Clozd: Hi everyone. I'm Scott Varner, director of program delivery at Clozd, here with Matt Nelson, VP of product marketing at AuditBoard. AuditBoard's really exciting company. You're a global solution for audit risk and compliance managers. You have offices in London, the UK and Asia. Five times rated is one of Deloitte's fastest growing companies globally. Just acquired by HG for a staggering $3 billion. So that is today's context.

Let's rewind the clock just a little bit, a little over a year. Talk to me about why win-loss and talk about standing up your win-loss program?

Matt Nelson: Yeah, thanks. And first of all, thank you for having me. Huge fan of Clozd and excited to kind of talk through the journey we've had together. Yeah, I think almost two years ago, year and a half, two years ago, newly in seat. And it was clear that for AuditBoard, win-loss was a priority. For us, from a cultural perspective, we claim to be customer obsessed. We care deeply about the customer. And so it was only natural that understanding why customers were selecting us or prospects were not selecting us was really important for us to understand not just from any one dimension, but really across the functions what we could do to obviously help our chances and improve.

The interest for win-loss program actually came from different parts of the business. Fortunately, we were able to sort of galvanize that interest and start pretty strong. Step number one for us was quickly building a baseline. So we rolled out the program, and Sky was exciting to have you as that key interviewer. The first objective for us was, "What is the baseline? Why are customers selecting us? Why are prospects not selecting us? And what do we want to do about it?" And that second of all, building an organic relationship with win-loss, that would allow really every level of the company to have benefit and to change behavior. Right?

Yeah. I'd be curious, you talked about there was interest from different parts of the business. What were those parts of the business? Who had the interest?

Yeah. So as you'd expect, I mean, the product team was very interested to understand what were the feature gaps that they could address in priority that would most move the needle. Sales team was really interested... Well, from a sales process, sales cycle perspective, what could they address. Even on the marketing side, we were interested to understand how we position our platform. "Were we providing the right enablement?" So really across the company understanding what could we do to help improve those outcomes.

Yeah, love that. In fact, I would compliment AuditBoard. I think, within a year, you had built an incredibly cross-functional program. What would you tell people that are starting win-loss about... How did AuditBoard achieve that? How did you get so many different key stakeholders involved so quickly?

That's a great question. I think a few things. First of all, I think from the very top, we needed executives to find value instantly. And so in the very first report, and again you were part of this, we wanted to come out of the gates with a really strong sense of, "How are we performing? Why are we being selected? Why are we not being selected," with the real level of detail to understand why and to drill down so that it's actionable.

In advance, that first meeting really is part of our process. Before we'll walk into a quarterly meeting with our senior executive team and even our CEO, time will be spent between me and other sub function leaders putting together a plan of, "What do we do about it?"

So if you remember in advance, that first meeting, we previewed those findings with the sales and even the lead with the product leads with different parts of the organization. Said, "Look, here's what we're seeing, not just from win-loss, but also for CRM in a full multi-dimensional view of our sales cycle. Here's what we're hearing. Here's what we think. What do you think," and building sort of a real sincere partnership with those different individuals.

So when we walked into that meeting with our senior executive team, we could say, "Hey, look. Here's what we're seeing. Here's the drill down. Here's some really great examples to provide evidence, but even more importantly, here's what we think, as a business, we should do about it. And oh, by the way, CRO, I've already had conversations with three or four of your leaders, and here's kind of what we think in that direction. By the way, CPO, already had conversations with three or four of your leaders. Here's what we think we could do in that direction." So not only can they understand what we should do, but they also feel like there's existing momentum to take action out of the gate.

I think that was key from a senior perspective. From a more organizational perspective or a viral perspective, we took advantage of the opportunity to share interviews with most leaders of the organization through our Slack channel. And every time an interview was done, publish that out. And certainly, there's things that I was doing to sort of corral at an executive level, but what we found was that almost out of the gate, different people in the organization would read an interview or see the report and take action on their own. And that was really exciting, because we worked with you to have a really curated view of what we thought the core insights were. But there's no way we could, at scale, weaponize win-loss without it being really viral. And I think that was the second piece that candidly I didn't expect to take off as fast as it did, but was exciting to see kind of take off. And there's a few examples that you and I know about.

Yeah, I think that one of those key things, like you said, is I'm impressed with how whenever we go present, there's always a slide that is, "Here's our key takeaways," including from customers, including from our CRM. But then there's always, "Well, here's the actions." And you always have included, "Here's actions that we're already taking, and the status of those. Here's some new goals as well that everyone's going to take."

You just talked about there are some key takeaways for the business. There've been some really important ones. What would you say was an initial example of key insight from win-loss that you started to really activate on?

Yeah, that's a good question. So kind of looking back to where we started, and there's a number of great stories. Coming out of that first meeting, it was clear that the number one opportunity for us, in terms of potential impact, was influencing the driver value in ROI. It was one of the most important drivers for deal selection, and it was one where we had real opportunity to improve.

