What to include in a win loss review process (#3/3)

“We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we’re in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There’s no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.” Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer Microsoft.

In the third article in this WLR series (see part one and two), we'll answer the question "Now What"? Now that you have a good handle on the premise behind Win/Loss Reviews and a solid understanding of WLR mechanics, how can you embrace this concept within your own business and start to realise some of the benefits?

Step 1: Decide whether to conduct the review yourself,

or bring in a third party organisation to assist you with the process. Article two provides a list of pro’s and con’s for both approaches.

Step 2: Develop an appropriate set of quantitative questions,

which will be used in each opportunity that you review. These questions need to be consistent, measurable and preferably developed in conjunction with your entire sales force. This approach will ensure ease of analysis and simplify the process of observing trends within your prospects feedback. You can also develop a standard set of qualitative questions; but you will need to modify these for each opportunity, to reflect the specific circumstances of the individual deal.

Step 3: Determine which opportunities to focus on

The average B2B sales organisations may prosecute hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities in a given year. In its initial roll-out stages, it often makes sense to concentrate on a relatively small number of sales cycles to begin with. This will allow you to test and improve your Win/Loss Review program and ensure you are gaining the type of insights you had anticipated.

You may decide to focus on your largest or most strategic opportunities, or a selection of highly competitive deals or you may choose those sales cycles in which your cost of sale is especially high.

Step 4: Distribute the feedback to the relevant individuals or teams within your business

The findings from these reviews will vary greatly depending on the level of granularity of questioning, the number of individuals interviewed within the target customer and their responsiveness.

The output from each review should be compiled into an Opportunity Report, with the feedback grouped into specific areas such as: sales execution, price competitiveness, clarity of vision, demo capability etc. These reports should then becshared and discussed with the specific sales team responsible for the deal, to provide a first-hand insight from your client’s perspective. This is an excellent mechanism to determine the training or enablement needs of specific team members, whilst also ensuring that worthwhile sales practices can be highlighted and substandard practices can be identified and eradicated.

Step 5: Draw conclusions

On a quarterly basis, the individual Opportunity Reports should be consolidated into a single Quarterly Trend report, providing an aggregated view of specific learning’s and insights garnered during the previous three months.

This process provides your management team with actionable information on trends that may be emerging in your competitive landscape, pricing or solution insights relating to specific competitors, an understanding of newly emerging competition in your field, plus an internal view of those areas of perceived strength or weakness within your own solution offering.

By now you may be asking yourself, do I really want to devote all this time and effort to put in place a review process, for a prospect who has already made their purchasing decision?

According to Rick Marcet, author of the book Win Loss Review: “Fewer than 5% of companies apply any formal win/loss review discipline to their sales outcome. Those that do inevitably focus on the losses, the wins lack any real scrutiny or proper review”.

In today’s increasingly competitive business landscape, whether you’re a newly emerging company, or an established player with significant market share, few of us can afford the luxury of ignoring client feedback and not worrying about why we’re winning and losing deals.

As Peter van Stolk, the founder of Jones Soda so eloquently explains: “If you’re able to listen to customers from their perspective, not everything they say will make sense. Not everything they do will be right. But you’ll know more about what you have to do because of it”.

For high-value b2b sales cycles, where margin from sales is a central pillar on which company growth is founded, sales execution, conversion rates and cost of sales are critical yardsticks to success. In my experience, there is no single better, cheaper and easier way to improve your odds in all of these categories, than through a consistent and repeatable Win/Loss Review program.

Having the ability to gather up and farm out individual pieces of micro-intelligence can provide your company with unseen strategic advantages, insights into perceived weaknesses in your solution offering and may just provide your sales force with the edge they require, when competing in your chosen market.

As a sales person, if you have conducted yourself in a professional and ethical manner throughout a sales cycle, you have earned the right to seek some feedback regarding your performance and some insights into how you and your sales team might improve over time.

So why do so many of us continue to step away at precisely the wrong moment in the sales cycle and could a Win/Loss Review program really provide the answer to this intractable conundrum?