve seen change the most in recent years is the speed of decision-making. Companies are taking longer and longer to select vendors, and increasingly, no solution is selected at all. Across our interviews, we’ve identified three drivers behind this shift.

1 – Greater Size of Decision-Making Teams and Deferred Accountability

Consider this, from a recent Anova interview: “We came together as a committee, and then the 47 did the final evaluation, and we presented it to our executive sponsors for approval.” Forty-seven people in a final evaluation – before it even reached the executives who could approve it. While 47 is an outlier, consider this quote from a media technology vendor’s client: “Decision makers include my team, Content Lab, along with our Customer Experience Planning and Optimization Group… our Behavioral Strategies and Planning group helps to drive our planning process. The Head of that organization is a peer to my VP and is also a key stakeholder and decision-maker around both the adoption, the use evolution, and investment in [client]. Ultimately, the CMO has a say as well.” That’s six distinct functions, with several levels of seniority, involved in the decision-making process.

Buying teams have grown substantially across industries. Depending on the source, the average now ranges from roughly 7 (CEB) to as many as 14–23 (Gartner). Anova’s research shows that more than half of sales processes involve third parties, and 67% reach decisions by consensus. In this environment, it’s increasingly difficult for sales teams to break through gridlock. When any one of a dozen stakeholders could have veto power — let alone when the goal is full consensus — it’s natural for decisions to stall.

2 – Data Overload

Technology has made it easier for buying teams to access information; firms like Gartner and Forrester provide detailed vendor comparisons across a range of industries, and AI platforms can surface research at a scale that was previously impossible. But access to more information has not made decisions easier. In many cases, it has made them harder.

When a dozen – let alone 47 – stakeholders each independently review sales presentations, third-party reports, and customer testimonials, they are going to reach independent conclusions – if they engage with the materials at all. Building consensus is difficult under any circumstances. Every additional piece of information layered into that process makes it exponentially harder.

3 – Macroeconomic Uncertainty

Global macroeconomic uncertainty has placed increased scrutiny on every budget dollar. AI disruption, a softening labor market, and geopolitical risk are new variables that buying teams must now factor into vendor decisions. Business uncertainty, while down from its 2023 peak, remains meaningfully elevated compared to pre-COVID levels. At the same time, many teams are being asked to do more with less, which raises the stakes on every spending decision and makes leaders more reluctant to commit without exhaustive evaluation.

When interest rates or tariff policy could shift rapidly, the instinct is to wait. And waiting, for many buying teams, has become the default.

Conclusion: How you can address slow decision-making among your prospects

When these three puzzle pieces are placed together, it’s clear why buying cycles are stretching longer and longer. More leaders are in the room with their fingers on the scale, each reviewing more data, with increased economic uncertainty thrown into the mix. Complexity isn’t going away – so the real question is how your team adapts.

Start by tightening who you pursue. Better prospect qualification means your salespeople spend their time where it’s most likely to pay off, not chasing committees that were never going to reach a decision. Next, push higher and broader. The further your team can build relationships up and across the decision-making chain, the less vulnerable you are to one sceptic in a room of 47 derailing everything. Finally, treat stalled and no-decision outcomes as a source for continues improvement. If you aren’t systematically learning from those lost cycles – through a formal win/loss program – you’re leaving critical intelligence on the table.

The sales teams winning in this environment aren’t the ones waiting for decisions to get easier. They’re the ones building the discipline to understand why deals stall and relentlessly closing those gaps.

The post The Paralysis Epidemic Hitting B2B Sales Teams appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

Written by Research Analyst Jeffrey Cheng, this is the third in a series of blogs that will

In many B2B markets, the ease of doing business has shifted from a secondary consideration to a decisive factor in purchase decisions.

Historically, Anova’s Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs revealed a familiar story: vendors won because their product capabilities were stronger, their pricing more competitive, or their brand more credible. Friction in areas like onboarding or contracting was often tolerated if the perceived value justified the effort.

Today, that story is changing.

Across industries, buyers increasingly evaluate vendors through a different lens: How difficult will it be to implement, integrate, and manage this solution?