And so in advance of that meeting and through that meeting with other stakeholders, spent time with sales leadership saying, "How do we change this? What are the underlying reasons why this is a problem utilizing the Clozd research, but also just talking with reps and getting deeper on the topic? And what do we want to do about it?"

And so there's not just one or two things that we did. There's probably like eight things we did. But one thing we did is we realized that we needed to shift from being product centric and feature centric to being solution centric. We needed to have a value framework. We needed to allow our reps to have business conversations and not just product conversations. And this probably makes more sense if you understand the culture of where AuditBoard was a few years ago. Fantastic product, great demo, a lot of former practitioners in our salesforce. But we were relying on those things to sell, and we were kind of missing the opportunity to have a business level conversation.

So we spent many months building a value framework. Our SK was all about communicating value in ROI. We signed up with IDC and did a total economic impact report at multiple value perspectives, changed the way we talked about our platform from being product to solution centric and probably eight or other nine things. We scaled our value realization team, built a value calculator, essentially aligned on a plan that took multiple quarters to execute and just remained maniacal in executing against that. And then, every quarter you could see that metric, that driver, value in ROI changed from being more red to being more green. And you saw that just change and change and change. And honestly, it correlated directly with improvements in win rate numbers. We could see our win rate in certain products and overall materially improve. And as we dug into data, it was clear that the actions we were taking that were affecting the driver was affecting the actual win rate metric, which we cared about.

Yeah. And I think you kind of called out this was maniacal and not just once. It wasn't just, "We did this. We had these learnings. We made these changes, and then we solved everything." How have you approached even there, like AuditBoard has changed a lot, just in the last year. There's new products. There's new questions. How have you balanced focusing on this perceived ROI thing maniacally, while also trying to leave room to capture insights on these new things?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's a good balance. Because if you're too scattered in where you focus, you'll never really nail the issue. So I think, first and foremost, making sure that we're prioritized, that we have a small number of things we care about, which I think gives us a little bit of flex. So for example, one of the areas of opportunity we identified later on was, "How do we really take advantage of the opportunity to communicate the value of our platform?"

So we decided that, that was another area of focus that emerged in addition to this other sort of work stream that I mentioned just a second ago. And that led to a number of initiatives. And again, it changed to how we're positioning and different types of material and even different types of marketing campaigns.

So in other words, not over committing and giving ourselves a little bit of flex so that if a new competitor pops up, which there've been examples there or a new issue pops up, we're not so locked in that we can't be a little bit flexible.

Okay. So I think the win-loss program AuditBoard consists of a lot of pieces. There's buyer interviews. We survey buyers. Then there's also the role that the CRM plays. How do you think about the CRM data with the qualitative data?

I think, for us, it's been really important to make sure that we had a representative view of what's happening in our sales cycle. I've been pleasantly surprised at the degree of fidelity and quality of insight that we get from our CRM. So for folks who are struggling that path, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. Obviously, serum data's never perfect and all the usual disclaimers. But for us having a combination of the 100% view from our CRM, in addition to the detailed views from Clozd, have been really important to understand, "Forest for the trees, here's how we're doing from a win-loss perspective. Here are the outcomes we're seeing. Here's very high-level drivers, and here's how that's different by product, by region, by other sort of cuts we want to do. And even pulling from comments and things like that and other fields that we have, who are we losing to? Again, from 100% of sales cycles perspective?" And then layering into that, "Well, great. Now we've done the detailed interviews, provides really rich color and additional insight and also a check against the other data."

And so that's been really important for us. We really don't report out on win-loss without the two being together. Otherwise, you risk either not being representative or not being specific and actionable enough. And so that's been a fun journey for us that is starting to bear fruit.

Yeah, there's usually this awesome conversation. Our internal lens looks like this, and our external lens looks like this. Neither are totally perfect. But then when we bring them together, and we ask a lot of questions, usually there's this great clarity that can come from that. And you're a little bit more closer to the truth.

That's right.

Have you ever been surprised by something the win-loss program has kicked up?

Yeah. The answer is yes. Over time, those surprises tend to become more minor, because you have a good amount of data, where it provides some context. So I would say the surprises are becoming fewer and far between, but we can start to see the green shoots of new issues or opportunities emerge. And so I would say less surprises than advanced warning that something could become an issue, or it could emerge as an opportunity.

I wish I could talk about some specifics. One of the... I wouldn't say a surprise, but something we didn't anticipate a while ago, realizing that, in many cases, when we were losing, we weren't losing to a competitor. We were actually, most often, losing to a no decision, was a huge sort of eye-opening moment for us that really changed how we thought about win-loss and, in my mind, helped us focus our activities on things that were actually going to move the needle. It wasn't about beating out X competitor, which can be very, very consuming from an executive conversation perspective. "Oh, we got to beat this competitor." "Well, actually guys, we've got to beat out spreadsheets.

We've got to beat nothing. We've got to beat incumbents."

