With many competing demands for investment, a win/loss program may not be near the top of your list. You can invest in sales training, lead generation, validation, product development, customer service. The list goes on and on. Why invest in a win/loss program?
Identify Best Investments
A data-driven win/loss program can help you prioritize other investments, including sales training, lead generation, investment validation, product development, and customer service. An effective win/loss program helps you to identify initiatives with the highest ROI and measure your success.
Establish Baseline KPIs
The win/loss analysis distills your customers’ perception of your value proposition and differentiation relative to your competition. This analysis can be done by customer segment, to identify relevant content. Themes emerge about content and activities that are working well versus those that are not. The win/loss program helps you understand the largest challenges in the customer’s journey, so that you can experiment with different solutions. Your initial win/loss baseline can be tracked over time to help you measure and improve your performance.
Understand Top Customer Objections
For example, a Brillianta client had a consistent theme of customers believing that their products were too expensive. A large percentage of losses were attributed to a high price. Thanks to the win/loss research, the client identified channel competition as a contributing factor to the perception of “high price”, where their channel partners intentionally priced the client’s solution higher, so that these so-called partners could undercut the client’s price with a similar solution, while earning higher margins on their services. To address channel conflict, the client revamped their channel program and invested in channel training. As a result, channel conflict subsided significantly, leading to more wins.
Develop Content to Overcome Objections
However, price remained a recurring concern. To overcome this recurring objection, the client hired a well-regarded research firm to create value analysis and ROI calculation report. This report became the most valuable piece of sales collateral for the next 18 months, substantially helping with the revenue growth and measurably reducing Price as a factor in losses.
Create Sales Strategies to Increase Wins
Another discovery was a high loss ratio to technology service providers. Armed with this information, the sales organization de-prioritized service provider opportunities and focused sales efforts on the enterprise market, growing overall revenues with higher sales efficiency. A tiger team focused on the service provider market, devising a sales strategy focused on service providers who had a time-to-market urgency and less price sensitivity. With this new opportunity qualification strategy and more focused lead generation, the service provider sales grew improving the win/loss ratio and sales efficiency.
Next time you feel unsure about where to invest your scarce resources, consider investing in a win/loss program. A win/loss program can help you with the following:
Understand why you win and why you lose
Improve your sales training and effectiveness
Improve your marketing content and customer experience
Identify opportunities for growth
Inform your product development
A win/loss program can help you measure your success and thus sell smarter.