Win/Loss interviews show this concern surfacing repeatedly, often late in the buying process. Buyers may recognize strong capabilities yet still choose a competitor that feels easier to adopt. In many cases, that perception is shaped less by the product and more by how well the sales team anticipates and reduces friction throughout the journey.

Critically, these concerns are rarely voiced directly during active sales cycles. As a result, many organizations underestimate their impact. Anova’s research increasingly shows that many deals are lost not because the solution was weaker, but because the overall buying experience felt harder.

Understanding where this friction occurs, and how effectively sales teams can manage it, has become a critical source of competitive intelligence.

Why is Ease of Doing Business Growing as a Concern?

Enterprise purchasing has become significantly more complex. Decisions now involve cross-functional buying groups spanning procurement, legal, IT, finance, and operations. Each group introduces new requirements and risk considerations.

In this environment, the role of sales has evolved. It is no longer just about positioning value; it is about orchestrating a seamless buying process.

Sales teams must align stakeholders, anticipate objections, and coordinate internal resources to keep deals moving. Even small breakdowns can have outsized impact:

• Delays in security responses slow approvals
• Rigid contract terms extend procurement cycles
• Unclear onboarding creates last-minute hesitation

Individually, these issues are manageable. Together, they signal something more concerning: Working with this vendor will require effort. When buyers anticipate effort, they also anticipate risk.

Anova’s Win/Loss Analysis frequently surfaces this insight. Deals that are competitive on product and price can stall or fail when operational complexity introduces doubt, particularly when sales teams are unable to proactively simplify the experience.

The Rise of “Conversion Aversion”

In addition to the growing bureaucratic and procedural hurdles, an additional dynamic emerging as increasingly important in our Win/Loss programs is conversion aversion, or the reluctance organizations feel when switching vendors.

Change requires coordination across stakeholders and often demands political capital from internal champions. As a result, incumbent vendors frequently enjoy a structural advantage, even when challengers offer superior solutions.

While this has always been a concern in complex sales processes, increasingly this conversion aversion has become increasingly difficult to surmount – in part due to the dynamics described above.

Win/Loss interviews often reveal buyers caught between interest and hesitation. Buyers may express strong interest in a new solution while simultaneously worrying about the implementation burden. When sales teams do not address these concerns early and consistently, the status quo prevails.

This raises the bar for sales. Winning now requires more than a compelling value proposition. Sales teams must actively reduce the perceived cost of change by simplifying the path forward to align stakeholders early.

How Sales Teams Can Help Manage this Changing Dynamic

Your sales teams are on the front lines of this shift. They translate internal complexity into a coherent external experience, guiding buyers through evaluation while managing expectations and momentum.

Perspective is critical here: internal teams grow accustomed to established processes, while customers encounter them for the first time.

Ease of doing business is not owned by a single function. It is shaped across sales, legal, security, product, finance, and customer success. That said, sales teams are uniquely positioned to connect these functions and shape how buyers experience them.

Sales teams set the tone early by establishing expectations for stakeholders and surfacing risks before they become blockers. It also acts as the integrator, ensuring internal teams align to deliver a seamless experience.

When this coordination breaks down, customers feel it immediately.

Leading organizations recognize this and treat ease as a strategic capability. They equip sales teams with:

• Clear, client-friendly contracting frameworks
• Preemptive security and compliance resources
• Defined onboarding and implementation pathways
• Streamlined pricing and procurement support

Just as importantly, they invest in Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer programs to continuously identify where friction exists and how it impacts deal outcomes.

These insights are critical for sales leaders. They reveal where deals are being lost due to avoidable complexity, where enablement is needed, and where cross-functional alignment can improve win rates.

Over time, longitudinal analysis allows organizations to track whether changes are reducing friction and strengthening competitive performance.

Conclusion: Ease of Doing Business is the New Competitive Advantage

In many markets, product differentiation is narrowing. Buyers increasingly assume a baseline level of functionality across vendors.

The calculus behind choosing a new vendor has shifted:

Instead of asking, Does this solution work?

Buyers increasingly ask, How much work will this create for our organization?

Sales teams are the first to hear that question and the most responsible for providing answers. Organizations that succeed will be those that empower their sales teams to remove friction at every stage of the buyer journey, while aligning the broader business to support that effort.

Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer insights provide the visibility needed to do this effectively, linking buyer perception to revenue outcomes and guiding where to act.

