6 reasons why win-loss analysis is a must-have for C-levels and Executives

Introduction

Executives are always super excited about win-loss analysis. One of their jobs is to make sure their company drives product & sales strategy by prospects and clients’ insights. They also want to know where they leave money on the table. Win-loss also helps them build or maintain a competitive edge over competitors, accelerate growth and improve market share. 

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Best CEOs choose to implement a win-loss analysis culture as they want to stay close to their buyers. Some companies say they do win-loss analysis. But they do it on a team-level only. Product teams on one side, marketing teams on the other side. Sales team on one side, product team on the other. 

They also do it with strong bias. Implementing a successful win-loss with a third party with automation, reliable and actionable data helps C-level align their team around a source that is non refutable. For three reasons:

• Data collected is from an external third party
• Data analyzed is from a independent third party
• Data extracted is centralized in one digital platform 

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Diffly helps us anticipate churn from our clients. Thanks to their unbiased interviews & surveys, our clients are able to express what is wrong and what is right. We considerably improved customer satisfaction and reduced churn by 30%. On top of that Diffly is a lever to detect upsell opportunities. We now use Diffly on a daily basis to make sure we are fulfilling the needs of our customers.

Victor

COO @Scalability

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As win-loss allows them to collect feedback at the end of the sales cycle, they can understand with precision what influenced negatively or positively deals won or lost. As a result, they can make decisions based on data rather than feeling. They make their company customer-centric. They rely on scientific data to make strategic decision such as:

• Development of a strategic feature or a new solution offer
• Change of pricing strategy
• Change of competition strategy
• Address a new ICP or market
• Etc.

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It seems logical but this is a key thing : win-loss tells you where you lose your deals. It tells you what exact decision drivers have negatively impacted your deals. They can launch action plans to adjust their Go-to-market and increase win rate and revenue. 

According to Gartner, you can improve your win rates up to 50% with a rigorous win-loss analysis. Accenture also explains that companies that launch continuous win-loss increase their win rates by 18%.

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If executives perform win-loss and heavily invest on it, it’s because they receive significant insights about their major competitors. In the light of all of this data, they can adjust their marketing positioning, product features, pricing strategy and sales performance. If you know your competition, you can be one step ahead.

One of the main reasons why C-level & executives adopts win-loss is that it’s really valuable for the following teams:

• Sales teams as it helps reaching quotas
• Product marketing teams as it helps aligning GTM teams and knowing competitors
• Product teams as it helps building feature with high ROI and successful product roadmap
• Customer success teams as it helps increasing client retention
• Ops teams as it helps using data to improve performance
• Marketing teams as it helps improving messaging and content creation

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An important value of win-loss is that you have “win” in “win-loss”. That means companies also analyze their wins. Knowing what makes you win deals is as important as knowing what makes you lose deals. You can duplicate what works, share good practices to other people and capitalize on decision drivers you know you are good at.

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Conclusion

If you are a tech company with no or less PMF, then it’s quite easy to double your win rates. It’s an iterative process where you improve and implement successful actions quickly to win more deals. Win-loss helps to know which actions are the best with high ROI. As you grow, it turns out to be more and more difficult to find impactful ideas to double win rates. It’s complicated to find actions that have real impact on your business. If you want to find optimization ideas that are relevant, win-loss analysis comes up with a really good idea!