Cameron Turnbow: Hi, I'm Cameron Turnbow. I'm the Director of Program Management here at Clozd. Today I'm here with Brady Tengberg. Brady is part of our senior leadership team here at Clozd and the Head of Customer Success and Delivery. Today we're going to talk about our experiences working with different win-loss programs. Together we have conducted thousands of win-loss interviews and conducted hundreds of win-loss programs for our clients. Brady, today I'm excited to chat with you a little bit. We're going to talk more about, one, how to get more feedback from our customers and prospects, and two, how do we help grow win-loss program internally and really gain internal adoption.

Brady Tengberg: Cam, I'm excited for it. It's going to be a fun day today.

Great. Well, Brady, maybe to start off, let's talk a little bit about how we can get more feedback from customers and prospects. What are your initial thoughts on that?

So honestly, Cam, it's a really good question. One of the key parts about win-loss analysis is actually finding opportunities for your buyers or people to participate in the interviews themselves. When I was first looking at coming to Clozd, one of the things that stuck out to me was, why aren't people just doing this naturally? And I couldn't quite grasp my head around why there needed to be this third-party solution, why it needed to happen. And there was this really funny story where my wife and I, one time, we were at a restaurant and it's this restaurant called BJ's Brew House or a Brewery and Pizza House or something like that, it's in California primarily, and we went to this restaurant and Mary, my wife, who you know, she ordered this salad. And first mistake there, you don't order a salad at a pizza place, but it's okay.

No shame on salads.

Okay, that's fair, but we can forgive it. But she ordered the salad, and the salad was supposed to have these beautiful, these grapes on it, candied pecans, roasted Brussels sprouts, goat cheese, strawberries. It was supposed to have this really ornate whole plate put together. And I remember as the waitress brought the salad out to my wife, it looked absolutely terrible. The Brussels sprouts were frozen, clearly still in the process of thawing, there was one singular grape on the plate. The whole thing was just a disaster. Now, I'm a very non-confrontational person, so there's a very good chance-

There's not a chance you said anything.

...I wouldn't have said a darn thing. I would've said, "You're right. This looks better than what I would've ordered myself. Thank you, sir." But my wife, she's definitely not afraid of confrontation. She raises her hand and says something to the extent of like, "Hey, this actually isn't quite what I had in mind." And at this point I'm starting to cringe a little bit because I don't like confrontation. And the waitress takes the salad back, she brings out a new one, and at this point she's added one grape to the salad plate, which an improvement, yes, but probably not quite what we have in mind.

So at this point, I'm ready to change Mary and my plate. "Just take my pizza, I'll take the salad, whatever, we'll get over it." But she raises her hand again and kind of says, "Hey, this still isn't quite what I had in mind." And as someone who doesn't love to give critical feedback to people who I don't know very well, I was not excited about this whole thing. And after a little bit, I start to see the chef poke his head out around the corner in his little chef outfit, and I'm starting to think we have offended this poor man, and where do we even go from here? So the chef walks out and he has a beautiful salad, exactly as it was supposed to be on a plate. And he comes out and he says, "I am so sorry. I saw what they brought out to you, and I couldn't be more embarrassed at what they brought."

And it was a really interesting thing for me. And obviously things like this happen to all of us all the time in restaurants or other situations, but what was so fascinating to me is how I hadn't internalized before how unwilling I would have been to give critical feedback in the moment to those individuals. And there are a lot of situations in life where this happens, whether it's a restaurant or a breakup or even a B2B sales process where we have things happen, but because it's largely a transactional relationship, you're not going to see this person again, you might not have the same appetite of actually speaking up and telling someone that they really screwed up.

Yeah, that's interesting because if you think about it from the chef's perspective, the chef is probably so grateful you said something. Right? And the feedback probably didn't get back to the chef for a while for probably two or three rounds of that. And so as we're thinking of this and as we even tie this into win-loss analysis, I think one of the big things that we really are trying to accomplish as we're doing win-loss analysis is how do we get the Brady's to speak up? We obviously have the Mary's, right? The Mary's are going to speak up.

