The Win-Loss Show

Product Marketers want to drive win rates and drive revenue by influencing pricing and packaging, product roadmap, the sales process, and more. But you can't impact overall strategy unless you have trust and influence within your organization. In this episode, Hugo Macedo shares how product marketers can improve relationships with revenue leaders to have a greater impact on the organization.

Many B2B companies—especially tech companies—are feeling the impact of the current recession. It seems like a big round of layoffs gets announced every week, pipeline is drying up as companies tighten their purse strings to weather the storm, and our own data shows a huge increase in deals lost to “no decision” because people simply don’t have the budget to bring on new tools.

That means revenue leaders are feeling more pressure now than ever to hit revenue goals. Sales and marketing teams are being required to do more with less—more emails, more cold calls, more demos leaving reps and leaders alike on the brink of burnout.  

But some revenue leaders are taking a different approach. They know pipeline isn’t the only lever they can pull to help them hit quota more confidently and consistently. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear from Clozd co-founders, Spencer Dent and Andrew Peterson. They’ll share the metric savvy revenue leaders are focusing on to hit quota consistently despite unpredictable pipeline, and what you as a revenue leader can do at your company to do more with less without burning out.

Today is our last day of the win-loss 101 series. We created these episodes to help you  get your first win-loss analysis project off the ground. If you’re tuning in to the show for the first time, I’d advise you go back and start at the first episode in this series and listen to it chronologially.

Today, you’re going to learn how to report your biggest and most valuable win-loss insights to other leaders in your company in a way that gets them excited to make changes to their processes and strategy to ultimately win more deals and generate more revenue.

As you’ve conducted win-loss interviews you’ve probably discovered some valuable nuggets of information for the product team, the sales team, the customer success team, the marketing team, and things you want to make the executive team aware of. Understanding what’s important to each team and how granular to get with each leader will have a big impact on whether or not they take action and actually make changes based on what you share with them during your readout.

This is another episode where you’ll want to have a notepad handy. I hope you enjoy it.

And if you’ve been with us through all 6 episodes in this series, thanks for tuning in! We hope you subscribe and come back for more valuable episodes about B2B companies are utilizing buyer feedback to improve win rates, and drive more revenue.

If you’re running a win-loss analysis program, few things are worse than conducting a dozen interviews, then realizing you have to comb through 200 pages of call transcripts to pick out the trends and turn them into valuable, actionable insights that can improve your strategy and drive more revenue. It can be a daunting and overwhelming task.

But if your insights just sit in a google doc—or worse, in your head—then all your work will be for nothing.

So, today we’re going to give you some tips on how to take all of that long-form, qualitative feedback, and turn it into something valuable so you can create action plan that will drive change and increase revenue.

A few months ago—after binge watching an entire season of the Great British Baking Show, I decided to try my hand at baking my favorite cookie. The raspberry rose macaron from the Jolly Holiday bakery at Disneyland. I assumed it would be easy.  After all, baking is just combining a bunch of ingredients in a bowl, then throwing it all in the oven, and voila, you have something delicious… right? Oooh how wrong I was. I tried baking these cookies 3 different times, and each time something went horribly wrong.  I was experiencing the Dunning Kreuger.

In case you need a quick refresher, the Dunning-Kruger effect is what happens when you completely overestimate your own competence while underestimating the difficulty of a task.

When most leaders hear about win-loss analysis, they make the same mistake I made with those raspberry rose macarons. They think, “All we need to do is call a few customers, have some conversations, and voila—we’ve got ourselves some valuable win-loss insights that can drive our strategy and help us generate more revenue. But if you’ve tuned into the past 3 episodes of this show, you know there’s a lot that needs to happen before you ever get on a call with a buyer if you want to build out a program that continuously impacts your business strategy, increases win rates, and drives more revenue.

In today’s episode, the rubber hits the road. Chase Pendleton and Scott Varner—two of our best win-loss program managers here at Clozd—are going to give you a crash course on how to conduct a top-notch win-loss interview that will reveal to you some of your greatest weaknesses as a company, and often some of your greatest strengths.

Buckle up and grab a notebook; this is going to be a great episode.

Let’s face it, people are busy, their calendars are packed and their inboxes are full—and carving out 30 minutes to tell you what they didn’t like about your sales process is probably not at the top of their priority list.

So, how do you get them to schedule time to sit down and talk with you?

There’s a science to it. The operations team here at Clozd is always testing things like email subject lines, incentives, and even the timing of outreach to optimize the performance of our win-loss programs. Today, Braydon and Riley will share some of their best tips and tricks to get buyers to agree to sit down and reveal to you what happened behind closed doors during their sales journey.