Because in today’s B2B environment, being great is no longer enough.

You also have to make it easy.

The post “Ease of Doing Business” has grown from a point of consideration to a dealbreaker appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

As leaders in the Win / Loss industry, we work closely with sales and revenue leaders to help them understand why they win, lose, and retain clients. In nearly every executive conversation we are having right now, one topic dominates: AI.

As this new technology sweeps across every industry, expectations have shifted almost overnight. Prospects and existing clients alike are no longer simply evaluating vendors on the quality of their services or expertise – they are increasingly demanding robust technology capabilities, specifically clear AI roadmaps as part of the baseline. In many verticals, AI has become less of a differentiator and more of an assumption.

Sales leaders are feeling this pressure directly. They are being asked not only how their teams perform, but how their systems, processes, and partners are leveraging AI to drive better results.

These new “table stakes”, however, are presenting new challenges for both buyers and sellers.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Win  / Loss research. On the surface, AI tools present intriguing opportunities for automation and scalability. Large language models can summarize interviews instantly, detect patterns across mountains of buyer feedback, cluster themes at speed, and generate polished deliverables in a fraction of the time traditional workflows require. For revenue teams under pressure to do more with less, the efficiency gains are undeniable.

And we agree – when applied correctly, AI can meaningfully augment Win / Loss programs and business intelligence efforts. For example, Anova uses various AI tools to elevate our efficiency in analyzing data and spark new insights.

In our experience, however, efficiency is not the same as execution – and automation is only as strong as the foundation beneath it.

In practice, many organizations are trying to layer AI-driven insight on top of sales ecosystems that are built on an inconsistent foundation. Widespread CRM data completeness and accuracy issues create a shaky base on which to build. Opportunity fields are missing or outdated, even contact information is inaccurate. Loss reasons are vague or entered for internal optics rather than the truth. Competitive intelligence is captured unevenly. Deal context often lives in unstructured notes, or nowhere at all.

AI does not solve these problems. It amplifies them.

This is the core challenge: AI can accelerate analysis, but it cannot independently validate whether the underlying inputs reflect reality. Even as new tools continue to improve and the frequency of hallucinations declines, our experience has been clear – it remains essential to fact-check and sanity-check all AI-assisted output, especially when insights are being used to inform strategic decisions at the executive level.

Compounding this is the growing ability of LLMs to quickly and cheaply generate content that passes the “eye test”. AI-generated summaries can sound credible. Reports can look polished. Themes can appear coherent. But when AI output is produced faster than the underlying sales discipline required to support it, organizations risk confusing speed with truth and volume with value.

And this raises a deeper question for Win / Loss programs specifically – one we regularly challenge leadership teams to consider: even if AI enables us to generate more data, more reporting, and more analysis than ever before, does that align with what your sales leaders need?

Sales and product leaders are already overwhelmed with information. The goal is not to provide ever more output, rather it is to deliver prioritized, actionable insight that drives better decisions and better execution. True client centricity is about clarity, focus, and guidance on what to do next.

Before organizations ask:

• How can AI accelerate this?
• How can AI automate this?
• How can AI augment this?

They must first ask:

• Is our underlying foundation strong enough to trust what comes out?
• Will this efficiency translate into better execution?

From our vantage point as a third-party Win / Loss consultant, before layering AI onto your sales data, the priority must be strengthening your CRM hygiene and foundational discipline. In the AI era, automation is becoming ubiquitous. But trusted insight – especially in high-stakes B2B sales and Win / Loss situations – still depends on fundamentals: clean data, structured processes, human judgement, and an unwavering focus on turning analysis into action.

In a world where AI is the expectation, disciplined execution is what earns trust.

The post AI Is Becoming Table Stakes. Data Discipline Comes First. appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

The Expansion Era: Why Growth Now Starts with the Customers You Already Have

For years, B2B growth strategy followed a familiar script: build pipeline, land new logos, repeat. Net-new acquisition was the headline metric. Expansion was a bonus.

That script is changing.

Across industries, organizations are recalibrating around a new reality: the most reliable growth often comes from the customers already on your roster. Retention, cross-sell, and up-sell are no longer supporting actors. They are central to the revenue story.

