Couple of weeks ago, I attended an event where Pragmatic Marketing’s Steve Johnson was the speaker. It was a very interactive conversation and Steve asked the attendees a question while discussing win/loss analysis – “if you asked your sales people, what is the biggest reason for their losses, what would they answer?”, the attendees unanimously answered “product”, he then asked “from sales perspective, what would be the next big reason for losses?”, the crowd had another unanimous answer “price”. Now, he asked “what is the biggest reason for wins?” The answer ofcourse is “sales execution” The group included around 100+ product managers and marketers from companies of various sizes and industries.

I was laughing out loud because it was funny in a way to see how so many companies were facing the same exact perception problem I faced through years of my experience.
Based on my good, bad and the ugly experiences with the win/loss analysis over the past decade, here are three ways to do the win/loss analysis and one way of presenting the final analysis that could offend your sales team – so stay away from it!
 
I recommend the first method outlined below for your win/loss analysis. The other two have a big caveat – the data will be skewed by sales perceptions, but hey, something is better than nothing!
 
Method1 – 3rd party firm:
Hire a 3rd party firm to interview the clients/prospects directly about the wins and losses. You can set the standard questionnaire in advance. I know how tempting it is for you to be on that call, but please don’t. Answers will be skewed once the customer knows that you are on the call. However, the 3rd party interviewer will let the client know that this interview is being done for your company. Here is one firm I used in the past and they do a good job: www.primary-intel.com (no, they did not sponsor this blog to get a good review, referring them here only because of their good work!).

Pro:
Third party analysis based on client interviews is the most unbiased data you can get.
Con:
Getting all the win/loss data to the 3rd party firm promptly can be tough. Do not rely on your sales people to keep sending all the contact info for their wins and losses to the 3rd party firm. Figure out a way to send the data to the firm directly – I had one of my employees collect the data from salesforce and email it directly to the firm and it worked well.

Method2 – sales interviews:
You could interview sales people about each of the deals.

Pro:
You will get a lot of more insight into the deals, pipeline, sales process and customer problems during these in-depth interviews.
Con:
This method cannot be used when the deal volume is too high. Sales reps are also not generally inclined to talk much about their losses.

Method3 – automated reporting:
Automate the process through salesforce reporting. When a deal is won or lost, have your sales people regularly update the salesforce with the relevant info like who did we win against, why, primary client need solved etc.

Pro:
Minimal work needed. You can get reports on win/loss data on quarterly basis.
Con:
This method works only if there is buy-in from the sales executives and if they encourage their teams to keep the salesforce up-to-date.

One way to offend your sales team
While presenting the final analysis, if you make it personal, that will surely offend your sales team. After all the effort you put into the win/loss analysis, the last thing you need is an angry sales team. All you need is ‘lessons learnt’ from wins and losses so that you can drive your revenues forward based on that intelligence.  For example, instead of saying “Mike lost Y deals because ..and would have won if he did that..”, position it as “In the mid market, we are winning when customer has this problem ..but not when they have XY problem, so these are the right ponds to fish in..etc”. If your presentation makes it look like you are criticizing the sales team, they will do anything to damage the credibility of your data and poke holes in the logic – who would want to discuss his/her shortcomings in a big group presentation? not me! not you! not your sales team..so stay away from it!