Our win loss analysis experience:

Successful win loss analysis is about gathering unbiased, actionable market evidence directly from your buyers and disseminating that intelligence to many different areas within your company starting with product marketing, product management and sales. Primary Intelligence combines business processes, people and technology to deliver world class win loss analysis programs to our clients.

For more than a decade, Primary Intelligence has been the world leader in providing win loss analysis programs to small and large companies around the world. We have studied more than 30,000 purchase decisions in deals ranging in size from several thousand dollars to multi-billion dollar opportunities. And more than 30% of the Fortune 500 have relied our on extensive knowledge and deep domain experience implementing and executing win loss programs across more than 30 different industries.

We live, eat and breathe win loss analysis and all things related to win loss analysis.

Why do you win? Why do you lose?

Do you know what the top three causes of your losses are? Do you know the top three reasons that buyers select you?

70% of sales managers and sales representatives indicate that the primary reasons they lose are due to price and/or a prior relationship with the competition.

55% of sales managers and sales representatives believe they win because of their ability to build strong relationships with the people they’re selling to.

Last year, our CEO studied 2,500 purchase decisions valued at more than $10 billion across 31 different industries:

• Price was mentioned as the non-selection reason in less than 10% of the deals studied
• Relationship was mentioned as a selection reason in less than 5% of the deals studied

If you never walk a mile in your buyers’ shoes how will you ever really understand what drives them to make the decisions they do?

Win loss analysis program implementation and execution:

We talk to buyers in your competitive wins and losses asking them quantitative and qualitative questions about their purchase decisions and the factors that caused them to ultimately select the solution they did. This interview process is done using software that Primary Intelligence has developed specifically to facilitate win loss analysis interviews. Key features of our proprietary software solution that allow us to perform deeper interviews and gather actionable intelligence include:

• Buyers have the option of doing quantitative questions online to shorten the time required for the interview and improve the decision review experience for the buyer
• Responses to quantitative questions are available in real-time to interviewers to allow them to ask appropriate follow-up questions based on the performance scores and ratings given by the buyer
• Qualitative questions are asked in a telephone interview that is recorded to ensure that all comments and insights offered by the buyer are accurately captured
• Interviewers have the flexibility of asking questions based on the natural flow of the conversation with the buyer, rather than a rigid, pre-defined question order
• Ad hoc/unplanned questions specific to the buyer’s situation can be asked and captured on the fly
• Ability to interview multiple buyers in the same opportunity for complex committee-based decisions and compile the individual interviews together to get an accurate view of large, committee purchase decisions
• Stakeholders can identify and update key priorities or questions they would like answered in the software solution and these priorities and questions immediately become a part of the interviewers interview guide

Primary Intelligence interviewers are senior level professionals that have many years of experience talking to buyers about their complex purchase decisions and uncovering the real drivers of those decisions for our clients. The key, critical areas your Primary Intelligence interviewer will focus on during their interview with your buyers will include:

• Compelling event (business needs and requirements that led to purchase decision)
• Purchase decision (products considered, primary selection and non-selection reasons, decision satisfaction)
• Product performance (yours and your competitors, perceived weaknesses and strengths)
• Sales experience (their experience with your sales team and the competitions’ sales teams)
• Company perception (their perception of your company and the competitions’ companies)
• Buyer Role (their role in the organization and the purchase decision)
• Buying Process (their selection of products to evaluate and their evaluation and approval process)
• Price position (yours and your competitors’ price position, discount strategies and impact of price on the decision)
• Perceived value (buyer’s product value observations and insights)
• Done differently (what you needed to do to win when you lose and what you could have done better when you win)

Delivery of your win loss analysis results:

As important as the collection of the intelligence from your buyers is, it is equally important that the gathered data and analysis from your win loss analysis program is made available to everyone in your organization that can leverage it to make better decisions in their respective roles. Primary Intelligence has created a suite of applications and reports that will give you complete, real-time access to your data and analysis as the interviews with your buyers are completed:

• Web-based software as a service (SaaS) business intelligence software solutions give every department in your organization access to the data and analysis needed to make better strategic and tactical decisions based on real market evidence from your win loss analysis program.
• Salesforce.com integration delivers your win loss analysis intelligence and competitive data in real-time to your sales force at the account and opportunity level
• Online reporting of individual win loss reviews with the ability to export to MS Word and MS PowerPoint
• Win loss analysis dashboards allow executives with sales, marketing and product management responsibilities to track and analyze important trends in your win loss data
• Competitor analysis applications allow you to analyze competitors across more than 50 different criteria to identify key competitive strengths and weaknesses
• Sales management applications help your sales managers identify key coaching and training opportunities with individual sales representatives
• Program management applications give you complete visibility into the entire win loss analysis process
• Access to a real-time SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis tool to help executives identify opportunities early and react proactively to threats
• Monthly or quarterly market evidence reports for key stakeholders based on their specific priorities and/or questions
• PowerPoint trend reports at key data point intervals designed to summarize and synthesize key trends that have been discovered from the intelligence gathered from your buyers

Win loss analysis program benefits you can expect:

While it can be difficult to absolutely quantify the increase in competitive win rates and sales you can expect from your win loss analysis program we have hundreds of clients that can tell you about the real world benefits they’ve realized through their programs. A recent example:

“The win loss data is the primary tool for us to build strate­gies to improve our win rate in the market. We launched many initiatives in the past year based on the data from the PI win loss analyses. The key metric for me to assess is improvement to our win rate. The past two years our win rate was 40% and 41% respectively. Our win rate, this year, is 67%. While an early indicator, I see evidence that this significantly higher win rate will con­tinue. Some of the changes we made, based on this data, have been around how we demonstrate and position our products. We heard feedback that our products looked more difficult to use compared to our primary competitor—this is not the case, but this was the perception based on the demo. This was a total surprise to us, and we changed our demo approach. Now, we go on-site 2-3 weeks prior to the demo. We see and understand their business process and tailor our demo to their specific issues.”

—SVP Sales and Marketing, Technology Company

Additional case studies and references are available upon request.

Win loss analysis program importance:

Only 20% of companies report having formal win loss analysis programs. And more than half of those companies define win loss analysis as asking their sales representative why they won or lost a specific opportunity.

This is NOT win loss analysis.

Implementing a win loss analysis program means that you will be ahead of 90% or more of your competitors in this best practice area. This represents a wonderful opportunity for you and your organization to develop a significant competitive advantage that could be the difference between achieving your growth objectives this year, or missing those goals.

Contact a Primary Intelligence representative today for a demonstration of our Win Loss Analysis solution. Ask them to tell you about the following additional benefits that our clients experience with their win loss analysis programs:

• Unexpected loss reversals (lost opportunities that ask for our clients to immediately re-engage with them)
• Win rate improvements versus a specific competitor
• Win-back opportunities (lost opportunities that show opportunity for win-back at a future date)
• Discovery of new product opportunities
• Average number of tactical and operational decisions supported with each win loss review
• Product marketing improvements realized
• Product management improvements realized
• Sales management improvements realized
• Sales performance improvements (from the sales representative’s perspective)
• Improving sales with buyer personas

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