Win loss analysis is a great way to get more detailed information about the reasons behind a win or loss than what your salespeople capture in Salesforce. Often all you can get your sales-incented staff to provide when they are closing an opportunity in your CRM is a 1 or 2 word response like ‘price’ or ‘usability’. It’s important to have more detail than that in order to make adjustments to help close more sales or reduce sales cycles.

Often in the early days of win/loss research, companies will try the home-grown approach and have some internal non-Sales resource conduct interviews with recently won customers or lost prospects to understand more about their evaluation experience, their buying criteria and their impression of how they are perceived vs. their key competitors.

I encourage companies to do these interviews themselves if it is the only way they would be able to get this type of input based on budget restrictions or an urgent need for information about a specific account. This data is definitely better than NO data!

But I have found that companies can get the best insights by outsourcing this work to an objective 3rd party who has no skin in the game. When I talk to new customers or lost prospects, I can get them to share details about their perceptions or experience that they would never feel comfortable sharing with a vendor directly. And that isn’t just the ‘negative feedback’ that they have. I have gotten these contacts to share very detailed pricing information from several vendors they evaluated which they never intended to share when they first got on the call with me. (“I can’t believe I’m sharing this with you, but I think it will be helpful based on the other things we’ve covered…”)

The other benefit of using a professional interviewer is that they are experienced in knowing when and how to probe further to get at the real insights. Cues such as silence or tone of voice can be the perfect opening to drill a little deeper than the first question you ask. This is where the value of interviews vs. surveys really comes in…

Lastly, I have also seen that there is a ‘halo effect’ that happens when new customers or lost prospects have a good experience during a win/loss interview, especially when conducted by an objective 3rd party. The fact that their vendor has invested in professionally conducted win/loss research amplifies the importance of the research to a vendor and their commitment to learning from their experiences.

Again, if the choice is NO research vs. having a 3rd party partner, I vote for doing some research using internal resources, but in hopes that those early interviews can prove that there are gems to be found in such interviews and that the value of those gems can only be amplified by working with a professional research partner.