Always. They're always going to say something.

They're going to say something, they're going to make sure that their feedback is well known. But those Brady's, how do we create an environment, how do we create a situation that they will feel energized to share that feedback? Because as they share that feedback, we're obviously going to be able to have much more of an influence in how we direct.

Yeah. So Cam, you've obviously been at Clozd for a very long time. You've seen all kinds of customers, all kinds of industries, personas, etc. And for customers that you've worked with, how have you seen them been able to get more of the Brady type people to actually speak up?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. When I think about it, we have what we would call a win-loss curve. It's something that we've seen over time of how our customers evolve and how we work with them. The majority of customers prior to starting win-loss analysis, they tend to come to the table of really just thinking of guesswork and here's what I think is happening within my company. Once they get to that point where it says, "Okay, I think there's this problem going on," they start to say, "Well, what can I do about it?" And they evolve a little bit more into maybe they start digging into their CRM data. Maybe they start ask, talking to people. And even thinking of the example with your chef, specifically with Mary's salad, probably initially, a, first, nobody would've heard about it. As you guys provided that feedback, maybe the chef start to says, "Huh, what actually is going on here?"

He may start to collect a little bit more data and feedback, and that might just be talking to the waiters and waitresses. And as he starts to collect this feedback, similar to like a lot of our customers do with CRM data, they start to identify, "Oh, there actually are problems, or maybe there's gaps of where we want to improve and where we want to be better." And so that a lot of times leads them into what we would say is a one-off project. And I think that's where a lot of our customers start to engage with win-loss analysis, is that they're looking to solve a problem on a specific area. And so specifically with your chef, what that might be is it says, "Oh, we need to figure out this specific salad. We're struggling to make this specific salad." For our customers it might be like, "Oh, we're losing a lot of deals in North America to this specific competitor."

And so they become very focused on that one specific area. As this continues to evolve, we then start to see that project that they run is successful, and then they say, "Well, we actually want to do this on a little bit of a broader scale." So now there's maybe doing these projects more ongoing, but really where we want them to get to is we want them to do this on an ongoing basis, but also covering their full pipeline. And so tying it back to the salad once again, "Oh, this is, we know all of our customers, their orders, what's happening when they're having good experiences, because then we can go ahead and address this."

And that's really kind of our goal here I think with win-loss analysis is that we want to get to that full pipeline coverage and be able to really see these are the certain people we need to talk to. Now, that's tough to do. Right? I bet it's tough to be able to get to that full pipeline coverage, and we'd love to hear your thoughts maybe of how our customers or people we've worked with have achieved that full pipeline coverage.

It is a really good question because whenever I think about full pipeline coverage, there obviously are trade-offs to that. It is expensive and time-consuming to interview all of your business. That's very hard to do. And one of the things that we've tried really hard to do at Clozd is we've tried to create different interview mechanisms, whether it's a survey, a flex interview, a video, or a live interview to make sure that based on different parts of your pipeline, you actually can reach out to them and can give them a chance to speak up. I think first and foremost, if you're not even asking your customers or your prospects to speak up, it's going to be hard for them to offer a response.

So I think first and foremost that the idea of casting a wide net is really just making sure that you're even opening the door to feedback in the first place. But I think once you start to overcome that first hurdle of even just asking people, the next thing I like to run our customers through in terms of a step-by-step exercise is starting to figure out next why might people not be responding. So going back to this example about the salad, because obviously very personal to me, When I think about that instance, my willingness to speak up, which was nil essentially, which was nothing, me and my wife or both of us, our willingness to speak up was much higher because it was in the moment. So if I were to ask you, "Hey, how was your lunch today?" versus how was your lunch five and a half weeks ago that you had on that Monday, you're probably going to have a different level of answer. Right?

Oh, totally.

So for our customers, one of the things that we encourage a lot is to actually drive people to participate in these interviews, is you have to do it in the moment that they're making their decision. So if for example, someone makes a decision not to go with your company today, well, if you wait six months to ask them to interview, they're probably not going to participate because it's not fresh anymore, they don't care anymore. So I think first and foremost, finding opportunities to really ask those questions right when it's fresh will make it not only so that you get better answers, but they're actually more likely to participate as well. What are some of the things that you've seen help to drive participation rate with programs that you've run?

