Clozd: Today, we're going to how win-loss analysis fits into voice-of-the-customer programs. Laura, we'd love to start by hearing about you and your role at G2.

Laura Horton: Absolutely. At G2, I lead our product marketing team. We’re a small but mighty team that oversees both product and partner marketing efforts. We do all the traditional product marketing roles of launching new things, working with the product team, and launching integrations and features—but we also oversee our win-loss program and a lot of the collection of our customer voice and customer sentiment.

With G2 being a feedback collection company, what made you decide to start a win-loss program—and did you have any pushback at the beginning?

We're really passionate about customer feedback, as you would imagine, and I think that customer feedback can come in many different forms. So of course we do use G2 to get feedback on G2 and reviews from our clients, but we find that something like win-loss captures a different part of the experience and a different part of the process. So we really wanted to validate some assumptions and hypotheses we had about what was happening, particularly during the sales process and the renewal process.

And we find that when people leave reviews on G2, for example, or maybe talk to us during their customer lifecycle, they're usually sharing more of their experience using the tool—what they love about it, what we can improve on. But they're not really sharing as much about their experience going through the sales process—maybe why they bought, what messaging resonated with them, things like that. So by adding a formal win-loss program, we could track some of those trends about what was happening on the front-end—why we were winning and losing, if competitors were coming into play—and get feedback from that part of the lifecycle that was maybe a gap for us before.

Because there's different moving parts, how do you work your win-loss program into your overall voice-of-the-customer program?

We have a couple of different touchpoints. So we have a traditional win-loss program, where we have in-depth interviews, which is obviously smaller scale but deeper, so going really deep to understand why a customer purchased or renewed—or didn't. And we use that to inform, cross-functionally, a lot of our stakeholders and initiatives, whether it's something that seems off in the sales process itself that we can flag to our sales team, or whether it's a product improvement that we're starting to hear frequent questions about. And then we supplement that with other types of voice-of-the-customer feedback. Our product team spends a lot of time sharing prototypes and interviewing customers in that type of setting.

We have a customer health survey that we do just to get a gut check throughout the relationship on how they're feeling. And then, of course, things like the review program that we have from our own product, drinking our own champagne with that. So I think different customers prefer to interact in different ways or give you feedback in different ways, and there are lots of different channels that you can activate. Then the trickier part becomes synthesizing some of that, so that you're looking for trends across those different parts of the program and really identifying those key things that you need to take action on.

Are you mostly focusing on current customers? Do you also reach out to potential customers as part of your voice-of-the-customer program?

We do talk with potential customers through our win-loss program, in the sense that we interview lost customers and lost renewals. So in those cases, they unfortunately aren't customers right now, but of course, we're always looking for win-back opportunities or improvements we can make to better meet their needs in the future.

How do you go from gathering those insights to then leveraging the insights within your organization?

From a really tactical standpoint, we have some things that have worked well for us. We share our win-loss insights with most of the leadership and management team at multiple levels—all the way from executives down to our frontline sales managers. One of the best ways we found to build that connectivity is through a Slack channel. So we have a Slack channel where new interviews flow in from our win-loss program, and then we see a lot of natural activity. Just people see: ‘Oh, there's something new in the channel. I'm going to read it.’

We get a lot of executive engagement there in the comments. And then we can also use that as a way to proactively tag and alert people so they can read one that might be specific to their segment, or a piece of constructive feedback that they could deliver to their team. At this time, we don't open that channel to everybody at the company. We do keep it to leaders and managers, just because sometimes there could be sensitive information about a deal that comes through or tricky feedback to deliver, and we'd rather have the manager have that coaching moment and deliver some of that feedback versus having it out there for everyone and their peers to read. So we have a lot of transparency, but we’re also strategic about how we've created that connection.

That makes sense. Another question about sharing the data: Which cross-departmental teams are looking at the feedback?

The program is run by our product marketing team and our marketing team, so of course we're in there. Our product team is in there quite heavily, looking for those opportunities to provide more value or maybe for sticking points that we're hearing about frequently. We ask a lot of questions about why they decided to buy or not buy to try to understand if there are product deficits or areas we should lean in even more, so they love that. And then the sales leadership team has access. I will say that the sales managers are busy, so they're probably more responsive when we call out, share, or tag them on something. But our executive team and our senior leaders are very proactive about reading all the interviews that come in and the reviews that come in on G2, and they want to be close to that voice of the customer, so we're really lucky to have that level of executive engagement. A lot of times, they're commenting on things before I even read it. So really, as soon as things come in, they're eager to get that connection to the customer.

