What is more valuable to your sales team than understanding why you win, and why you don’t? Probably not much. But there’s more to win/loss analysis than just improving individual sales performance. In fact, effective win/loss analysis can help you improve almost every aspect of your business.
The benefits of a comprehensive win/loss analysis include:
In order to significantly improve your sales results, your win/loss analysis process must go beyond the usual questions and dive into the impact that each aspect of your system has on winning and losing.
This is a big job, and worth investing time into. To get you started, I have devoted the next three weeks on this blog to providing a framework you can use to improve every critical aspect of your sales system through your win/loss analysis.
Today, we look at how to collect and structure your data to feed your win/loss analysis, and briefly overview the key aspects of your business to review through the lens of win/loss analysis.
In the next two parts of this win/loss series, we’ll dive deeper into each of those key aspects and how an effective win/loss analysis can help you improve them.
Effective win/loss analysis begins with good data. In many cases, the only data we have is what the sales team voluntarily and subjectively adds into the system.
This may include the salesperson’s guess at why they lost:
Or the salesperson’s best guess at why they won:
I’m poking fun a little bit with that last one, but the truth is that many sales organizations do not have a way to clearly understand the real reasons that they win or don't, because the data they’re collecting is based on a salesperson’s best guess.
Effective win/loss analysis begins with solid data beyond the sales teams' best-guesses
In order to perform effective win/loss analysis, you have to begin collecting data not only on what the salesperson thinks, but also on the actual factors involved in each sale. To do this effectively, you need a clear sales process and a way to track what is happening within the sales process for each potential sale.
For instance, inside Membrain, salespeople are guided through the sales process step by step, milestone by milestone, and the system records that progress. This creates a wealth of data that can be analyzed to discover insights like:
Our “Win Rate Influencers” tool enables companies to see at a glance what factors are most impacting win and lose decisions, so attention can be focused on those areas. Having access to good quality data about every aspect of the sales process supercharges the win/loss analysis process.
When we think of win/loss analysis, we most often think about salesperson performance and goal-setting. But the most effective win/loss analysis enables you to review every aspect of your sales and marketing system to identify areas of improvement.
At minimum, use your win/loss analysis to review these key aspects of your business:
You can also use the win/loss analysis to examine your product, delivery, and customer success processes to see where you are winning and losing customers. In short, leave no aspect of your business untouched by the insights gained from win/loss.
Over the next two weeks, we’ll dive deeper into HOW to examine the key factors above through the lens of win/loss analysis.
George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.
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