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Stakeholder

The More, the Merrier: Stakeholder-centric Win Loss (Part Three)

by , March 18, 2011


In recent blog posts (part one and part two), I’ve discussed Primary Intelligence’s adoption of a program model that is focused on a larger set of an organization’s stakeholders, rather than a single, traditional project manager/gatekeeper. In this model, we include all of an organization’s relevant individuals in the various stages of the win loss analysis program, including determining program objectives, gathering information, setting priorities, and utilizing results. This model not only improves the speed in which a win loss program is implemented and executed but also increases the relevance of the data and the likelihood that people will act upon the data.

Many companies, however, are not used to this approach and show concern when we suggest it to them. A dangerous tendency to avoid in your win loss analysis program is the “Mine!” attitude, or gatekeeper mentality. If you guardedly dole out the intelligence from the program and “protect” people from what buyers are telling you—you are hurting your program, regardless of your reasons for doing so. If you act as the gatekeeper to the intelligence because you view your win loss analysis program as “job security,” you are damaging your opportunity for career advancement. Over the years, I have seen the promotion of many individuals who ran their programs the right way, and they pointed to their win loss programs as a key catalyst in their advancement.

Two of the questions we get most often are ‘How do we identify which people in our organization should be included in the program’ and ‘How do we get that initial ‘buy-in’ from them?’ In this post, I’ll discuss some methods for identifying key stakeholders and some things you should be aware of in the process. In my next post, I’ll address the most effective practices our clients have used when approaching key stakeholders and getting their “buy-in.”

Who should you include?

A short answer to this would be “everyone who would benefit from the information,” but, in some cases, it is hard to know who those individuals actually are. Depending on your organization’s structure and the specific goals of the win loss program, your list of stakeholders could range from a few individuals to several hundred.

We have found that the best way to identify your initial stakeholders is to ask these three questions:

  1. Does this person have access to enough information to identify the most important concerns for their department or for the organization as a whole?
  2. Can these concerns be addressed or informed by data gathered from your buyers?
  3. Is this person capable of making meaningful changes in the organization’s strategies, products, or processes based on this data?

If the answer to these three questions is yes, then that individual would probably make a good stakeholder in your win loss program. After spending more than a decade helping hundreds of clients with their win loss analysis programs, we have learned that there are at least six primary roles within an organization that almost always meet these criteria. However, other roles could certainly be included as well—the key is to keep an open mind about the breadth of benefits a win loss program can provide.

The six roles that we identify as key stakeholders for a win loss program include the following (not necessarily listed in order of importance):

  1. CEO or product division head (the person with P&L responsibility for the product or solution)
  2. Product marketing leader
  3. Product management leader
  4. Sales leader
  5. Competitive intelligence leader
  6. Sales representative

Organizations that integrate (the key word here is “integrate”) all of these roles in their win loss analysis programs will experience the most return on their investment—the kinds of returns that would make any CEO giddy with anticipation. I have personally seen this time and again. However, this type of win loss analysis program is the exception and most certainly not the rule. Only 20 to 30% of companies implement systematic win loss analysis programs, and, in my experience, less than 10% of those integrate the key stakeholders identified above in their win loss analysis programs.

Companies that refuse to include the roles above will almost never experience the same level of return on their investment as companies who do. (I would go so far as to say you will never experience the same ROI, but I tend to get into trouble when I use absolutes like that). Those companies will still derive great value from their program, but they will be missing an enormous opportunity.

Seeing so much evidence has convinced me that including all stakeholders is critical to a program’s success. Because I know what it can do for clients and because I want to further motivate clients to fully participate, we are offering a substantial discount to clients that are willing to set up their win loss programs and include the six key stakeholders identified above from the beginning. It’s that important.

In the next post on this subject I’ll go over how to get stakeholder “buy-in” and get your stakeholders excited about being a part of your win loss program.