Or how do you beat out a fact that it's not a big enough priority for the decision-maker? Or "We're not reaching the senior decision-maker." Things like that, that I think weren't necessarily surprises, but were definitely eye-opening insights that came from the combination of our CRM and our win-loss interviews.

Yeah. I love that. So we talked a little bit about getting involvement from different pockets of the business. There's also this element of starting with executive buy-in, and then things went viral. How did you manage getting involvement from people at different levels within AuditBoard?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think, first of all, it was making sure that we did our part to provide relevant insights, curated insights, to the different parts of the organization. So a conversation that we'll have with a CPO is very different than the conversation we'll have with the different levels of the product organization. So in line with that same sort of executive level conversation, as you know, we'll take portions of that insight, and we'll have conversations with individual product teams. And you're part of those conversations. And those are conversations where we can be very, very specific and focus at product level, "Here's what customers are saying. Here are the opportunities," allowing the product team to really dig in.

I think part of the magic that I've seen is having a little bit of openness to allowing them to direct the conversation, allowing them to direct the journey, which may not be areas that we feel are an interest, but necessarily they feel are interest, which kind of gives people a feeling like they own it, like they co-own the program. A leader for one product area can direct the questions or say, "Hey. Next time, can you actually focus in this area?"

I think what happens is when people feel like they have some co-ownership of it, they intellectually are more willing to invest in it. Even for example, I'll get a technical sales leader reaching out to me and saying, "Hey, I read this interview. Really feels like there's an opportunity here." I think it helps politically for us to be really responsive to that, because then again, they feel like, "Wow, if I see another thing that I think is interesting that the team is going to take action on that." And I think that builds trust. That builds confidence, and that tends to snowball.

For example, there was a scenario where I found out that a sales leadership meeting was almost entirely oriented around one of the themes for win-loss, but I wasn't even involved in that. And I almost found out after the event that they'd done this. Like, "Hey, great news. We actually used this to formulate the agenda for this meeting." I think those are actually great successes, because it means that it's not driven by a person. It's driven by the data, and the data is helping inform action that scales beyond just the conversations you're a part of.

Yeah. I think one of the things a lot of organizations struggle with is deciding, "How do we give access and who do we give access to the data we're gathering?" How did you make decisions around who to give access, when to give access?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think initially, we wanted to be careful about providing access to anyone where it might put them in a tough spot, where they might feel embarrassed, where there might be some sort of scenario where a rep could reach out to that customer or create some sort of negative outcome.

Ironically, as we've kind of moved forward, I think we've gotten even more comfortable, to the point where I think we almost give everyone access. I'd have to maybe check myself there. But maybe that's a part of the culture of AuditBoard, where we just generally want to learn, and we're not afraid of a data point suggesting there was an opportunity for improvement. And I think people have become comfortable with that. And again, I think part, it's a cultural element of AuditBoard, where this is not the only point of feedback either. And so we're regularly talking with customers, capturing feedback. Win-loss is a part of that broader picture. And so, for us, we've kind of moved in that direction, because it fits with how we want to operate generally.

Yeah, I mean, I think when you're five-time recognized as one of the fastest growing companies globally, there kind of has to be this culture of ownership and this culture of moving forward. And that probably ties in with the decision like, "We need to give people information. So if we want to move fast as an organization, we need to make sure everyone has the information so they can move fast individually."

Yeah. And I think, also, everyone's on the same playing field. So it's not just a salesperson that would be called out. It's marketing might get called out, or product might get called out. And Clozd does a great job of the way the information is organized, being focused on the opportunity. And so I think if anything, folks appreciate that level of transparency, because we desperately care about the next quarter. We care about the next deal. We're actually not really concerned about the last deal. We're really concerned about the next deal, the next opportunity, the next market segment. And so that kind of keeps us oriented in a positive mindset.

Yeah, "We're looking forward to how do we win the next one."

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, we've covered a lot of ground, talking about a majorly disciplined win-loss program serving a lot of key stakeholders. What would you summarize as your key learnings, your recommendations to someone that's just starting out on their win-loss journey?

It's a good question. I think first and foremost, and not that we have all the answers, there's still a ton we're learning, of course, the folks I'm delivering value to different stakeholders in the business. It's really not about a great slick presentation one time a quarter. It's not about getting as many people into the Slack channel, or... It's really about having one-on-one moments with individual leaders where they're finding value and where they're feeling co-ownership of improving our sales outcomes, improving our business, improving our revenue model, and then partnering with those people, one-on-one, to help them take action and providing more fuel. And eventually... Or hopefully, it comes to a point where it's much bigger than one person, or one team, driving a win-loss program. It's just part of a culture of using win-loss data to make better decisions and to find improvement opportunities.

Once it reaches that point, it becomes bigger than any one person or team. Then, it's really reached a scalability where it's exciting what happens.

Yeah, it feels like it's as an entire organization, ownership action, transparency.

That's right.

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing your insights. We're hugely grateful, and I think everyone here benefits from learning.

Yeah. Well, listen. It's been our pleasure.

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