Yeah. One of the things that I think we've found to be very helpful, and how I would describe is you need to meet people where they are, I think especially early on, it's tempting to just rely strictly on email, for example. A lot of times we're used to responding to surveys or anything business-wise, a lot of times happens to email. We've found a lot of success here at Clozd by branching outside of some of those communications. We've obviously developed a type of interview that is much more asynchronous that allows people to answer on their own time.

Sometimes we are running projects with business owners that they're on their feet all day, they're not at their computer, and so it's hard for them to be able to sit down and maybe have a 30-minute conversation with one of our consultants. And so it might be easier for them to do more of an asynchronous type of interview or type of survey, but in order to even reach them, how do we do that? Obviously, email is still critical, but we'll reach out to them by phone and catch them in the moment, and a lot of times just conduct the interview there on those calls. Other times we'll reach out to them on LinkedIn. Especially in the business world, that's one area that a lot of people are very active and looking to engage with us on.

Yeah, I can see especially with business owners who aren't at their desk, that'd be really helpful. I think the last couple of things that I've noticed in the last year or so at Clozd, we've started to see a lot of programs who have very high participation rate, and it's largely because they're starting to introduce the idea of win-loss earlier in the sales funnel. So you can imagine if we were to reach out to a customer at the very end of their procurement process and ask about their feedback, but it's their first time hearing about the idea of win-loss, they might respond, they might not.

But if, for example, that company has actually introduce the idea of win-loss early in the sales process and said, "Hey, at the very end of this, we're going to have a company called Clozd reach out to you and do a win-loss interview, where we want you to give your full unbiased, fully candid feedback. Whether it's good or bad, we want to hear it," companies that are doing that early in the sales process, they're seeing really, really strong participation rate. So it's really fun to see how even across companies who are largely homogenous or similar participation in terms of their customer's willingness to participate, it can vary quite a bit.

Yeah, no, that's interesting. One thing that is staying with me, going back to even thinking of your story with the salad, I found it interesting that the chef did care enough to come out. It would've been so easy for the chef just to send his messenger, the waiter, waitress out to actually come solve that issue for them. Tying into this next part, we obviously want to talk about how we get more buy-in across the entire organization. How do we take win-loss just from being interesting information and really tie it into being actual digestible insights that people can actually do something with. What are your thoughts there? How can a company go from just being, "Oh, this is interesting information, this is something that the chef knows about," to making it widespread so that organizations can actually make changes?

Yeah. Well, one, I am glad you brought it up. I think it's one of the most common things in customers that often come to us, is that we have one person who is really excited about win-loss because they've seen it done before, but win-Loss is largely a new category. There are a lot of companies both in B2B and B2C that they haven't done this before. When I think about one interesting time in my life where I thought that I had created the best process ever and it just completely fell flat was actually early in my marriage. You're learning all about Mary and I today in our marriage, this is great, but early on in our marriage, we got married quite young. We were in our early, early twenties, and we had no money. So for us, it was really important that we had to keep very active track of our finances. And being a strategy finance consulting nerd, I was like, "I'm going to create the best budgeting system ever. It's going to track every single purchase. It's going to be perfect, all the spreadsheets, all the charts."

I bet she loved that.

Well, she did until her Apple Watch started telling her every conversation, it would tell her that her heart rate was going up and that she needed to go take a walk, so I learned quickly to tone it back on the conversations, but no, early on, so I built this amazing system. And then as soon as I stopped keeping track of it, I started to realize that nothing was happening, that I would check back in a month or two later, and none of the transactions were entered in. Even though the system itself was great, my wife was not bought into this idea of budgeting in this particular way. And when I really thought about what had happened here, I realized that although the system itself was good, I had a buy-in problem. I had someone who didn't understand how this would help them in their particular role in our marriage.