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About the Author: Ken Allred, Founder and CEO of Primary Intelligence, is a thought leader in SaaS-based sales intelligence, analytics and sales enablement solutions. He is committed to the optimization of sales, marketing and product management teams through the implementation of advanced Sales 2.0 intelligence solutions.

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The More, the Merrier: Stakeholder-centric Win Loss Analysis (Part Two)

by , November 24, 2010


In my last blog post, I began discussing how Primary Intelligence decided to move away from a traditional “gatekeeper” model of delivering and disseminating win loss information and toward one that is more focused on a larger set of an organization’s stakeholders which can include key executives, product marketing, product management, sales management and the sellers themselves. In this new model, all relevant individuals in the organization are included, not only in determining program objectives but also as active participants in the ongoing development and execution of the program.

As a third-party provider of win loss analysis programs, there are obvious reasons why we love using this approach. However, there are just as many (if not more) reasons why the organization itself would want to do so. As you’ll see, there are a myriad of benefits for including a greater portion of stakeholders into your win loss program. Here are just a few:

Faster implementation & reduced downtime risk

Juggling a Win Loss Analysis ProgramIt can be extremely difficult to manage a win loss analysis program on your own, especially in a large organization. Information to run the program properly needs to come from numerous different sources—recent sales opportunities to study will need to come from sales or sales support, relevant product features to study will need to come from product management, competitors to focus on may need to come from sales management or product marketing, key strategic issues or priorities will need to come from executives, etc. Experience has shown us that if a single project manager at the organization tries to gather and maintain this information on their own, it takes approximately three times longer for the win loss program to get started than those programs where the relevant stakeholders participate directly in the implementation of the program.

In addition, when only one person is responsible for the win loss program, it introduces much more risk that the program will experience downtime as the project manager struggles to keep a consistent flow of sales opportunities to study while managing all of the other moving parts of a win loss program. However, when key executives and sales management stakeholders are involved it is much easier to keep a steady flow of the right opportunities to study and ensures that the program doesn’t experience downtime.

Increased relevance of findings

As we will discuss in more detail in an upcoming post, one of the keys of a successful stakeholder-centric win loss program is ensuring that you solicit questions, concerns and priorities from your stakeholders on an ongoing basis. In this way, you do not have to “guess” what is currently important to your stakeholders and sales representatives—you should solicit these individuals’ key concerns and priorities directly from the individuals themselves. Also, since your stakeholders were involved in the implementation of the program and have been fully briefed about the scope, methodologies, and objectives of the win loss program, there is less chance of receiving unreasonable or unachievable requests. Instead, you’ll be able to gather win loss data that is both obtainable, relevant and, most importantly, actionable.

Greater adaptability in the program

In addition to having more relevant data, programs with high stakeholder involvement also tend to be more agile than those developed by a single project manager or small project team. For instance, we encourage stakeholders in our win loss programs to periodically submit any current concerns or questions that could be answered, or priorities that would be applicable to the win loss program. In this way, the win loss interview or the types of sales opportunities studied can be adjusted on demand to better answer the concerns the stakeholders are experiencing right now. This transforms the win loss program from being a static, project-driven procedure to being a dynamic program that adapts to your organization’s changing needs and objectives.

Easier dissemination of information

By involving stakeholders early in the process, you can ensure that the members of your organization who will most benefit from the information you gather will actually receive it. This begins from the very start of the process, when stakeholders are made aware that the findings will be forthcoming—no more cases of “I wasn’t even aware that we had this kind of information!”

When win loss data starts becoming available, these informed stakeholders will be able to use it immediately without the project manager having to explain the entire win loss process and when/where the data was gathered. In other words, the win loss data can become “real-time” with no lengthy training or ramp-up time when the data become available. This is especially true if the organization uses technology such as dashboards or information portals to make the win loss analysis findings immediately accessible.