This is a structural shift from growth-by-acquisition to growth-by-expansion, and just as importantly, growth-by-retention, brought on by increased uncertainty – uncertainty that looks like it’s here to stay.

So, what can my business do to retain and expand our existing accounts?

Why Expansion Is Harder Than It Looks

On paper, selling into the installed base should be easier. You have relationships. You have history. You understand the account.

In practice, the bar is often higher.

When selling to a new prospect, expectations are shaped by positioning and promise. When selling to an existing client, expectations are shaped by lived experience.

Every support ticket.
Every missed deadline.
Every surprise invoice.
Every positive outcome, too.

Expansion conversations don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen in the context of trust that has either been strengthened or eroded over time.

Win/loss and pre-renewal interviews consistently reveal a subtle but important dynamic: clients expect vendors to demonstrate that they know them. Not in a superficial way, but in a way that reflects accumulated knowledge of their business, priorities, and internal constraints.

Generic pitches that might resonate with a new logo fall flat inside an existing relationship. Their reaction is “You should know us better than that.”

The Psychology of Selling to the Installed Base

There’s also a psychological difference between acquisition and expansion that organizations underestimate.

In a new-logo pursuit, buyers are evaluating potential. In an expansion or renewal scenario, they are evaluating performance and risk.

Prospects ask: Can this partner deliver?
Existing clients ask: Have they delivered? And what happens if we give them more?

That second question is rooted in retention logic. Clients are thinking about stability, continuity, and internal optics. Expanding a vendor relationship is not just a commercial decision, it’s a reputational one for the internal champion.

Pre-renewal interviews often surface this tension. Clients may express overall satisfaction yet hesitate to expand scope because ROI was never clearly quantified, early implementation challenges created skepticism, or value hasn’t been consistently reinforced.

Retention as the Foundation

Expansion strategies tend to get attention because they drive incremental revenue. But the strongest organizations understand that retention is what makes expansion possible.

If a renewal is uncertain, cross-sell conversations are irrelevant. If trust is fragile, upsell feels opportunistic.

That’s why many companies are investing more heavily in client satisfaction and pre-renewal interviews. These conversations surface friction early, before it turns into churn. They often uncover issues that would never appear in a survey:

• A stakeholder who feels under-informed
• A service model that no longer fits evolving needs
• Quiet competitive evaluations happening behind the scenes

Protecting revenue today requires more than a renewal calendar. It requires listening.

What Win/Loss Data Reveals About Expansion Friction

Traditional satisfaction metrics rarely capture these nuances. A customer can rate a relationship positively and still be quietly at risk or resistant to expanding it.

Independent win/loss, churn, and pre-renewal interviews reveal where the retention and expansion engine breaks down.

Common themes include:

1. Value articulation gaps.
   The product works. The service is solid. But the client cannot clearly explain, internally, why renewing or expanding makes strategic sense.
2. Misalignment between sales and relationship management.
   Clients describe a disconnect between the person pitching new work and the team managing the current engagement. Expansion feels like a reset, not a continuation.
3. Conversion aversion.
   Even happy clients are wary of adding complexity. New modules, new contracts, new integrations each introduces risk. Unless the upside is unmistakable, inertia wins.
4. Unresolved friction points.
   Minor service irritants that were tolerable in a small engagement become barriers when the scope grows. Clients often think, “If we expand, will this problem scale too?”

These insights don’t surface in pipeline reviews. They surface in candid conversations that clients are often more comfortable having with an independent, trusted party.

Growth That Compounds

Acquiring new logos will always matter. But in this expansion era, durable growth compounds from relationships that deepen and endure.

Retention is the prerequisite. Expansion is the multiplier.

Organizations that treat client satisfaction and pre-renewal diagnostics as strategic disciplines vs. administrative tasks are better positioned to navigate shifting markets, evolving technology, and rising buyer expectations.

The companies that win won’t just ask, “How do we land the next client?”

They’ll ask, “Have we earned the right to keep and grow the ones we already have?”

About Anova Consulting Group

Anova Consulting Group is a recognized leader in Voice of the Customer. Through expert-led executive interviews, actionable analysis, and our proprietary myView dashboard, Anova delivers the intelligence leaders need to improve retention, drive expansion, and refine competitive positioning.

