Clozd: Hey everyone, I'm Monica Privette-Black and I'm a program manager here at Clozd. Today I'd love to introduce you to Hila Lauterbach. She's the VP of product marketing over at Scorpion. We'll just be talking a little bit about how Scorpion is getting sales buy-in and participation with win-loss and ultimately boosting cross-functional collaboration.

Hila, let's start off. I'd love to have you tell us a little bit about your role in the org and a little bit about Scorpion.

Hila Lauterbach: It's great to see you. I'm Hila, I'm leading the product marketing at Scorpion. Scorpion is a digital marketing company. We're focused on solution for combining AI products alongside services and expert support. We do it for local businesses in the home services, legal, and healthcare verticals. My team is really honestly growing significantly this year, which really enable us to focus in more impactful product in the company and touch more side of the business.

Generally in this role, I supervise and lead all product and solution, go-to-market and launches, work very closely with our partnership team to launch new solution, obviously with our co-work marketing team as well. I'm leading the win-loss and shared programs that we're going to speak about today, building new revenue stream, working alongside the PLG team, product and partnership and many more and also working on our pricing and packaging in Hila's focus on the vertical solution, which is going to be big shift this year going deeper in subverticals as well.

Great. Then I know you've been doing win-loss for a while now before win-loss was cool. Before you started working with us here at Clozd, tell us a little bit more about what you were doing as far as win-loss and what made you decide to work with a third party.

Sure. In the past in a few companies, I used to work with internal quite small teams to drove the win-loss analysis. One part of that was to schedule the interview based on the Salesforce data, working internally with team to integrate the sales workers representative, insights, and analyze the knowledge with our research teams. Usually, I used to limit this program to once a year readout, mainly focus on the sales aspect of the business and less on the cross org overall impact. I think that as you can imagine, there are a few challenges that are common when you do it internally.

The number one challenge for me was really secured participation from lost clients. As you can imagine, this is really hard to get incentive for a prospect that was lost and really maintain this high response rate. This was something that came along a lot. Another issue was the resource allocation and the element of collecting the data. When you do interviews like that and conduct the data and analysis, it's really required some type of specialized skills, rigorous analysis, and some other element that you don't always have in your team and it's really strained them down.

We needed to be very sensitive with the information, ensuring that we collaborated in the right data storage we already had in our system, and all these elements of data security, collection. Obviously, what I did not mention, the biases that might happen and some challenges with consistency in with methodology made us understand that we need to consider, I would say all these elements. To work with a company, that third party in this case, that has the better solution, worked from this field for many years, has the best practices and how to lead to the success rates we wanted to see.

To be honest, after understanding that and doing some couple of programs, it was a no-brainer to make a decision to really elevate the program and in this case work with Clozd.

No, and I feel like it's such a good point. As I always see, if you spend so much time on the operational side just getting people on the interviews and you don't have as much time for this strategy, you can't share the feedback because there's not as much feedback to share. One of the other things that I feel like is really unique about Scorpion is you were such a data-driven company. I very seldom see a company who is so focused on collecting data and actually actioning on it. I'd love to have you tell us a little bit about just your current feedback collection process in addition to what win-loss looks like for you.

For sure. I will say that this is across company, it's bigger than product marketing, and I have a great partnership in the research team under the brand team in our company. Great people, there is specifically Robert Rund that leads that, so I want to mention him. Generally, the way we do it, the analysis process begins with qualitative insight. How we do it, we take knowledge and data from Salesforce, internal reports we have, we ran survey in Qualtrics. The interesting stuff that we see that although surveys always have this question mark, is it valuable enough or not? We see about 10% response rates and it's quite robust surveys, so we get a lot of knowledge out of that.

Once all the quantitative data collected and we concluded on the data and analysis, we run this together and combine the data we have from the analysis with the qualitative insight that we get from you, in the interviewing club, our other internal resources and knowledge, and our sellers interview and focus group we do internally. We also use the course recording analysis like... have the same functionality that used for these needs.

This really help us as a company to synthesize everything we get and to start having better insight and theme to tell more of a comprehensive story and narrative that we can run later along the readouts.

Given that you do surveys and you've got the course recordings, what do you feel like that the Clozd interviews really add or supplement to your current process? What are the additional insights yet you're getting from those?

I would say multiple. I'll try to theme it for a few areas. First of all, it can help us to really identify the patterns and the trends in the industry. What are the recurring themes that we see? What are the main pain points coming along the prospect and the customer at the end of the day? What are the desired outcomes? Secondary, and I think it's really interesting, we're trying to analyze the internal journey of the client/prospect in this case to really better understand the messaging and product focus that we need to highlight for each one of the stages. When I break it down high level here, what are the clients need?