Increased opportunity for future funding

Regardless of what department you are a part of, it is important that your win loss efforts are valuable to your organization and that your program receives the funding it will require in the future. By involving key stakeholders, you will dramatically increase the opportunity for the benefits of the program to gain organizational visibility and with it, an increased chance for future financial backing. In programs where the win loss information is freely shared between stakeholders, it is not uncommon for us to see another department begin to fund a win loss program if the current sponsor cannot include it in its budget. Stakeholder involvement ensures that the win loss program is an organization-wide enterprise, not just a departmental one, and that the company as a whole will receive value from it.

In my next post, I’ll go over some of the best practices we have discovered for identifying key stakeholders for your win loss analysis program.

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About the Author: Ken Allred, Founder and CEO of Primary Intelligence, is a thought leader in SaaS-based sales intelligence, analytics and sales enablement solutions. He is committed to the optimization of sales, marketing and product management teams through the implementation of advanced Sales 2.0 intelligence solutions.

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The More, the Merrier: Stakeholder-centric Win Loss Analysis (Part One)

by , November 23, 2010


Like most people, every so often I get in one of those moods to just sit back and reminisce. I was thinking today about how the end product of the research we do here at Primary Intelligence (our deliverables) have changed and evolved over the years, and what drove those changes. At first, we started off producing very traditional reports that contained extensive charts and tables with pages and pages of explanatory text, additional analysis, and recommendations, delivered as a PDF or MS Word document to the point of contact for our client. These reports were informative, comprehensive, professional in design and execution . . . and usually underutilized.

Top Secret Win Loss Report!In fact, we often found—to our horror—that the reports we sent to our clients would never get past our point of contact.  At best, the point of contact would take the data and analysis we provided, reconstruct it, and then disseminate small parts of it to those who they thought might find it useful. At worst, the information wouldn’t be distributed at all, as if the point of contact wasn’t interested in using the intelligence, but instead just wanted to collect intelligence, like it was a  stamp or a butterfly.  In some extreme cases, the individuals at the company who could most use the information (executives, sales managers, marketing managers, product management, sales representatives, etc.) didn’t even know we were doing win loss analysis for them.

These revelations were a definite wake-up call and emphasized the vital importance of including all relevant stakeholders in a win loss analysis program as early as you can in the program.  Even in the best of cases, where our point of contact would pass information along to others in the organization, those stakeholders were only the recipients of information—they weren’t involved in the process of uncovering the best win loss intelligence, or market evidence to meet their needs.

We quickly realized that it wasn’t just our deliverable that was the problem; it was how we were envisioning our client. We were looking at the client as a single entity (with the point of contact as its representative), rather than as a collection of diverse stakeholders, all with their own concerns, needs, priorities, and agendas. To reverse an old saying, we were too busy looking at the forest and not taking time to look at the trees.

To make sure this scenario never happens again, we have worked diligently to refine our methodologies, our client communication, our internal and external tools, and all of our deliverables to reflect a “stakeholder-centric” perspective. In this approach, all relevant individuals in the organization—whether you call them stakeholders, personas, influencers, or agents—are included, not only in determining program objectives but also as active participants in the ongoing development and execution of the program. While it does sometimes resemble a juggling act, this approach allows for a more dynamic win loss program that can adapt to changing organizational needs along multiple dimensions, as well as promote better dissemination of information and adoption of changes based on the findings.

Since this is an involved process, I will be devoting my next few blog posts to go into more detail about how to implement a stakeholder-centric approach to your win loss program and why this approach could be beneficial for you. Some of the points I hope to cover include:

  1. The benefits of a stakeholder-centric approach
  2. Identifying appropriate stakeholders in your organization
  3. Approaching stakeholders in your organization
  4. How to include stakeholders in the win loss process
  5. Developing deliverables for a diverse stakeholder audience
  6. Addressing potential concerns from potential stakeholders

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About the Author: Ken Allred, Founder and CEO of Primary Intelligence, is a thought leader in SaaS-based sales intelligence, analytics and sales enablement solutions. He is committed to the optimization of sales, marketing and product management teams through the implementation of advanced Sales 2.0 intelligence solutions.

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