TIMESTAMPS

• 0:00 — Inroductions
• 5:50 — Are you nervous about CRM hygiene?
• 7:35 — Make sure you interview losses AND wins
• 8:57 — Outreach should change based on buyer persona
• 10:34 — Factor in deal recency before reaching out to buyers
• 21:24 — Outreach best practices
• 26:44 — Email cadence
• 31:03 — Incentives
• 36:07 — Tools to improve efficiency
• 47:45 — How to get 3 free win-loss interviews from Clozd

When you want honest feedback from your buyers about what they like and don’t like about your company, the questions you ask matter a lot.

If you ask the wrong questions, or you ask the right questions in the wrong order, or you spend too much time on one topic, or you accidentally introduce bias into your buyer’s mind—you could end up with inaccurate feedback from your buyers, and damage the value of your win-loss program.

In today’s interview, some of the top win-loss program managers at Clozd will walk you through how they develop an interview guide to help them ask the right questions and deliver the highest-value interviews possible for our clients.

This is the most important part of the process at the practitioner level. If you you don’t plan out your questions, you’ll have bad interviews. And if you have bad interviews, you’ll end up with bad data. And if you have bad data, you can’t use it to make strategic changes to improve your win rate… which is the main purpose of your whole win-loss program.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 3:38 — Win-loss analysis is like having an MRI machine for your business
• 8:06 — Why is an interview guide important for conducting a win-loss analysis program?
• 11:21 — How to structure your interview guide
• 24:43 — Open-ended questions that get buyers to talk
• 30:33 — How to keep your guide efficient
• 34:26 — You can't treat all buyers the same
• 37:12 — Don't try to make your guide perfect
• 45:16 — How to get 3 free win-loss interviews

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “perception is reality.”

In business, nothing is more important than the perception of your buyers. It doesn’t matter how good your sales process, marketing messaging, customer experience, product, or service are… if your buyers perceive your sales process as being confusing, or your marketing messaging as annoying, or your product as inferior to your competition.

So if you’re building your strategy around YOUR perception and not your BUYERS’ perception, you’re leaving valuable revenue on the table.

In order to build your strategy around your buyers’ perception, you need to be talking to them to better understand what they perceive your strengths, weaknesses, and what they think about you in relation to the competition. That’s where a strong win-loss analysis program comes into play.

Over the next few weeks on the win loss show, we’re going to be teaching you how to get your first win-loss analysis project up and running so you can start getting a clear picture of how your buyers perceive you—and more importantly, what in your business you need to change in order for you to start closing a higher percentage of the deals you’re involved in. 

If you want instant access to the full video recordings of these lessons and bonus materials to help get your program up and running just visit winloss101.com and you can get access to it all for free.

Our goal is simply to help you understand your buyers better so you can win more. 

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 3:02 — Announcements for Win-Loss 101
• 5:47 — You can't start a win-loss program without choosing a revenue problem to investigate
• 7:41 — Your CRM tells you WHAT is happening, not WHY
• 9:04 — 5 areas you should focus your win-loss program on
• 12:57 — Common roadblocks you might run into
• 21:43 — Examples of win-loss program successes
• 30:06 — Q&A session
• 42:00 — How to get 3 free win-loss interviews from Clozd

Here at Clozd we recently conducted a really interesting research project.

We looked at the CRM data of nearly 1,000 closed-lost deals. Then we compared the competitor that was tagged in the CRM on those deals to the what the buyers said was the main competitor in their win-loss interviews.

65% of the time, what the CRM said, and what the buyer said did not match up. 

That means the CRM data was wrong on nearly 7 out of every 10 deals.

This just goes to show that buyers aren’t always transparent with your sales reps about what’s going on behind closed doors.

If you’re a sales leader, a product marketer, or someone who works in competitive intelligence, what’s the cost of basing your strategy on highly inaccurate CRM data?

You could be spending countless hours and dollars creating a strategy to take down the wrong target.

On today’s episode of the Win-Loss Show, we sit down with two of the best Competitive Intelligence professionals in the business, Alysse Nockles and Monique Eddleton to better understand how they use win-loss analysis in their Competitive Intelligence programs to understand who their true competitors are, and how they use that information to empower leaders in their company to confidently create a rock solid strategy that results in winning more deals and delighting more customers.

0:00 - Setting the stage
1:52 - Introductions
3:31 - Every Competitive Intelligence program needs this...
8:34 - The value of using a 3rd party to talk to buyers and customers
11:46 - How to use win-loss data to validate CRM data
20:26 - Making your data tell a story
22:27 - Creating change is contingent upon your company's culture
23:51 - Advice to CI professionals