Why Traditional Win Loss is Dead
Written by Jonnie Anderson, Marketing Manager at Primary Intelligence
Traditional win-loss analysis is dead. We’re sorry, but it is.
Having been in the industry for over 20 years, we’ve seen the struggles of traditional win-loss analysis and how it impacts businesses of all shapes and sizes. Traditional win-loss analysis is classified as a program conducted in-house or with a third party, typically in partnership with members of the marketing team who are also focused on other objectives. Traditional win-loss analysis typically consists of manual phone interviews, manual survey processes, and third-party industry data from external sources (i.e. Feedback not from your buyers).
Traditional win-loss analysis is expensive, rigid with messy, hard-to-understand insights, and difficult to scale – especially for small to mid-sized companies.
At Primary Intelligence, we have a better way.
The Issues with Traditional Win-Loss
- Low Conversion Rates
Trying to gather buyer feedback by using members of your internal team and manual collection processes can lower conversion rates. Buyers are often hesitant of giving to give raw feedback directly to the asking company, and most marketing professionals do not have the expertise in win-loss analysis to know how to ask what questions to get relevant feedback. - Not Enough Data Points
For most marketing teams, finding the bandwidth to send surveys and conduct interviews is nearly impossible when there are other marketing objectives at play. To collect a minimal number of data points, an in-house employee would need to spend upwards of 20+ hours a month interviewing, surveying, refining questions, and compiling reports – and this would likely only contain data from a few of your deals. - Difficult to Share Results
If you manage to collect enough buyer feedback, you’ll then need to determine relevant insights, compile reports, and communicate your findings with stakeholders and front-line sales reps. This takes time, manual data manipulation, and expertise to ensure your insights are digestible (and relevant) to all teams. Each time new feedback comes in, you’ll need to update and re-share these reports. - Limited Bandwidth
Most companies do not have a win-loss expert in-house. Instead, win-loss analysis is managed by a member of the marketing team who also has other responsibilities and objectives to hit. This could mean that win-loss analysis gets pushed or is incomplete due to time constraints and bandwidth. - Cost Prohibitive
Taking into consideration the time it takes to run a win-loss program in-house and the salary of your marketing managers, traditional win-loss analysis will cost you a pretty penny. You’ll also need to budget for a potential learning curve for figuring out best practices, relevant questions, and more. Traditional win-loss vendors also tend to be expensive and you’ll only be getting data from a fraction of your deals. - Data Not Relevant to Sales
If you aren’t collecting feedback from all of your deals, you may have a hard time getting reps to take win-loss insights to heart. If you are unable to tie your specific findings down to an individual rep level, your sales reps will likely write off your analysis as “not my data, not my problem”.
A Better Way for Win-Loss
As win-loss experts, we’ve tasked ourselves with breaking through the barriers of traditional win-loss analysis to ensure your business gets the most from your program. Here’s how we do it:
- Collect Relevant Data Points
Rather than sourcing industry insights or generalizing win-loss analysis by using only a few deals, it’s key to collect relevant, unbiased buyer feedback from all your deals – won or lost. When you’re able to ask the right questions in a comfortable setting, your buyers will tell you what it takes to win more deals. Gathering this feedback for every deal makes it possible for sales leaders and reps to discover strengths and weaknesses on an individual level, making win-loss analysis invaluable to your sales team. - Automate and Analyze
Through automation, we collect more buyer feedback to gain actionable insights into why you win and why you lose. With these automated collection processes running in the background, you’re able to spend more time analyzing feedback to discover buyer trends, competitive insights, and opportunities for sales enablement. - Explore Real-Time Insights
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time you collect new buyer feedback. Instead, your buyer feedback is fed into your account where you can easily customize digestible reports, see data on an aggregate or filtered level, dive into competitive insights, and discover top reasons for wins and losses – all in real-time. - Easily Share Findings
Win loss analysis findings can often be hard to share. With seamless reporting, customizable dashboards, and competitive battles cards, you’re sure to capture the attention of every stakeholder – from C-Level to front-line rep and everyone in between. Our reporting is made to be digestible at all levels so you can share key win loss insights that will help your business make data driven decisions to help your reps win more deals.
Traditional win loss analysis is dead, and we’re okay with that. There are better ways to collect higher volumes of quality buyer feedback and better ways to use buyer feedback to win more deals. At Primary Intelligence, we’re here to help your team save time and money while increasing win rates, elevating the sales experience, and discovering your competitive edge.
Interested in learning more? Talk with our team today.