Learn how Anova can help your organization transform customer feedback into a measurable business advantage.

The post The Expansion Era appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

As 2026 kicks into high gear, I want to revisit the trends we’re seeing in Anova’s research across clients and industries. During Anova’s 20^th anniversary in 2024, I reflected on where the industry had shifted since Anova opened its doors. In that piece, I noted that the pace of changes had accelerated – and eighteen months on, that trend has only picked up pace.  There are four key themes that we’re seeing as we enter the second half (!) of the 2020s:

1: An increased focus on retention and expansion

One of the most prominent observations we’ve noticed is that our clients – both new and long-standing – are placing an increased emphasis on our customer satisfaction and churn analysis, with an eye towards increased retention, upsell and cross-sell opportunities.  Organizations are turning inward because we are in an extended period of considerable uncertainty. As discussed below, prospective new logo clients are hesitant to bring on new vendors when a new AI model or legislative decision could cause disruption for their business.

It is no surprise, then, that many of our win / loss programs have evolved to include pre-renewal, at-risk, or pre-upsell components. Protecting and expanding existing clients has always been important, but doubly so in this current period of uncertainty. Our analysis enables our clients to dig deeper than a satisfaction or willingness to recommend metric and uncover the real drivers of friction in client relationships – issues like service model or product gaps that imperil relationships that are critical to protect.

Additionally, Anova’s win / loss analysis shows that sellers face a higher bar when selling into existing relationships, with an expectation that client’s specific needs and experiences will proactively be taken into account during the sales process. Successfully navigating these higher expectations requires collaboration and flexibility between sellers and relationship managers.

2: A Higher Bar for Technology / AI Acceleration

As AI sweeps the world, prospects and existing clients in all industry verticals are demanding ever-more robust technology capabilities and roadmaps of their vendors, though these new “table stakes” are also presenting new challenges for both sellers and buyers.

To use the win / loss industry as an example, AI tools present intriguing opportunities for automation and scalability, though widespread CRM data completeness and accuracy issues create a shaky foundation on which to build. New tools are constantly improving and reducing the frequency of hallucination, though in our experience it is still important to fact and sanity-check all AI-assisted output. LLMs have the ability to quickly and cheaply create output that passes the “eye test”, though the jury is still out as to how well providing ever more data to already-overwhelmed clients aligns with actionable insights and true client centricity.

3: Ease of Doing Business Increasingly Drives Decisions 

While it has always been a topic raised in win / loss and client satisfaction research, both new prospects and existing relationships are placing a higher emphasis on how easy it is to do business with potential vendors, even relative to the quality of the company’s offering and the professionalism of the sales process. Dynamics like burdensome contracting processes, rigorous information security / compliance audits, rigidity in scopes of work, and consistency / responsiveness of client service are coming into increased focus in how our clients evaluate whether to purchase or continue using a vendor. The prospect of integrating additional vendors and technology is becoming increasingly daunting, and “conversion aversion” is growing.

4: Slowdown in Decision Speed

A related dynamic to the factors discussed above is an overall slowdown in decision-making processes that borders on paralysis. In Anova’s win / loss research, the average length of sales cycles is increasing, and our clients are seeing a higher number of stalled deals or no decisions reached. As I noted in 2024, information overload contributes to slower decisions – the sheer quantity of data that is available to buyers is increasing the challenges facing sales teams to differentiate their offerings and articulate their solutions’ value propositions.

Global macroeconomic uncertainty has created increased scrutiny on every budget dollar. Whether due to actual AI adoption or the prospect of it, teams are being asked to do more with less to justify their value-add.

This dynamic has increased since 2024 (as explored by our research analyst Cam Chambers in a recent post), exacerbated by the growing prevalence of AI, which can quickly synthesize large volumes of data. While superficially useful, if the influx of new data does not drive action, it can muddy the waters and continue to slow down the decision-making process for purchasing teams.

These are just some of the most pronounced trends we’re seeing among our clients as we start off the new year. Every client will tell a different story – although many times, those stories rhyme. If you’d like to see how your organization fits into these larger trends, reach out – we’d love to help your business navigate 2026.

The post Voice of the Client Research: State of the Union 2026 appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

This blog post is written by Cameron Chambers, Analyst at Anova Consulting.

