Dani Talbot: My name is Dani Talbot and I'm the Head of Marketing at Clozd. I'm here with John Hanks, our Head of Sales, and we're going to talk about how we use buyer feedback to fuel our go-to-market strategy. Well, to kick us off, tell us about yourself.

John Hanks: Yeah. So John Hanks, I head up our sales team here at Clozd. Been here about three and a half years. Prior to that at my former company, what's interesting that will come up today is I was a customer of Clozd, so I had an opportunity to sit in the chair of a sales leader and consume sales data. I've got a lot of thoughts as to what helped me and what was interesting about that, but I have the regular sales background. I started as an SDR, was an AE, was an enterprise account executive, sales leadership, and grew into that. So, I'm excited to chat today. It's going to be good. What about you?

I have a similar career path to you, but in marketing. It's a parallel path. I've always been in B2B SaaS, always held marketing roles. I've held roles and functions like partner marketing, demand jet, field marketing, and so I think my background in marketing has given me a lot of empathy for the challenges that marketers face. I know how hard it is to get alignment and buy-in from our friends in sales or get visibility into buyer feedback, so it's really exciting to be in this role because a lot of those challenges that I was facing in former roles, I'm able to help solve in this one.

Great.

So, how are you using Clozd on your team at a high level?

Yeah, we do a lot here at Clozd. I love our program. I'll answer that question maybe differently than you might expect. The first thing that we do to make sure that we have a successful program and honestly, one of the only things that as a sales leader, we have control over is to make sure that there's good Salesforce compliance. That sounds like a no-duh statement, but in order to have a successful win-loss program, you have to make sure that there's good data in Salesforce or in your CRM to begin with, and that starts with good contact information. So your primary contact, your champion, any influencers in the deal, that will be the people that we want to talk to or have an understanding of why you win or lose. So, that's actually really important. That's something that can be driven from a sales leadership perspective, is if we can get good information in there, that's a really good place to start.

The other place that we talk a lot about is just being pipeline representative, so making sure that we have a good understanding of all of our pipeline. We handle it pretty interestingly here at Clozd, so we look at new business and we look at existing business and then we look at won and lost or renew and churn. So depending on where they come through in the pipeline will be how we go talk to them, whether it's through a survey or through what we have called flex interviews, or through a live conversation, live interview. We're lucky at Clozd because we do the majority of those through live interviews, so that's been super helpful for us, but we want to get full pipeline coverage and talk to as many people as we possibly can to get good representative data on why we're losing.

I think that's great, and we love to be your partners on the other side of it. I think we also like the pipeline representation because we're able to see the other side of the coin. You're looking for sales-specific feedback. We're looking for that marketing-specific feedback, and then it's those points where we meet in the middle.

So on that note, in regards to marketing, you obviously have specific use cases. I'm interested to have you walk us through that.

Yep. So there's three primary ways that we use Clozd here on our marketing team. The first is demand generation, the second is product marketing, the third is content marketing. So on that demand generation use case, we are looking at our own win-loss data to validate our ICP so that we can more precisely target our buyer and improve the down funnel conversion. In a former role of mine, before I came to Clozd, I led a field marketing team. I would sit with our head of sales every quarter, and we were consistently meeting our pipeline goals but not our revenue and we couldn't figure out why our win rate was so bad. We would go back and forth and try to figure it out. We would ask the sales team, we would look at our CRM and the data was all over the place. It was really hard for me as the marketer to figure out what was going on, and so I was burning time and resources trying to drive the win rate up, and source more quality pipeline.

When we got access to closed data in that former role, we realized it was none of the things we had been talking about. It was totally different reasons than what we had been considering, and that was eye-opening for me as a marketer to realize I had no idea what was actually happening in the buyer experience. I was so reliant on the sales team, I hadn't actually gotten access to the buyer's point of view, and so since that point and since I came to Clozd, I've really pivoted our demand gen strategy so that we start with that buyer feedback. We start with our own win-loss data to drive our demand gen strategy. The second use case is product marketing. That's a really common one for win-loss. We use our own data to help us inform our product positioning, product messaging, and product launches. We work with our friends on the product team, we get a lot of feedback about our product so that we can more clearly understand what our buyers want and then adapt accordingly.