Assessment. What happened in the first phase? What happened later when the client cared? What do they need to learn before they actually meet our sellers? During the sales pitch, what is important to highlight for the sellers? What is considered evaluated versus our solution? What are competitors speaking, what do they care about? Trying to figure out all these aspects along the line, and also get learning about leader training and win-back opportunities.

Other side of that is really see the pinpoint commonalities and differences between the closed win and closed loss. Trying to better understand the key decision drivers, what helped them to get the decision, what were into consideration. We differentiated to specifically for us the verticals path. Specific insight, it's really important we go along the different line of the business trying to understand what happened in every subvertical in different industry and better understand the drivers there. You help us to also identify the competitors overall in the industry and the market perceptions of us versus them.

I would say that in the end of the day we get active learnings with better idea how we could implement them through the marketing product and other business unit in the company. I would say all in all a great opportunity for us to really review the marketing and sales effort that we do through the year. How to impact the work, how is the perception look like, and really learn better about the client perception, expectation, and how to both celebrate the wins and improve the places that really need to strengthen and learn more from.

You sound like a very classic product marketer, sitting in between the perception and the sales, and even customer success, right in between just a little bit of everything. I was actually talking to your team earlier and mentioned that I feel like you guys are the messengers. You're going from department to department and doing such a phenomenal job sharing these insights. Tell us a little bit about how do you share from department to department and what does that look like?

Sure. I would say the buy-in is so crucial, something that I learned through the years with this program that you need to really start with engaging cross-functional people that you think might be your champions. This is something I'll speak more later, but this will be a nugget. Generally, we put together a semi-annual data and insight presentation based on all the findings that we have and we schedule about 90-minutes readout twice a year. In this readout, we share this presentation and key findings. We also share it later across several different departments. We share with sales, corporate marketing, customer success, product delivery, and obviously leadership.

We also have a Slack channel, something along the line of heritage fields so we share the findings from the interview, some knowledge that can be actionable and also asking reps to share with us their knowledge and what do they hear in their conversation. Generally, the win-loss and specifically the chain data, I didn't even mention that but we do review the chain analysis. It's really spread across the organization, specifically followed the chain with a client retention plan, upsell plan with corporate marketing, and customer success.

We bring all this insight and knowledge all the time to discussion in routine basis. Every conversation, it has some mention of that or a lot of them have some mention of that. Obviously, sharing with leadership and in the case of sharing investors and private equity that support us to really ensure that we have the commitment and involvement across the entire work. I think that I said it earlier to my team, I think it's buzzing. It creates some interest, discussion across the company by itself at some point.

I love it and I think that's biased. I think that's the point of win-loss, is get people talking and we're bringing voice of customer, voice of prospect, voice of loss customer, and then buzz it internally and you get to action on it, so I love that word. Looking at how things have evolved over the past few years of working with us here at Clozd, I know last year we had the sales department and organization brought in when it comes to the win-loss and the feedback there, but this year we've got them even more involved really from the very beginning before the win-loss outreach. Tell us a little bit more about how did you do it and how's that been?

I would say that the number one win is really to involve sales early. I'll start with this and jump in. Generally, we engage and involve sales leader early in the process. How we do it? I would say it's a challenge. In the past, it was harder and what we learned from ourself is just to really less work in silos and ensure that we have this longer dialogue early in the process, ensuring that we speak with top sellers, and bringing them in very early to show them the system, the demo, and how everythings work and make them the champions of this program.

We use Clozd to demonstrate the relevancy of the data for them. Tech sellers on our key findings today, ensuring that they're really familiar with the system and know where to find what they need. We actually ask them to edit and finalize the interview guide with us involving them in a way that reflect what they care about, what do they want to hear in this conversation, what do they want to make sure that we ask and not missing from what they care about?

We also have these findings via the Slack channels. We talked about it in the past, but I would say that something important for me is the consistency in really framed everything in a positive way. When we come to this readout with sellers and open the discussion, we always ensure that it's coming in respectful light. We open with the main goals. Why are we doing that? How do we agree to support you in your future conversation with prospecting clients? We celebrate the seller's win and if we have a good quote and shout out from clients, we use those to drive the conversation. Never ever pointing fingers or mention seller's name in a negative aspect. Just really very clear about using this insights for learning, improvement and a way to support seller for the long term in their future interactions.

This is something that for us was very, very meaningful. I would say that another element is the communication. How do we really use the insights? Because data can be overwhelming. Really share high level insights with them during post-sales kickoff and later following good newsletter and meetings and their drumbeat and all these elements. We schedule this readout that they mentioned and follow them up with actionable insight slide that we send, how to really use the tomorrow morning. It's really important for us not just to give them the data, but being able to translate it in a way that they can use in their calls.

