Episodes
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Most win-loss program typically gets started because a leader at the company wants answers to a big, important question. Why do we keep losing to competitor X? Why is this new product not selling? Why has our win-rate dropped so much? Once leaders start to get their hands on a few super-insightful buyer interviews, they get hungry for more. In today’s episode, I sit down with Tirrah Switzer, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Community Brands, to talk about how a win-loss program can grow and mature over time — especially after the initial business questions get answered.
She’s done an incredible job at finding new questions to ask and problems to solve using the methodologies and technology of modern-day win-loss analysis. It will give you an idea of the immense value companies get out of having ongoing conversations with their buyers.
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When there’s not alignment in your company, the sales process breaks down and you lose deals you should be winning. Many companies struggle with low trust between marketing, SDR, and sales teams. Rather than collaborating and working to enhance outcomes for the company as a whole, they end up stepping on each others toes, throwing each other under the bus, or competing for credit… which is never good for the buyer or the company.
Kyle Coleman, the CMO at Clark, has experience working across the entire revenue organization. One of his greatest strengths is helping to create alignment by helping teams cultivate empathy for each other, and for the buyer. In today’s episode, he gives his recommendations on how to be a stellar SDR or SDR leader in today’s economic climate.
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Missing episodes?
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What happens when you take the same methodologies, skills, tools, and genuine desire to understand why you win and lose deals and apply them to understanding why you win and lose current business? Kathy Hassett and Nancy White did exactly that, and what they saw happen to their churn numbers was remarkable. In this episode, you’re going to hear them tell the story of how conducting retention interviews virtually eliminated churn, and how they did it.
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Ethnography is a type of social research that involves studying the behavior of a group of people and the culture they create.
Our guest on today’s episode is Peter Spear, a corporate ethnographer and brand consultant. Throughout his career, he has helped big brands like Gatorade, Coca-Cola, the Discovery Channel, and AMC to understand their buyers through qualitative interviews — which is just a fancy way of saying that he talks to them and asks them thoughtful questions. This episode will resonate with anyone who wants to bring more curiosity, empathy, and understanding into their business.
What I hope you take away is that you ALWAYS have something to learn, and the fastest way to learn it is to engage in meaningful dialogue with your customers and sincerely listen to what they have to say to you.
I hope you enjoy the show.
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Heather Pepe, the Manager of Solutions Marketing at Calendly discusses how win-loss analysis data benefits leaders across the entire company, helping them create strategic alignment, and address issues to build and sell top-of-class products to their customers.
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Rex Galbraith, CRO at Consensus, uses win-loss analysis feedback to optimize his sales team's effectiveness by helping them better understand why they should NOT be selling to, giving them more confidence when negotiating pricing, and more.
Find out why Rex decided to outsource their win-loss program, and just some of the direct benefits they've seen since doing so.
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What would you have to change for you to win more deals than you lose? What would it do for your business, quota, morale, and stress levels? In today's episode, we chat with Andy Paul about the number one metric revenue leaders need to hone in on—especially if they want to be successful during an economic downturn. (HINT: It's not pipeline.)
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When a sales team sees pipeline dry up and revenue begin to drop, leaders begin to scramble for answers.
"Why did we lose that big deal?"
"What product features are we missing?"
"Which competitor is undercutting our pricing?"
Finding answers to these questions is like being given the cheat code to improve win rates, and drive more revenue.
In this episode, Cam "The Win-Loss Guy" England explains the natural evolution a business goes through as they seek answers to questions about why they win and lose business and how much more confident leaders become when they get their answers directly from buyers and customers.
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What do you think happens when you have a high-intent lead who fills out a form and it takes you days to respond and over a week to book a meeting?
How will a buyer respond when they pull together an entire buying committee to check out a demo, and you spend 25 or your 30 minutes qualifying them?
👎 What happens is... you lose the deal.
They might tell you it's because of pricing or timing... but really, it's because your responsiveness and sales motion is too clunky, slow, and tailored to your needs, not your buyers.
In this interview with Tom Rowe, SVP of Sales at ChiliPiper.com, you'll learn what B2B sales teams should be doing to convert more leads into buyers simply by improving responsiveness.
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Michael Tuso was the first sales leader hired at ChiliPiper back when the company had less than a million dollars in annual recurring revenue.
He then helped them scale through a seed round, a series A round, and a series B round of funding until they reached a valuation of over $350 million. Michael hired, coached, and trained dozens of salespeople and built out processes for the entire revenue org from scratch, including STRs, AEs, and account managers.
Ever since he started selling, he noticed that it was really difficult for sales teams to figure out how to grow and expand customers once they landed them—And that's why he's founded his new company, Calypso, which is dedicated to helping companies expand and retain their current customer base.
In this economic climate, I can't think of a better guest to have on the show to learn more about how to drive net revenue retention, their Michael Tuso.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 — Inroductions5:50 — Are you nervous about CRM hygiene?7:35 — Make sure you interview losses AND wins8:57 — Outreach should change based on buyer persona10:34 — Factor in deal recency before reaching out to buyers21:24 — Outreach best practices26:44 — Email cadence31:03 — Incentives36:07 — Tools to improve efficiency47:45 — 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.
TIMESTAMPS0:00 — Introduction3:38 — Win-loss analysis is like having an MRI machine for your business8:06 — Why is an interview guide important for conducting a win-loss analysis program?11:21 — How to structure your interview guide24:43 — Open-ended questions that get buyers to talk30:33 — How to keep your guide efficient34:26 — You can't treat all buyers the same37:12 — Don't try to make your guide perfect45:16 — 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.
TIMESTAMPS0:00 — Introduction3:02 — Announcements for Win-Loss 1015:47 — You can't start a win-loss program without choosing a revenue problem to investigate7:41 — Your CRM tells you WHAT is happening, not WHY9:04 — 5 areas you should focus your win-loss program on12:57 — Common roadblocks you might run into21:43 — Examples of win-loss program successes30:06 — Q&A session42:00 — 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.
TIMESTAMPS0:00 - 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 -
Buyers want sales reps they can trust to help them make the right decision. Stop acting like a salesperson, and instead act like a consultant who cares about helping buyers accomplish their biggest priorities.
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