Introduction

In today’s fast-moving business landscape, sales teams have more data than ever — and more pressure than ever to prove they’re using it well. Dashboards glow on every screen, performance reports pile up in inboxes, and analytics platforms promise leaders a clearer path to growth. Yet despite the abundance, many companies still struggle to translate information into action.

The issue usually isn’t access. It’s interpretation. In other words: most organizations don’t have a data problem; their problem lies in understanding that data and turning it into action.

Where the Value Disappears (When Insight Doesn’t Turn Into Action)

Most sales teams aren’t short on data. Companies track everything: pipeline velocity, revenue, stage conversion, churn rates, NPS, win rates, marketing attribution, and sales activity. The intent is good: to be data-driven and reduce reliance on gut instinct. But data visibility is not the same thing as insight.

They know which deals stall late. They can point to common objections. They’ve identified trends in churn, buying behavior, and competitive pressure. The problem is rarely what the data reveals. It’s what to do with it.

A dashboard can tell you what happened. It rarely explains why it happened, what it means for the next quarter, or what specifically should change Monday morning. Without context, teams can spend hours reviewing KPIs, only to leave meetings with observations instead of clear decisions. Over time, the volume of available information can slow down decision-making by overwhelming teams with metrics that lack narrative, consistency, or direction.

Without a clear bridge from insight to action, valuable information tends to linger in reports, decks, and dashboards. Teams acknowledge the findings, agree they’re “important,” and then move on. Messaging doesn’t change. Qualification stays the same. Enablement isn’t updated. Strategy remains largely untouched.

This is where momentum breaks down. Sales keeps selling the same way. Marketing tells the same story. Product follows a roadmap disconnected from real buyer feedback. The organization technically knows more — but operates no differently.

That gap between insight and action is where value disappears. And it’s exactly where win/loss analysis comes in.

How Anova’s Win/Loss Analysis Bridges Insight and Action

One of the biggest challenges organizations face isn’t a lack of insight — it’s a reluctance to act on what they already know. In many cases, teams continue to gather more data not because they need it, but because it delays the harder work of making changes. Instead of moving forward by acting on existing insights, organizations wait for more certainty, more validation, or “the answer” that never fully arrives.

Effective win/loss analysis helps break that cycle. By equipping sales teams with direct, buyer-driven insight, win/loss enables immediate, practical action — small adjustments to messaging, qualification, and deal strategy that compound over time. The best sales organizations don’t wait for perfect information; they learn from every opportunity, test what they hear, and improve through consistent action rather than analysis alone.

Win/loss analysis is one of the most effective ways to close the gap between insight and action — especially when insights are delivered in a way that teams can consistently understand, trust, and apply. That’s where Anova Consulting Group’s approach stands out.

Most organizations already have strong visibility into their sales performance. Dashboards, CRM reports, and analytics platforms surface valuable signals about pipeline health, competitive activity, and deal outcomes. The challenge isn’t having access to information — it’s knowing how to interpret it, prioritize it, and turn it into meaningful change.

Anova’s win/loss programs are designed to complement and strengthen those existing data investments. Through structured buyer interviews and deal-level analysis, Anova captures buyer-validated, conversational intelligence that adds critical context to performance data. This insight helps explain why the trends teams see in their dashboards are happening — and what should be done about them.

Anova brings win/loss insights to life through its myView dashboard, that delivers real-time access to both qualitative buyer feedback, quantitative benchmarking, and competitive intelligence. This combination allows teams to ground decisions in buyer truth while tracking performance trends across deals, segments, and time. Supported by Anova’s expertise in the space, the myView dashboard becomes more than a reporting tool — it’s a shared source of understanding that helps organizations move from insight to action with confidence.

With this foundation in place, patterns turn into priorities:

• Deals don’t just stall — they stall for repeatable reasons that can be addressed.
• Customers don’t just churn — they disengage at identifiable moments that can be mitigated.
• Competitors don’t just win — they succeed with specific narratives and proof points that can be countered.

This is the difference between simply viewing insights and using them. When win/loss analysis is supported by the right methodology, expert interpretation, and purpose-built dashboards, it becomes a living input — not a static report — and a powerful driver of future performance.

