The purpose of a win-loss program is to uncover buyer insights that inform go-forward actions & strategy across the GTM functions. With the right implementation, a Win/Loss Analysis allows Sales Leaders to zoom out and take an unbiased look at the state of their sales strategy.
In this article, we explore how to properly use a Win/Loss/No Decision Assessment to identify gaps in your sales strategy. This will help transform your sales team into a data-driven sales organization.
There are four main actions to identify the gaps in your sales strategy. Each deserves a concerted effort on your part and offers a different vantage point from where you can analyze and discover areas for improvement:
1. Sales Data Collection. The best win/loss reports have both qualitative and quantitative information. But the quality of that information is really the key to success.
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- Develop a baseline of your current win rate. Win rate = # or $ of won opportunities / # or $ of lost opportunities. Calculate across different dimensions like time, geography, customer segment, or competitor, to gain valuable insights.
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- Determine goals in collecting qualitative data. Qualitative, or “categorical,” data is information expressed in natural language instead of numbers. It is the actual experience had by all the participants in a sale. Get specific on your goals and develop your set of interview questions from those goals.
2. Sales Data Analysis. The next step is understanding the data you have gathered from your sales teams. What factors are helping or preventing your sales team from winning or losing deals? Review the data against your defined competitors to determine leading, lagging, and behavioral indicators. Isolate themes from the unstructured data that are actionable.
3. Communicating the Data.
Improving your win/loss ratio requires understanding your prior performance throughout the sales cycle. Analyzing your performance through the lens of data analysis gives you the ability to spot patterns or trends that may have relevance to why opportunities end up as a win, a loss, or a no-decision.
- Sales Process Assessment. You must perform a thorough study and analysis of your sales process, both from the Sales perspective and the Buyer’s perspective. For example, it's essential that Account Executives are providing demos to confirm both value and power to customers at the precise stage when those customers are attempting to identify their preferred solutions. The two must align throughout the sales cycle in order to increase the opportunities that convert as wins.