And I think often with our companies that we work with, we find very similar things, that win-loss, it takes work, it takes effort. Obviously when you're using a third-party vendor, we can take a lot of that work off the plate, but ultimately, if we're going to go deliver 100 or 200 interviews, but nobody actually reads it or consumes it, it's not going to lead to the change that companies want. So I think one really interesting question that I encourage our customers to ask themselves is, "If I were to leave my company today, would my company continue to use win-loss analysis? Have I actually taught them and encouraged them and gotten their buy-in so much that even if I'm not here, they're still going to want to do that?" And I think that honestly is one of the toughest questions that we have to ask ourselves, is whether the actions we're doing, are they just actions that we are doing or is it a muscle that we're actually helping to build for our organizations themselves?

Yeah. Well, even, I remember in the early days of Clozd when I started, a lot of our main points of contact were in the product marketing department. And we love working with product marketers. I think the product marketing role is so important because it touches so many different parts of the organization. And so win-loss analysis made a lot of sense originating from the product marketing department, because they did have, say on the go-to-market, they had say with customer success, with product, with sales, everyone, they had these different touch points. However, similar kind of like we were saying, if a product marketer left the organization, then we were really just up a creek trying to figure out what to do in order to continue with this win-loss program. What we've really seen over the evolution is the importance of bringing in other departments to really play a role within win-loss analysis.

And I think that's specifically with the product marketers, when they're able to bring in the sales team and get the buy-in from the sales team or maybe the buy-in from the customer success team, it just makes so much sense at that organization because sales, they're obviously interested because it ties to that bottom line of, "Hey, how can we go out and win more deals?" A lot of times we'll get off these interviews and, whether it's with a current customer, whether it's with a prospect, it's an opportunity and a literal playbook for them to go back and either potentially win back that deal. And we see that often. We see that so many times where a deal was marked as Clozd lost, and then it comes back and it's a win-back opportunity and they can go back and win it.

That is a very easy way of getting buy-in, is actually finding ways to deliver value in the moment, especially.

Yeah. Yeah. It totally ties to the ROI and justifies your program there. And so being able to pull in sales, being able to pull in customer success, not only does it help in terms of keeping that win-loss program, the momentum going, they see at the individual level and at their individual team levels direct benefit for a successful win-loss program.

That's really interesting. And Cam, I think one thing that I find very helpful when I'm working with a new company or a company who's new to win-loss analysis, I often like to walk them through what I call the adoption curve. So early on in adoption curve, you have awareness. Are you aware that this thing is happening or not? And you have adoption. You've already learned that it exists, and then you start to use it in some shape or capacity. And then you become an advocate. You've used it enough that you see value and that you actually have the appetite to continue doing it. And I think it's really important, especially when you're looking at your organization, to not think about your organization holistically as one entity, but to think about it almost department by department. If you in your role and in the marketing group or in your sales enablement function, if you understand the benefit of win-loss analysis, that's awesome.

You're probably already an advocate because you've seen the value that it can bring to your organization. But for someone in your sales function or someone in your finance or someone in your strategy function, they might not even be aware that you're talking to your customers. So you can imagine if you go out and start talking to individual customers or to opportunities and the sales rep on that deal has no idea that you're talking to them, they're going to be frustrated. They're going to wonder, "Are you going to screw up my deal? Are you going to mess something up for me?" That's-

Well, not only frustrated, but it's a missed opportunity for specific questions that we need to ask in this aspect. Right?

Yeah. So I think in particular, what I find very helpful is to really force your program to go through this adoption curve by department and figure out where are each of these departments at and how can I help move them along that curve? So I'm curious from your perspective, let's just focus on awareness first, what are some of the interesting things that you've seen done and programs that you've run over the past four years to help broader parts of the company be aware of win-loss analysis?