Conclusion: Don’t Just Collect Data — Learn From It

Data is a powerful tool, but only if it leads to understanding. The organizations that separate themselves in crowded markets aren’t the ones collecting the most information, they’re the ones transforming what they already have into insight, and insight into action. Because in the end, data doesn’t drive growth – understanding the data to make changes and drive action does.

Interested in learning more?

Anova Consulting Group offers real-time insights on our clients’ Win / Loss programs through the myView dashboard, a secure web portal that provides real-time access to research results and trends. If you’re looking to turn win/loss insights into tangible revenue impact, myView helps teams stay aligned, informed, and ready to act.

The post From Data to Decisions – Closing the Action Gap with Win/Loss Analysis appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

This blog post is written by Jeffrey Cheng, Analyst at Anova Consulting.

Clean Data, Clear Decisions: Why Clean CRM Data Drives Better Sales Performance

In a world where every business decision is expected to be data-driven, the truth is simple: the quality of your data determines the quality of your decisions. When sales data quality breaks down, it can have ripple effects throughout your organization, impacting future sales prospects and retention.

In our twenty years of experience, the team here at Anova has noticed replicable trends emerge from poor data hygiene. As an organization specialized in working with B2B sales teams, we have first-hand knowledge of the benefits of strong, trusted CRM data – and the consequences of bad CRM hygiene.

When Data Quality Breaks Down

Over time, many organizations experience what we call “CRM drift.” Duplicate records, inconsistent data entry, outdated contacts, and incomplete deal notes gradually erode accuracy and undermine confidence in the insights produced.

This degradation isn’t intentional – sales teams are rewarded for closing deals, not maintaining data hygiene. Yet the result is predictable: flawed data leading to flawed insights. Poor CRM discipline can distort forecasting, misdirect strategy, and weaken the credibility of customer feedback programs.

The Consequences of Data Breakdowns: Win / Loss and Voice of the Customer

One example where these concerns come to the forefront is Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs. These initiatives reveal the why behind performance outcomes – why deals are won or lost, and why customers stay or leave. Few inputs are more valuable for improving sales performance and strengthening competitive positioning than genuine feedback from prospects and customers.

But these programs rely on strong data quality.  When CRM hygiene breaks down, it can have huge impacts on sales programs, revealing major shortfalls and gaps that impact your bottom line.

Consider one real world experience the team at Anova encountered:

A client asked Anova to analyze a “new competitor” that suddenly seemed to be winning more business at an alarming rate.  After a few interviews, we discovered the problem wasn’t a competitive surge at all – it was a CRM error.  The supposed new competitor was simply the first name in a Salesforce dropdown menu.  Sales reps, unsure who had actually won or rushing to log a deal, picked the first option by default.

The result? The client had been channeling resources to fight a competitor they rarely encountered.

A simple data integrity issue had cascaded into a strategic distraction; a perfect illustration that small data problems can have big strategic consequences.

Data Discipline Reflects Customer Discipline

Beyond its impacts on sales strategy, across Anova’s client base, one insight has proved consistent: data discipline mirrors customer discipline. Organizations that take care to capture complete, thoughtful details about each opportunity tend to earn higher ratings from prospects for attentiveness and importance. Conversely, when data is incomplete or inconsistent, prospects often perceive a similar lack of rigor in their interactions.

Clean data, then, is more than an operational best practice – it’s a culture signal.  The same discipline that ensures CRM accuracy also signals to customers that their time, needs, and feedback matter.

How do you Ensure Data Quality? Developing Strong CRM Hygiene

Strong CRM hygiene begins with establishing clear data-entry standards and enforcing them consistently across the organization. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams should operate from a shared definition of core fields – such as opportunity stage, close date, lead source, competitor involvement, and reason codes. When everyone uses fields the same way, data becomes more trustworthy and more actionable. Organizations can reinforce these habits by embedding mandatory fields, providing brief in-app guidance, and performing quarterly data audits to identify duplicates, missing information, or outdated records.

