We spend a lot of time talking with Executives and Sales Leaders about their Sales related priorities and current challenges. An area of opportunity that I would put forward as low hanging fruit is doing comprehensive Win/Loss Analysis on an ongoing basis. The information is extremely valuable and helps you both shape strategy and make decisions in areas that you may not naturally think about. We have met very few organizations who do it at all and almost none who do it well.
There are some trends evolving across most markets that you are likely seeing and feeling. Buyers are more risk averse, have more governance (RFi’s, RFP’s, etc.) built into their purchase process, seek consensus decisions from broad cross-functional groups and where possible, solutions as customized as possible. The downstream impact on sellers is both decreasing Win Rates and a rise in the number of No Decisions. These metrics impact others like Cost of Sale, Rep Productivity and Quota Attainment.
The opportunity that goes along with Win/Loss analysis is huge. Think about what you are trying to understand and the information that comes from those discussions with clients, prospects and your internal team. If you understood the real factors that lead to decisions (or not), the data gives you great incites to shape strategy and decisions in areas such as:
-Your Value Proposition and Deal Positioning
-Your Sales Process or How You Sell
-The Skills of Your Team (with a comparison to your competition)
-Competitive Understanding and Positioning
-Pricing Strategy
-Factors of Competition in your Industry
-Deal Qualification
This is not even a comprehensive list. If you had better information on these types of effectiveness metrics, how would it impact your sales strategy and market responsiveness? How would it impact your Revenue Growth Strategy? We have developed a product to do exactly this with clients that we call a “Growth Lever Analysis”. Fast, inexpensive and very high value, the outputs drive growth strategies using hard market facts.
This is shameless self-promotion, but we believe you are better off outsourcing this activity as well. It will get you better, more timely and less biased data if your clients or prospects are talking to a neutral third party versus someone from your company. Either way, understanding why you Win, Lose or Draw will give you essential information that you likely do not have today that will positively impact both strategy and execution.
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