Win/Loss Analysis is a powerful tool that can shed unique insights on the reasons why a company has sales success, or why it struggles to meet its goals. Looking back on 30+ years of Win/Loss experience, we have identified the top ten benefits that companies experience with effective Win/Loss programs. Win/Loss is one of the few tools that can objectively produce higher revenues and higher margins from existing products, while also directing new products.
1. Sales and CI Alignment: A successful Win/Loss program creates a strong link between the front-line sales staff and the CI team. This opens up dialog that can enhance early warning of competitive threats. It also offers the CI team the chance to regularly interact with the sales team, at different levels, providing a wider range of perspectives on the competitive situation.
2. Frequent Interaction Between CI Team and All Other Functions: Win/Loss is a platform for regular interaction between the CI team and other parts of the company, including product development, service, support, and design functions. These regular interactions create channels to share insights, and to promote the function and purpose of CI throughout the company.
3. Anticipated Competitor Actions: Through tracking how competitors sell, what they sell, and how well what you are selling meets customer expectations, Win/Loss provides a level of early warning that few other resources can match. A properly designed Win/Loss program should identify ways a competitor hints about new product features, functionality, or other factors. This allows you to have advanced notice on competitors’ launch dates, and insight into their product development road map.
4. Deep Understanding of Buyer Decision Factors: Mixing quantitative and qualitative information collected through Win/Loss creates a clear picture of the potential strategic opportunities in a market. Effective Win/Loss programs aggregate performances across several deals, allowing analysts to determine which decision factors are most critical to the buyer in different segments. Matching decision factors to buyer types allows fine-tuning of the sale, and potentially higher value offers within a segment. The most advanced programs will gather all of this information in one spot and have some type of Win/Loss Portal. Here you will be able to further analyze your results and uncover insights you would not have been able to find before. At Fletcher this is done through our Win/Loss Portal.
5. Sales Team Battle Cards: When Win/Loss is done in collaboration with the CI team, battle cards can be a useful way to link the CI and Sales teams. Drawing on Win/Loss findings of what decision factors are most important and matching that to how competitors perform on those factors, the CI team can develop sales battle cards and other marketing support that highlights messaging on where competitors are weakest.
6. Senior Executive Interaction: Company leadership loves to know why deals are won or lost. Regular reports on performance creates a key opportunity for the CI and Win/Loss team to interact with the company leadership. During these interactions, the CI and Win/Loss teams can present other market insights and recommend actions that will improve sales success. Some CI firms, such as Fletcher, have tools beyond normal Win/Loss reports which allow clients to easily assess their Win/Loss results. These tools allow stakeholders to track progress of an individual deal, assess common success factors across multiple deals and against competitors and complete many other analysis tasks.
7. Better Predictability for Sales Forecasts: Over time, the Win/Loss process builds an accurate measure of sales performance. This can focus in on the average win rate, and (if enough volumes are covered) win rate by various segments can also be calculated and projected. Having this information helps produce more accurate sales forecasts and also aids in directing future sales efforts towards segments where win rates are higher.
8. Improved Pricing and Value Proposition Alignment: Win/Loss collects customer buying decision factor rankings, which can be used to match the value proposition with each decision factor and align the sales message with the buying decision. This tighter alignment can allow for value-based pricing that is geared to match buyer triggers, capture a higher price, and generate higher sales success.
9. More Effective Product Positioning and Messaging: Having buyer decision factors ranked on importance provides sellers with unique transaction-based insights into what is most important to the buyer. When product messaging is developed to align with buyers’ key decision factors and factor ranking, these insights create more effective product positioning and messaging.
10. Higher Close Rates: When one aligns the sales message, product features, and overall value proposition to the buyer’s decision factors, it produces higher performances against each factor. This in turn produces a comparative advantage in the selling process and makes the offer more attractive to the buyer. Done right, and with the proper assessment of the buyer decision factor importance, it produces higher close rates.