The third is content marketing. We rebranded earlier this year, and it was a fun project to do. The first place we started with that rebrand was looking at our own win-loss insights. We took a look at where buyers perceived we were strong and where buyers perceived we were weak. So, we crafted our messaging to combat those perceived weaknesses and then doubled down on the perceived strikes. If we notice that there's feedback that customers don't know about a certain feature or product that we offer, our team can double down and create content to address those concerns and make sure that we highlight our own offerings and drive awareness through our channels.

Great.

At Clozd, we believe that transparency around sharing win-loss data garners a culture of winning. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you think about that?

Yeah, I love this. It's one of my favorite things about the data that we get, is that data shared broadly is data that can be acted on far easier. So at Clozd, when we get win-loss feedback, we have Slack Channels that are set up that we get automatic notifications integrated with Slack. We have a general Slack Channel that every single interview that takes place goes to that Slack Channel. Anybody at Clozd can go read that interview. You click into it and it brings you into the platform. It's super, super helpful for everyone to have access to that information. We also have specific data for specific individuals that can be triggered to keep people. For instance, product.

Product has tags that we have inside the platform that auto notify them when their product is brought up, so that they can have specific quotes and customer feedback in regards to that. Our program manager's team runs our renewal process and churn. Anytime that comes up, we have specified Slack Channels that come through there so that everybody knows the information that's relevant to them, but also if you are not in product or you're not a program manager, you can just see what our customers are talking about. It really helps drive change. There's really a lot of opportunities that pop up where we're commenting to each other saying, "This happened in a win-loss interview. We should do something." That's been super helpful as we've done that.

We love that too. I've noticed that my team, our marketing team also gets into the interviews, because they see the alerts that they come through. They click on them and they're commenting to each other, "Hey, did you see this? Did you notice this about the deal?" It's created this culture of transparency on our team and encouraged this drive for us to get better and double down where we see opportunities or threats.

Yeah. I would also say just one more thing to that. We have functionality that auto-flags something at risk or a win-back opportunity or something like that. We get notifications when those things happen, and so we're able to go act quickly, get the people involved. That's been super helpful, to go talk to an at-risk customer, make sure that we immediately go take care of that. So, that's been really helpful for us.

Okay. So shifting gears into a topic I love to talk about, let's talk about competitors and competition. As a marketing leader, when you're looking at competitive deals, what do you look for specifically that helps you in your role?

I know both of our teams regularly use Clozd for competitive insights. Our team is constantly analyzing the data to understand which competitors we go up against most frequently, where we're winning, and where we're losing, so that we can better understand how marketing can help close those gaps.

If we're constantly coming up against a competitor, we want to dig in to figure out can we better enable our sales team with a talk track to help them go up against that competitor? Or maybe to the earlier point about content marketing, are there gaps that we need to better message where a competitor is messaging this part of their functionality better than we are and we can go and double down, create new content, and address those concerns? We believe your best competitive intelligence comes from your buyers.

Yeah. I totally agree. I love this topic because we use this a lot in sales. We come across competition all the time. At my former company, when I was using Clozd, there was a competitor's tab that we can go to and we can see all of the recent deals that we came up against a specific competitor. So when we're in a deal and we know we're up against a specific competitor, we go to Clozd and say, "What were the primary reasons why we lost to this competitor over the last five deals?" Or, "What did we do well inside of those deals that helped us to win?" Our win rate skyrocketed when we did that, and that was super, super helpful. There's another really cool story that's kind of like, we think we know our competition when in reality we maybe don't and win-loss can really help with this.

