Understanding why are you winning and losing business is critical in building successful marketing programs. Knowing where customers minds are at: what the special sauce is to lead them to put pen to paper, or why they are just saying no, will help you adjust your strategy and help the business keep track of the health of marketing and sales.
Marketers often rely on sales or finance to do this analysis, but they should be actively participating in the data collection and data analysis.
What is win-loss analysis?
Win-loss analysis can be most easily defined as why a prospect bought your product or services or did not bought your product or services.
It can provide insight into larger trends – perhaps your product doesn’t apply to a specific vertical or industry so you should stop investing there (or determine how to alter your positioning) or perhaps a vertical you haven’t focused on is closing deals at a higher rate than others, and you should invest there.
The key to a win-loss analysis is that you look at both wins AND losses. The mistake one often makes is focusing too much at the losses when the wins can unlock many key insights as well.
What is needed to conduct win-loss analysis?
Ensuring that data collection for win-loss reasons is incredibly important – otherwise you will, of course, get very skewed data that could lead you down the wrong path. So make sure you carefully design and implement data collection for this properly.
Pretending you are losing business for the wrong reasons (say it’s product challenges, but you list it as budget challenges) will lead you to more mistakes down the line. Another thing to watch out for is timing – ensuring you have accuracy in terms of when something has become a loss (which is often the most delayed input) can help in terms of identifying buying cycle trends.
How to leverage win-loss analysis
There’s many way to leverage the analysis in marketing, but the easiest is to look at it by role:
Brand awareness/reputation & demand gen
- Supports brand perception
- Enhances targeting capabilities
- Optimizes messaging and content opportunities and can support optimizing SEO
Product marketing & product management
- Identifies new segments and verticals to investigate
- Supports product improvements
- Identifies market trends
- Provides more insight into competitive strategy
Sales is likely already leveraging this data to support training, objection handling, and restructuring their strategy as needed.
If you aren’t already leveraging win-loss data to support your marketing program – it’s never too late. It will more than likely provide insight you didn’t have before into your prospects and customers, and help you optimize so that you can increase your marketing influenced or marketing originated bookings!
Header Photo by Japheth Mast on Unsplash