So you have a win-loss analysis program in place, and you are getting a lot of feedback and insights. Now what? As Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker, “with great power comes great responsibility.” That’s you—you’re Peter Parker (!!!!). And with all the feedback and customer insights you’ve gained from your win-loss analysis program, you have a responsibility to take that information and use it to help your organization. But how?

Caleb Liao, a product marketing manager at Loopio, talks about how his team is actually taking the insights from their win-loss analysis program and applying them to make revenue-growing changes.

Whether you’re doing win-loss analysis or not, Caleb said it’s always in the back of a product marketer’s mind as something they should be doing. Admittedly, it can be difficult to prioritize, knowing you’ll be adding another thing to your list. But if you can use win-loss analysis feedback as the cornerstone of all your initiatives, it is worth it.

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Loopio, as an organization, has many different feedback channels and does a great job at getting information dispersed throughout the company. However, they needed to see what kind of perspective product marketing could bring to the already-existing-info. Caleb said, “Win-loss allowed us to capture the [market] perception of Loopio, our features, our offerings, and how we are positioning ourselves.” Many times when reading through the notes in their CRM, they were finding things that weren’t true: “What? We DO have that feature!” or “No, our pricing is always lower than that competitor.” That’s the buyer's perception—and that’s what they couldn’t get from their CRM alone.

“From a marketing perspective, that’s all we care about. We want to see how people are perceiving us, and win-loss was our way to capture that perspective—to see how people are perceiving our features, our pricing—that would be a different type of feedback compared to what an AE would get or a CSM call and what they would get. It was really that unique perspective of perception on an opportunity side.” – Caleb Liao

Once you’ve gotten feedback from buyers, be sure to use it. 

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Adapt Your Program As Needed

Once Loopio was able to get that buyer perspective, they could take that data and adapt over time. Initially, Loopio wanted to get buyer feedback that could help them grow into the enterprise space. Now, with the information they’ve gotten from their win-loss program, their priorities have changed quarter over quarter. “We’re doing 5-10 calls a quarter, and what happens is that we’ll learn something that will help us adjust our interview questions. It’s not the same program necessarily––we change it quarter over quarter to move with business goals & objectives.” Though they started out with one goal in mind, they received enough intel that they were able to pivot and use that information to grow the business in other directions. Once you get what you need from the program, you’re not done. Win-loss analysis is an evergreen initiative. The more data you gather, the better armored you are to make fundamental business decisions.

“Be adaptable over time. Your business is evolving. Your customers are changing. Your products are changing. You need to adapt these questions to make sure you’re learning exactly what you need to learn.” - Braydon Anderson, VP of Operations at Clozd

Share Your Findings

“This win-loss program would be a failure if us, as product marketers, if we got smarter, if we got enriched with all these insights, and everybody else was kind of left out of it. That would be a failure.” - Loopio Product Marketing Team

Caleb and Loopio wanted their win-loss program to be very action-oriented. Everybody throughout their organization has access to the Clozd platform, which enables them to see what’s going on for themselves. It’s one thing to watch a PowerPoint or listen to a zoom call about the findings, but it’s entirely different to see the feedback for yourself. Aside from that, Caleb puts together specific presentations for the sales teams and client success teams. Each team has different goals and objectives so it’s helpful for them to see the most relevant information.

From those findings and then shared reporting, they can take actions to pivot, improve, or celebrate.

Use Your Findings To Guide Strategy

Hearing directly from your customers why you won, what’s enticing about your product, what’s working and what’s not gives you a leg up on your marketing messaging, sales strategy, product roadmap, and more. 

“In terms of ROI/feedback/time, it’s definitely worth it. Whenever we are surfacing these insights from our win-loss calls, we want to track value by asking if this insight is validating the investment we are currently working on. ‘If we have this project going on, does this insight say ‘hey continue to invest’ or ‘hey think twice about investing here’?”

Caleb continues on to explain three specific examples of where win-loss analysis helped guide strategy and actionable steps forward.

1. The first one he talked about was their packaging plans. The win-loss program provided great feedback call after call that the way they had them currently laid out was great. That helped them validate those plans internally.
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2. Some feedback they were getting was that customers were having a hard time going through all their features. From that, they were able to create a required capabilities document aimed to help users better understand the platform’s capabilities.
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3. Lastly, in many of the buyer interviews we did for them, Loopio had gotten a lot of praise for their CX and onboarding teams, which, of course, is awesome. But, those insights made them realize that they didn’t have any marketing components around them. If those teams were such huge selling points, they needed to have a web page promoting them. They were able to take those insights and produce new marketing content highlighting those selling points.
   
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“Those [win-loss analysis] insights definitely helped spur action.” - Caleb Liao

Win-loss analysis programs can aggregate a lot of useful information but taking that information and actually using it to drive meaningful change is why it is so important to your overall strategy. These guidelines can help ensure the feedback you’re receiving is being used to make changes throughout your organization that lead to higher win rates and more revenue. Read more best practices on win-loss analysis here.