We actually had a client of ours at Clozd that were convinced that they were losing to a specific competitor. They deployed Clozd. We went and did a ton of interviews, and turns out, that competitor was not coming up frequently at all. Also turns out that it was just the first competitor listed in the dropdown. So as salespeople, again coming back to this, we'll go mark what's easiest sometimes to just get through and mark that as Clozd lost or Clozd won, and move on. It may not be entirely accurate. So going and talking to your buyers, understanding that competition can be super helpful.

I've had the exact same thing happen in a former role where we as a company spun up an entire campaign to go and combat a perceived competitor. Now looking back, I'm not actually sure how much we were even going up against that competitor or if we were just relying on the sales team to tell us that we were. I love using the data because it gives us something to stand on where we can actually look at the feedback we've gotten from buyers and feedback from sales reps to dig down to that competitor level.

Yeah, so true. What other insights are you looking for in a win-loss program?

So my favorite question that we ask in our interviews is, "How did you hear about us?" Oftentimes, we'll hear that somebody heard about us at an event or on a sponsored podcast. We don't know that. If you came through on our website in an inbound form, of course we know that that's how you got in touch with us. But what we'll hear oftentimes is that somebody saw us at an event, they walked past our booth, noticed us, didn't have budget, then went and got the budget and re-engaged with us. I would never know that if we weren't able to go to our buyer and ask them. Having access to that data helps me to better validate where to spend our budget, where to spend our resources, and which of our channels are most effectively driving awareness.

It's very difficult to track which channels are working from an awareness standpoint, and that question has really helped me to validate that. I'm also looking for general feedback about their experience with sales and marketing. So we will get feedback around which assets they're engaging with. Customers will tell us whether they read some of our guides and those were useful or they'll give us constructive feedback. Our team looks at individual data, and we also look at the aggregate data over time. Then we use that to go and better adapt our content so that it's working for the needs of our prospects and our customers.

Love it.

So, what are some ways that having a win-loss program has helped the sales org?

Yeah. There's lots of ways. I'm going to stick to just one, but it's a really important one, and that's enablement. There's a couple different facets of enablement. You've got org enablement and then you've got individual enablement. When it comes to the organization as a whole, I have a monthly all-hands sales meeting that I leverage win-loss data in. The way that I go about doing that is I actually look at our decision drivers or the primary reasons why people are saying that we're losing deals or that we're winning deals, and I can actually dig specifically into sales, right? And I can go see from a sales experience perspective, from a knowledge and expertise, from a are we providing enough value or ROI. So I actually see our weakest points, and I develop our enablement based on that. So, it really helps form our roadmap for enablement for the org as a whole.

This is generally what we need to focus on. So, another one that I'm super excited about is this Ask Clozd feature that we just released. I've had beta access to it, so I had it a little bit early. But when it comes to individual development, one of the cool things that I prompted Ask Clozd with was I was going into a one-on-one and I said, "What can I tell this rep to work on based on their win-loss feedback from the last six months?" Ask Clozd wrote out two or three things that I could focus on with that specific rep, and it blew my mind. I was so excited by it. It can help me coach individuals at the individual rep level and not just high level. So, it was very specific to this rep. Then I can also build general enablement plans. I love the enablement that we can do as a sales team based on just win-loss feedback. It's been game-changing for us.

We love Ask Clozd as well. I think what happens with a win-loss program frequently is that you end up with a lot of data and it's awesome data, and sometimes I'm just looking for something really specific, and it would take me a while to parse through reports or to click around until I get what I want. With Ask Clozd, I have been asking, "Hey, what are the top reasons where marketing is influencing those decision drivers?" So the marketing reasons we win or lose, so that I can better understand and calibrate accordingly. Ask Clozd has made that so simple for our team and we've just loved it as well.

I think we're all getting used to this AI world where we're used to being very formal in how we Google things. With AI, you can talk to it as a person and I love it. You can interact. You can ask really specific questions or general questions, and then you can follow up. It's been amazing. It's going to be great.

I totally agree. John, thanks so much for joining to talk about how you use win-loss here at Clozd. It's been so helpful for me to hear your perspective and to be able to share my own perspective as well. I've had a great time.

It's been a lot of fun. Appreciate it.

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