We've talked about who's looking at the insights and how you use the Slack channel. How do you make sure that you're engaging with these stakeholders at the right time?

In addition to the Slack channel, which is more real-time, we do quarterly roll-ups as well. So we'll put together a quarterly report of trends that we're seeing, key loss reasons, key win reasons. We'll usually include some customer verbatims in there. Again, just tying everything back to the voice of the customer so our team can get a feel for not just the stats, but really what people are saying and how they're feeling in these moments. And that's a great place for us to bring in, again, those insights from other parts of the program—like what we see in our monthly cadence of renewal surveys that goes out, or trends we see through other feedback channels. 

And we try to pair that with the actions we’re taking. So we usually include a table that includes what we heard last quarter and what we've created in response—whether it's a new asset, some new training, new messaging, things like that. That way we can show progress, not just that we're collecting the data, but also that we're using that data to improve our business and get closer to our goals.

How do you make sure that the insights are relevant to different departments or different levels of stakeholders within your organization?

I think that comes down to us being proactive about getting them in front of the right people. We’ve been doing win-loss with Clozd for over a year now, and recently, as we were looking at how we can improve, we did write up some rules of engagement and things like that, so we wanted to get a feel for how teams wanted to interact and how we could be a good partner to them. Questions like, ‘Do you want to go in and read things and tag your teammates, or would you like us to proactively tag you and deliver those insights?’ So we have different working norms with different teams to ensure that we're engaging the right people, and we did go through the effort of writing some of that out so that we can have clean agreements on who’s responsible for actually engaging with and acting on the feedback.

Before we close here, I wanted to ask you what's next? How do you continue to evolve your win-loss program?

I think what we're working on now is going deeper with some of the questions we ask in the program. I think going into this, we had some big projects on the horizon—packaging changes, things like that. And we had an inkling of what people wanted or where they were getting stuck, but we wanted to validate that with data. And so in the first year, a big part of it was collecting and validating some of that. Now that we know what some of our common challenges are, we're wanting to go deeper to be more actionable.

So we are engaging right now, for example, with our customer success leaders to try to understand what would make the data more useful for them and what level of specificity do they need to be able to make changes to their processes that might support a better overall customer experience. So it feels like in some ways, we understand a lot of what we were looking to understand at the highest levels. We're not right now seeing a lot of change in that, say, month to month, quarter to quarter. We're seeing common themes that keep emerging, so now, we're trying to dig deeper into those common themes to really understand even more about the customer pain or customer success.

Lastly, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about the overall value of your win-loss program and within that, in the bigger scope of the voice of customer program for G2.

Yeah. I think as I said, of course, we're passionate about voice of customer and having that authentic and varied source of feedback. So when we look at the value overall, we're really looking at how can it impact our total go-to-market. So ideally, we would want to see some kind of harder metrics like improved win rates and things like that with some of the changes that we might be making, acceleration through the process if there were points where people were getting stuck, but we also love learning from our successful customers and looking at that as, okay, what makes someone a successful customer? What is maybe a best fit customer trend that we're seeing in certain types of customers? Or certain actions that those customers are taking, because we can develop those into best practices that can be scaled across other customers, so if we've got some customers who are really successful and have come up with great things that we can share with others, we love to take that real user feedback.

I think people like to learn from their peers and either invite them to work with us on a guide for something, or just take those learnings to roll out across our wider customer base. So you have to get out and hear what people are saying. I think you can't always just assume, even if you've been somewhere really long time, or you're really, really deep and familiar with a product. You can't always assume that you know everything that your customers are thinking. And so that constant flow of customer feedback from people who are using and deep everyday users of your product, as well as from those decision makers who might be part of the sales process really helps just ensure that what you're out there marketing and selling is hitting the mark with your real users and not maybe something that you're just inventing in your head, something fluffy.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Well, it's great to hear how G2 is going about listening to their customers, new and existing, won and lost and taking those insights to overall continue to improve your business. I think that's a great example for others building their own win-loss program, so thank you for being willing to share these insights and for being part of Win-Loss Week.

Of course. Thank you for having me.

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