Sustaining CRM hygiene also requires cultural alignment, not just process alignment. Leaders should communicate why clean data matters: better forecasting accuracy, more effective Win/Loss Analysis, stronger Voice of the Customer insights, and clearer visibility into pipeline health. Highlighting the downstream impact – such as how incomplete fields undermine your ability to diagnose churn drivers, understand loss trends, or waste valuable resources chasing phantom competitors – creates accountability and buy-in. Pair that message with ongoing enablement, quick-hit training sessions, and automated reminders, and CRM hygiene shifts from a compliance task to a strategic differentiator.

The Competitive Advantage of Trusted Insight

As automation, analytics, and AI reshape competitive dynamics, the differentiator won’t be access to data – it will be confidence in data.  Clean, credible data gives sales programs like Win/Loss and VoC the foundation they need to deliver unbiased, actionable intelligence – the kind that drive sustained growth, alignment and resilience.

Our client work consistently reveals the same truth: the difference between reactive and resilient organizations often comes down to one thing – confidence in their data.  When data integrity, disciplined feedback, and objective analysis converge, insight doesn’t just explain performance, it improves it.

About Anova Consulting Group

Anova Consulting Group is a recognized leader in Win/Loss Analysis and Voice of the Customer research. Through expert-led executive interviews, actionable analysis, and our proprietary myView dashboard, Anova delivers the intelligence leaders need to strengthen sales performance, improve retention, and refine competitive positioning.

Learn how Anova can help your organization transform customer feedback into a measurable business advantage.

The post Clean Data, Clear Decisions appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.

Introduction

In today’s fast-moving business landscape, outsourcing has become more than a cost-cutting strategy – it is a strategic move to consolidate specialized skills, scale quickly, and stay agile. From customer support to IT services, marketing to finance, companies are increasingly turning to third-party providers to handle non-core functions. A recent uptick in outsourcing across industries reflects a growing need for flexibility, efficiency, and global expertise.

But as outsourcing becomes more prevalent, it brings new challenges, particularly with respect to maintaining high levels of client satisfaction.

When services are outsourced, companies lose direct control over how customer interactions are handled and how services are delivered. There’s often a physical and cultural disconnect between the service provider and the end customer. This disconnect can lead to misaligned expectations, fragmented communications, and minor problems sitting unnoticed until they turn into major pain points.

Gartner reported that in 2024, 84% of surveyed organizations reported working with at least one business‑process outsourcing (BPO) partner, and 56% said improving those relationships is a moderate or significant priority. Gartner also warned that 60% of companies outsourcing customer‑facing functions would suffer client defections or hidden costs outweighing the savings.

Voice of the Customer Research and Outsourcing

This is where Voice of the Customer (VoC) research becomes essential. VoC is the process of collecting and analyzing feedback from clients to understand their needs, experiences, and expectations. For companies that outsource services, VoC insights can bridge the gap between the business, its service partners, and the end client.

By integrating VoC research throughout the outsourcing process before, during, and after transitions, businesses can:

• Identify pain points early: Are clients frustrated by slower response times after a service was outsourced? Are communication handoffs creating confusion? VoC highlights issues quickly, allowing companies to address them before they impact satisfaction or loyalty.
• Identify client priorities: Feedback can help clarify what clients truly value, enabling better alignment with outsourcing partners from the start.
• Ensure consistency in customer experience: Even if multiple vendors are involved, VoC insights and ongoing feedback ensure companies make data-driven decisions about whether a partner is meeting expectations and take corrective action if needed.

In short, companies that rely solely on internal KPIs or vendor reports to track how their clients feel about their outsourcing are operating in the dark.

That’s why organizations that outsource must invest just as much in listening as they do in logistics. Ultimately, outsourcing can drive efficiency and growth, but only if client satisfaction keeps pace. Voice of Customer research gives organizations the insight needed to manage outsourced services more effectively and ensure that clients don’t just tolerate the changes but benefit from them.

In a world where service delivery is often one step removed from the business itself, VoC becomes the direct line between companies and the customers they serve.  And in an age of outsourcing, maintaining that connection is more valuable than ever.

Interested in learning more?

Anova Consulting Group offers real-time insights on our clients’ Win / Loss and Client Loyalty programs through the myView dashboard, a secure web portal that provides our clients with real-time access to their research results. Click here to learn how myView can help your organization win and retain more business.

The post Why Outsourcing Is Growing – And Why Listening to the Customer Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Anova Consulting Group.