I really think in terms of awareness, the role that senior leadership plays is crucial. Right? It is so hard to drive a win-loss program across an entire organization unless we do have the buy-in from top leadership. And that's something even here within Clozd. We obviously run our own win-loss program here. There's that expectation from our senior leadership team that anytime a win-loss interview is published, it has the eyes of the entire company on that team. So being able to have that buy-in from the senior leadership, that it is an expectation, but then even just across the board being able to have, whether it's... A lot of our customers will go in and they'll run Tiger teams where it's leaders coming across from sales, marketing, product, representatives that can come together and use this data to help drive change, help drive awareness across the board. It's much more impactful than just someone, maybe an individual contributor within the product marketing org that's really trying to push this, but gets so much resistance from whether it's sales or whether it's from the product team. Having that upper leadership really drives a lot of accountability.

I love that, especially for programs that are just starting out, if you can ensure that your senior leadership team is aware and involved, a lot of that will cascade down.

Well, let me add one more thing to that as well, because obviously it's a great thought of it, "Oh, I want my senior leadership to be involved," but how do we actually get them involved? A couple examples of things that we've seen that have been successful, even going back to maybe that individual contributor that maybe is pushing the win-loss initiatives. We have a lot of our customers that they run a win-loss day at their company, and that win-loss day is where they are able to bring people in and say, "Hey, we want to be able to have representatives from the sales teams, we want to have representatives from the product team, maybe our sales team," and they actually spend the day digesting the win-loss insights, because as much as we want them to review all the interviews or the surveys, the insights that we do get, they are busy and they have a lot of things going on, and so they may not do that.

And so they've actually dedicated entire day to accomplishing this. And this has been interesting because once again, senior leadership has to be on board in order dedicate an entire day to this. Senior leadership talks about the importance of having this type of information, but then it also evolves into, "Oh, these different people can actually spend time with each other from other departments and evolve with this information."

I love that. Well, and if you imagine any sort of change that you might want to make from a win-loss program, it is very rare that it's going to be siloed into one department. Right?

Yeah.

Let's just imagine for a second that your win-loss program surfaces that your pricing needs some adjustment. Well, that small piece of feedback alone is going to touch your marketing team, it's going to touch your finance team, it's going to touch sales, it's going to touch customer success, so every single part of the business is going to be affected. So making sure that they're aware of what you're doing earlier on is going to make it so much easier on the back end to actually go drive that change that you want.

Totally.

A couple of things that came to mind for me that I've seen, especially early on in a program that can help quite a bit as well, there was one customer that I worked with earlier in the year who actually did a video from their CMO to the whole company. And it was really simple, but it was just an email to the whole company that said, "Hey, this is really important to our business. There's a lot of teams out there that are sports teams, and they all review their film. This is our film review, and we're going to watch this, and we're not going to be possessive or egotistical about it. We're going to be low ego. We're going to watch it and we're going to learn." And I think that little things like that can set such a strong tone for being able to understand why you're doing win-loss analysis in the first place.

Yeah, no, it's an excellent point. Even going back to our internal win-loss program here at Clozd, I mentioned that it's the expectation for leadership for us to review this. We have a Slack channel where all of the feedback is published into a Slack channel and the entire company's in this Slack channel, and it's fascinating to see the conversations that will happen in the threads of those Slack channels. So whether it's Slack or Teams, whatever it may be, I think even going back to the point we talked about earlier with our clients, we want to meet them where they are, I think it's important to meet the internal stakeholders where they are as well, be able to share that insight specifically where they are working, whether that is Slack, whether it is the actual portal for their win-loss data. And so that could be another area that really helps drive that awareness throughout the entire company.

I love it. The other nice thing about Slack too, you can throw memes in there. Right?

That's true.

So if you get some spicy commentary from one of your customers, the memes, they're on fire. That's great.

Yeah. Let me ask you this. So we get awareness, we get people bought in, people are in the channel, they're talking about all this data, how do you actually get from point A to point B in terms of awareness advocacy?

One, I think first and foremost, you have to understand that it's just going to take time. These people that you're working with in your business, they have day jobs, they have other responsibilities, so they might not be as invested in win-loss analysis as you from the very beginning.

As much as we want them to be.

