Three Critical Questions for Increased Win Rates

One critical component to a successful revenue growth strategy is to increase win rates on deals in the pipeline. But it’s much easier said than done, and it has become even more challenging in a post-Covid world. To accomplish big gains in win rates, an organization really needs to understand the answers to three critical questions.

It’s our job at primary intelligence to make sure you get these answers quickly, painlessly, and continuously, as your market is constantly changing, especially in uncertain times

Let’s take a look at each of these three questions, along with a couple of dashboard views in our platform TruVoice, to see how easy it can be to get these answers.

1. What matters most to your buyers when making a purchase decision?

Here we turn to the Performance module inside TruVoice. On the y axis, we can see what your buyers ranked as the most important criteria when making a purchase decision. This is ordered from the most important at the top, to least important moving downwards. On the x axis we have numerical scores. In the middle is 0, and everything to the left is a negative number indicating a negative gap in the criteria. Everything to the right of the 0 represents a positive gap or advantage in the criteria.

A gap indicates a separation in performance between you and a competitor or competitors. This perception comes directly from your buyers.

In this example, using a demo company’s data, “ease of use” is showing to be the most important criterion when their buyers make a purchase decision (first on the list). If you hover over the blue bar, you can see that this organization scores an average of 8.9 out of 10 in this criterion.

This company’s strongest competitor only scores a seven, on average, which means there’s a significant positive advantage of 1.9. As such, when a buyer ranks “ease of use” as being important, this organization can expect to have a high win rate in those deals. This is an opportunity to highlight one of your strengths and help new or developing reps master the skill of demonstrating “ease of use”.

The second most important criterion is that of “understanding your business needs”. The story for this one is a bit different as we see a negative gap (orange bar). The demo organization scoring a 7.9, on average, in understanding the customer the buyers’ needs, whereas the strongest competitor scores an 8.1. It’s a smaller gap, but a gap, nonetheless.

Here is an opportunity to coach the sales team to better demonstrate their understanding of your buyers’ needs. This is a high-level view. You can always double-click on criteria to understand the details behind the scores, and the behaviors or product features that led to the gap or advantage.

Again, as you strive to increase win rates, understanding what is most important to you buyers, and how you perform in those areas, is a great first step. You can get this insight and additional details with just a few clicks inside the Performance module in TruVoice.

2. What are the unique win loss reasons for each individual sales rep?

Old thinking would suggest you can take off the shelf sales training, throw reps in a room for a few days of role playing, and expect an increase in win rates. Today we know that our training and coaching needs to be personalized to each rep for it to be effective. With this objective in mind, sales managers and sales coaches can turn to the Sales Profiles in TruVoice, for quick answers on how to personalize their coaching and have confidence it will increase each reps individual win rates.

Each tile in the module represents a different sales rep on the team. If we look at a particular sales rep, we can see that Dallas Farley has feedback from five of his buyers. Currently, Dallas has $140,000 in revenue sold, and he boasts a 53% win rate in terms of dollar amount and a 40% win rate when it comes to count.

We can also see that, according to his buyers, Dallas typically wins because of “ease of use”, “future direction”, and “product integration”.

Now look across the entire sales team. We can see “ease of use” is the number one reason for winning. This isn’t much of a surprise given the positive advantage we saw for this criterion in the Performance module. This sales team this team is doing a great job in demonstrating how easy the product is to use.

Each of these cards can be flipped over to reveal the top LOSS reasons. In the case for Dallas, “on demand reporting” is a reason why he continues to lose deals. We might think that “on demand reporting” is lack of product feature, but in this scenario it means Dallas is not doing a very good job in demonstrating the product’s capability around on-demand reporting. Their product has this feature but Dallas is not doing a very good job of showcasing it in a relevant way.

Dallas’ second most common loss reason is “concern resolution”. This is definitely a sales rep mistake or misstep.

Here is where it gets interesting. As we flip over some of Dallas’ peers, we can see that their loss reasons vary across the board. For Larissa, her number one loss reason is “responsiveness”. For Bonnie it is “integration”. Can you imagine sitting them all through a group training on “on demand reporting”? It might have helped Dallas, but wouldn’t have been a good use of time for Larissa and Bonnie. Again, this is why it’s so important create individualized and personalized win loss dashboards for each rep, so the right coaching can be applied, and win rates can improve.

Let’s not ignore the additional details needed to provide the appropriate coaching. Let’s take a look at Dallas’ detailed view.

Here, along the top, we can see in green all the win reasons why buyers purchase from Dallas, and the loss reasons in red. You can click on each of the reasons listed in each section for more detailed feedback on that issue. The sales leader could use this for coaching or share it across the team, or the rep themselves could do self-coaching by viewing why buyers have positive or negative perceptions of their work.

As an example, let’s look at concern resolution from the losses.

What we see populated below are all the deals that specified “concern resolution” as a reason for the loss. We can see the verbatim responses that come from the buyer interviews and surveys…this means there is no guessing to what the buyer meant, or even left up to the sales rep’s interpretation.

Sales Profiles is a powerful module for providing personalized sales coaching based on their unique win loss reasons. The more personalized the coaching the bigger impact it will have on each rep’s win rate.

3. What is my competition doing and how do I compare across the board?

This can be one of the most difficult question to answer. The organizations that can stay current on this find a way to continuously adapt and thrive. For all others, growth strategies are built on guesses and assumptions.  As challenging as it may be to stay current on the competitive landscape, the Battlecards module in TruVoice makes it simple. Each one of these cards represents a competitor that your buyers admit they have evaluated alongside your company.

For this demo company, we see Sistemic being ranked first because we see them the most frequent; in a total of 18 deals. Andem is second with 10 deals, and DDX is the third most common competitor showing up in 5 deals.

If we focus on Sistemic, the company has a 50% win rate based on count with nine wins and nine losses. However, when we start looking at the dollar amount won or lost as illustrated by the red/green circle,  the story changes a little. There is more red than green indicating the company has lost more revenue amounts than it has won. This may suggest the company tends to lose higher priced deals to Sistemic.

If you click on the card you will see the additional details. Across the top, we get a breakdown of strengths, weaknesses, root causes, best practices, and additional competitive intelligence.

Clicking the header for each gives you some of the detailed, verbatim insights from each deal where that criterion is found.

Here we can learn that Systemic’s strength, according to your buyers, is that they do a really great job of understanding the buyer’s needs.

If you remember from the Performance module, “understanding business needs” was the second most important criterion to buyers. It’s no wonder the company is losing some important deals against Systemic when that’s the second most important criterion to their buyers.

However, their top weaknesses is “professionalism”. This can be used as a strategic position when competing against them, and an opportunity to tactfully position a few landmines.

Also available is data around overall price position for wins and losses. This is helpful when making strategic pricing decisions, and to better understand if you are coming in higher or lower against certain competitors in various markets/industries.

This, this is just a glimpse of what TruVoice modules can do. The goals is to help you increase your revenue by growing your win rates, especially in these uncertain times.

These are three very critical questions.

1. What matters most to your buyers when making a purchase decision and how do you compare in those areas.
2. What are the individual and unique win loss reasons for each of my sales reps so I can coach them for improvement.
3. How does all of this compare to how your buyers perceive you versus your competition.

Contact us for more information on how TruVoice can help you coach your team for better win rates and higher revenue.