I recently had a great conversation with a client who is championing win/loss research at his company and we explored win loss analysis: what is it, why do it, what are the obstacles, how to overcome them, and more.

Win loss analysis is one of the lowest hanging fruit for organizations, providing a relatively easy and quick way to get invaluable insights that have implications across the organization.  But very few organizations are doing win loss analysis…why IS that?

We came up with this list of obstacles…I’ll be blogging over the next few weeks about ways to overcome many of these.

First, there are the functional areas that can serve as obstacles:

Sales – doesn’t want to give access to their contacts, skeptical and even paranoid about the information that will be collected

Marketing – bandwidth

Product Managers – “we’re already done with the product so can’t do anything with the input”

Then there are the perceptions/mindsets that get in the way:

  • Companies that just don’t do ANY research
  • “It takes too long to implement win/loss programs.”
  • “We won’t get any good, deep insights.”
  • “It’s hard to quantify the results.”
  • “We’ll just get self-fulfilling results…the person who does the interview will hear what they WANT to hear.”
  • “No one will want to talk to us…they’ve moved on.”
  • “It will take too much training to do it well and make sure the interviewers do a good job.”

What obstacles have you seen that get in the way of companies talking to customers they have won and those they have lost?  How have you overcome these obstacles?