That's okay. They'll learn, don't worry. But what's really important is just to give them bits and pieces over time. So I think very tactically, to get someone from awareness to adoption to advocacy, I think first and foremost, make sure that they have access to the Clozd platform, make sure they have access to the win-loss insights more broadly. It is really hard for someone to adopt it in their role if they don't have an opportunity to adopt it in their role. If they're constantly waiting around to be told by you what to have learned from the program, it makes it very difficult for them to actually apply it in a way that internalizes it for them.

So I think, one, give them access. Two, I think it's very helpful to actually train people on how it is relevant for their role. So you can imagine if you're a sales leader and you come into a win-loss program for the first time, you might not know what you're supposed to take out of it, you might not know how it applies to your role. So I think one thing I've seen work really well is actually having the win-loss program owner at the company go in and do a training specifically for that department and say, "Okay, as a sales leader, here's how you should be consuming this. Here's what's relevant to you. Here's what you can learn from it." And little trainings like that over time can help to reinforce the value and can really make it so that when you find things about the sales process in the future, those people are already aware of it and they can come to the same conclusions themselves as well.

Yeah, it's almost too simple at times where if you think about it, if I'm a UX/UI designer, the best way that you can help me improve the product from a UX/UI perspective is to make sure that the customer feedback that is shared about the UX and UI is in my hands. And I think that's a lot of times when we're doing these win-loss programs, we sometimes keep it so close to the chest and we're afraid to let this information out. In the thousands of interviews we've done, I think we can agree that the number of times that an interview just attacks a single persons-

Is so rare.

...it's few and far between. It just doesn't happen as frequently as I think sometimes think it will, as they are starting off a win-loss program. And so that ability to really get the insights that we do have, the feedback, whether it's through interviews, whether it's survey into the right hands, I think it's absolutely critical because then they can actually go out and solve the problems that they need to. Sometimes people come to us and be like, "Hey, how do I change my pricing model? How do I do this?" And we don't feel like we're the best people to help with that. We can tell them what's wrong with their pricing model. We can tell them what customers are saying about it. When it comes to making the changes within the company, the right people are actually the internal stakeholders, the people that will consume the data.

That's totally right. And I think the last point you made there is very important, where you actually have to drive change with this program. If the whole point of your win-loss program is just to find really cool customer quotes and then put them on a wall and do nothing about it, you're not going to get value out of win-loss analysis. The whole point is to actually drive change within your business. And I think that's where I've seen people become advocates of Clozd or win-loss analysis more broadly, is because it's actually driven change in their business.

You can imagine if your executive team is struggling with net retention and they're struggling with gross retention or churn or whatever aspect of that, if you can find a customer insight that helps change your customer success motion or helps change your licensing model or your entire account management structure, if you can make that change and it drives results, all of a sudden you're going to have really big advocates of win-loss analysis. And if you continue to do it, you will continue to drive positive change and net retention or reductions in turn or anything along those lines as well.

Totally. Well, and speaking specifically to the owners of win-loss analysis, the people that we work with, we have seen many, many of our clients, our direct points of contacts, be promoted to different parts of the company based off of what they found through the win-loss analysis. And it's neat because it gives someone a chair at a table that they may have not had to seat at to be begin with. And not only are they at that table, but they're bringing insights that everyone else at that table is incredibly interested in. And being able to champion that win-loss analysis, that cause, I think it really not only helps the entire company, but specifically for those owners of win-loss analysis, it boosts them up in their career as well.

Absolutely. Well, Cam, we've covered a lot of different parts of win-loss analysis today. I think as you and I have gone back and forth about what to talk about in this session in particular, the whole idea of this is to share best practices, tips and tricks. I think it's really important for people who are either new to win-Loss, whether you're new to win-loss, whether you've been in doing it for a little while, or whether you are an experienced win-loss practitioner, the most important things are to make sure that you're giving your buyers an opportunity to speak candidly, that you're actually reaching out to them, that you're giving them opportunities to speak up, that you're encouraging them to participate, and then you're also creating a system internally in your organization where that feedback can live, that it can flow through and actually drive change.

Yeah, I totally agree. Well, Brady, thanks so much for the conversation today.

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