Also, focusing on providing this tailor recommendation that started with sales, but growing to other teams, working with marketing sales, enabling the audit to really improve messaging processes, training some specific slide in... stuff that can really be useful for them.

One of the things you said that I love is that you had them help from the very beginning with the interview guide, and I think it makes people more bought-in and interested because they specifically want to know XYZ, you've discussed that, and now when the interviews come out, they want to see right, well, what was the result? What did people actually say?

I think that is such a phenomenal idea. How do you feel working with sales has really helped the relationship between product marketing and the sales team?

I think the number one thing that we've got working with them together through the win-loss is really strengthen the relationship and bring much more trust between product marketing and sales overall. I think that for me, just showing the sellers that their success, their focus area is our top priority, that we support them on very in-depth, dedicated works for the year and really committed to their sales success. I think this was number one for us to really build this trust and relationship.

It's really opened up new channels of communication, directed many sellers, not just with sales leaders over the years, allowing them to really be more involved in our work in the interview guide, as I mentioned, shared their learnings, come to us with ideas and what they think we should focus on, foster more requests and collaboration. I would say that it's exceeded the relationship among the win-loss and opened this kind of relationship and collaboration across the board from events that we do together, to how to improve sales velocity in specific area, how to think about vertical solution. It was a great foundation to open much more deeper discussion.

You say that just you're focused on their success. To me it makes me think, no wonder they want for you to go out and get win-loss information because you see their success as your success and vice versa. Of course, I would want that kind of feedback if I was a seller as well.

In general, one of the struggles that I've seen just with win-loss in general is things being siloed, but you have truly mastered that cross department involvement, getting people involved, getting them to know, to talk, to buzz around the data like you said. I'd love to hear just any final thoughts that you have on how to work cross-functionally around your win-loss program to actually drive outcomes.

It's interesting, we had that conversation internally. Once in a while, we do debriefing. One of the key findings is going top down but also bottom up. In this case, what I mean top down in the chain analysis we do, we get this discussion came from our private equity, our board, our CEO. It was great conversation to have, how do we look at this? How do we actually build a great program together to have better retention? It came from them. In other places when the win-loss is coming from the ground, it's really great to get this kind of involvement from sellers and create, as I mentioned earlier, championship.

Really thinking about all these aspects. For me, it's also to create a clear program and really define objective and set expectation across the organization and what are the goals, what are we trying to achieve, ensure that we have really good exposure for the insights and key deliverable across the entire organization, as I mentioned leadership, but also get this buy-in other layers of the organization.

What is interesting is the consistency. We take this readout, being consistent through the year in regular times that they can expect that and also understanding that different departments has different needs. What sellers do is not exactly what corporate marketing or the product need. When you think about sellers, I just want to ensure that I'm giving them the clear recommendation for demos, new slides, how to use better talk to track. When it comes to corporate marketing, you think about ideas for better positioning and messaging, some of the product and solution, clear ICP needs, and really speak about idea to win that campaign and how we think about this opportunity.

Product, mainly we would love to hear more feedback about the product and the roadmap ideas for the future and what they can do based on the client from conversation, what works, what's not working, what is missing, these tables discussions. Customer success, mostly in the chain side, want to have more insight about the hypothesis, which chain and recommended improvement for them for the retention basis. Leadership generally, as you can imagine, want to hear more of the trends and insights and areas of focus too that we can recommend to improve.

I think that overall, keep bringing this theme and findings cross organizational and learning to each of our meetings during the regular basis is really helpful. It's like, as I said, buzzing coming along the conversation. I think that overall the tailored approach really give each of the teams benefits and really focus on what they care about, helping us to drive this conversation through the year.

Right. No, I love to hear it. I think it's so important to have role specific and department specific conversations and focuses. I know you did such a good job of having just discussion meetings as well. I know you bring the data and you talk about, okay, well what can we do? What can we do now? What we can do later on in the future based off of the data. But I love that it's not just the Clozd data. You compare your course data and Salesforce data and everything to just have most the educated strategy, so I'm impressed. Thank you. You all are doing a great thing over there. It's great.

We have a good partners.

Hey, glad to be partners. I feel so lucky to work with you and the team, because you have vision right from the start to the end. That makes it so, so, so much easier coming in as a partner, because I get to focus more on the strategy of looking at the trends and talking about those things instead of trying to figure out, well, how do we want to build a win-loss program? Because you already have a best-in-class win-loss program built.

I know we always speak about that and called it leader, but I do want to mention the great people that work with me. Molly Reynolds that from my team leading all the conversation and readouts, Kelly Parisson, they're doing amazing work to drive this program. Rob Tran, as I mentioned earlier, amazing research that without him we didn't have a program. All of them together, really great.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time and just sharing a little bit more about your win-loss program internally. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Monica.

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