What is Win-Loss: the no-fluff version
What is win-loss?
It’s using interviews, surveys, and other data to understand:
- Why do you win or lose deals?
- What buyers think about you and your competitors.
- Learn about your buyers’ view of the market.
Who do you talk to?
Some won deals (recent customers), some lost deals.
Losses are often more interesting than wins.
They tend to be the leads who disappear, stop replying to your sales team, and leave you scratching your head.
If you can make a change that wins over 5% more people, that’s usually a pretty sizeable revenue boost.
Why do companies do win-loss?
There are a few common reasons:
- Leads are dropping, and they need to know why
- There are lots of ideas for products, changes to pricing or sales process, but lack of agreement internally.
- Support a new launch by understanding real buyers
- A competitor is outperforming the market and we need to find an edge
How Goldpan does win-loss
We lean on deep-diving interviews as our lead information source. Some people lean toward surveys, we use those as a secondary source after interviews.
25 minutes on the phone, you uncover data that’s rarely revealed publicly:
- Their experience with sales
- How different products in the market “feel” (you know, they are all basically the same, so we went with one my boss liked)
- People’s fears about them (e.g. I’m a bit worried all of them are overhyped)
It’s meatier information than a survey. You can dig into an issue or an idea in conversation.
Why do companies bother with win-loss (don’t they have all the data they need?)
Some companies don’t need win-loss. The ones who value it the most are companies that want to know why buyers do what they do.
Most companies have a ton of observed data.
Observed data: e.g. signup rates, in-app stats, CRM data. It’s an observation on “what happened”, reviews, strengths and weaknesses on G2, etc.
This is especially powerful the more volume of sales you do.
Many B2B companies lack knowing why those happened and how the buyer views the space more generally.
E.g.
- Why did the buyer say the timing wasn’t right
- How the company seeks budget
- How the salesperson made them feel (patronized, excited)
- Why the buyer thinks the entire category is a bad fit
Do you have other services?
We do churn analysis, too. Our wheelhouse is to find out why people make a decision.
