02
Oct
2024
•
5 min read
Introduction
It seems so logical for any B2B companies to collect feedback about their products, services, customer experience, reputation, marketing perception and sales skills. Some companies use tools such as Net Promoter Score or try to manually ask their customers when they find time to do it. At the end of a deal (whether it’s a prospect or an existing client), performing Post-Mortem turns out to be a great solution to understand why this buyer made this decision. If you do it internally, it’s not going to give you the right answers because it’s usually done reactively when there is a big loss. More importantly, this process is not done on enough deals to really understand what drives your customer. Asking only internal people (salespeople, project leaders, partners, key managers, …) about why they lose or win also comes with big biases. All of this gives you subjective answers as to why you win or lose. If you want to get concrete answers to increase your conversion & retention rate, you have to systematically integrate your real buyer in the loop. This practice comes with a win-loss analysis program.
Doing Post-Mortem internally is a waste of time
1. The Post-Mortem meeting is usually triggered only when there is a big loss
It’s classic just like saying you are going to the gym each week. Each B2B organization wants to stay close to their buyer. They would like to do so by collecting feedback about what their prospect & clients think of their solutions. However, in reality, what we observe is that B2B companies sometimes perform Post-Mortem only when there is a big event, such as a big loss. Post mortems are usually triggered by spectacular failures, the ones that make headlines internally.
As a big loss doesn’t happen each week, Post-Mortem becomes a one-shot exercise. All of this have two big negative consequences :
- This process is not systematic and people are not used to it. Although Post-Mortem is key to success, one-shot means people will not dedicate real time to it
- You don’t analyze why you actually win deals : this is a shame as you could understand what are the exact drivers behind your buyer’s decision to choose you. Understanding why you win is just as important as why you lose
2. A not significant number of Post-Mortem leads to bad decision
Simple point : statistical significance. We have seen so many times a sales person communicating with great ease why he lost this big deal because of this particular missing feature. This leads to decision that could be wrong or not adapted to the real needs of your company, such as :
- Wrong product roadmap decision
- Wrong marketing action
- Wrong sales enablement action plan
- Etc.
Small wins and losses, which are often more representative of general trends, go unnoticed, thus skewing the real understanding of the market and sales dynamics.
3. Doing Post-Mortem internally is by nature subjective and 100% biased
If you do that, that means you precisely ask the people who managed the deal to give their feedback as to why this prospect has not chosen them. Their perception is interesting and you have to take it into consideration. But it’s absolutely not objective and you can’t rely only on their feedback.
Nobody wants to be accountable for this loss. What we see is that departments (Marketing / Sales / Product) blame each other. As a result, there is no true collective improvement.
Sending this Post-Mortem to a person within your organization that has no link with the deal recently lost is a good initiative. However, this person also has its own biases and perceptions. All of this makes your Post-Mortem subjective if you do it internally.
4. The buyer (prospect or customer) is the great absentee from the debate
Why not simply ask your buyer why he made its recent decision? It seems straightforward but only best B2B companies are directly talking to their buyer, once they made their final decision. Asking only internal people of your company makes these Post-Mortem meetings shaky, based on internal speculation rather than hard facts.
Of course, it could be challenging to take buyer's time on this topic. That is particularly why we have launched Diffly. We recommend you to do simple things such as :
- Explaining during the sales or the client cycle that you will ask feedback about their experience at the end of the relationship
- Asking for feedback proactively a few days after you close the opportunity
- Give incentive to your buyer as this is goldmine for you
- Being resilient and ask again if you don’t have any answers
- Making sure your buyer understands the time you spent preparing the offer and that you just want to receive a feedback for improvement
Launching a recurring win-loss program analysis gives you the right answers to why you win or lose
1. A real program means significance in the results
Collecting feedback on several deals allows you to get reliable insights on :
- Why you win
- Why you lose
- Are your customers happy?
- Are your customers unhappy?
- Are your customers going to renew?
- Are your customers going to stop the collaboration?
- Are your customers going to upsell?
Thanks to a win-loss program, you will scope which kind of deals you want to request feedback. Then you will observe some patterns that could drive your future decision. The thing is, as you collect a lot of feedback, you can be 100% sure your decisions are right.
2. A real program means real time insights on why you win or lose
Launching a win-loss analysis program makes you proactive when it comes to asking feedback to your buyer. This means you receive real time insights as to :
- How your company is perceived
- At which point one of your competitor is better than you
- How your business model is externally seen
- Why this prospect chooses you or not
- Why your buyers are satisfied or not
- Why your existing clients will be okay to up-sell or not
- Etc.
3. Use a third party to get candid and robust feedback
If you manage to hire a neutral third party such as Diffly in your win-loss analysis, you make sure your analysis will be fully objective. A third party doesn’t have anything to sell and the buyer will be more honest to give feedback.
We have done more than 1000 win-loss interviews and it frequently happens that the buyer tells us that he has said things he would not have said to the company.
A third party also comes with skills and experience when it comes to interviewing. Asking the right questions at the right time, mixing the topics to extract what is really interesting, synthesizing the results. This third party is not inside your organization, which means there is no internal pressure or biases.
4. A real program promotes a culture of continual improvement
Formalizing a win-loss program and communicating it to your customer-centrics teams will promote a culture of improvement. The topic is not simply identifying errors, which could be understood as such if you don’t run a real program. It’s about launching a constant cycle of reflection, learning, and improvement.
Conclusion
One shot, subjective and manual Post-Mortem meeting is now old age. B2B companies are more and more launching a formal and rigorous win-loss analysis program, aiming at collecting in real time actionable feedback about what are their decision drivers. With this new superpower tool, you can make decisions to improve your processes, services, products, reputation and your company as a whole.
