TL;DR

• Flex Interviews from Clozd provide powerful feedback from buyers at a lower cost.
• These asynchronous interviews are ideal for mid-market and SMB-sized companies looking to scale their win-loss programs.
• Innovative technology allows for personalized interviews with audio and video responses.
• Flex Interviews are not recommended for companies with a low number of high-value deals in their pipelines.

Historically, Clozd has been an ace in the hole to help large, enterprise software companies understand exactly why they win and lose deals. 

For smaller companies, however, robust win-loss analysis programs have been out of reach.

Let’s say you don’t fall into the big-budget enterprise camp. You’re trying to be scrappy and get answers on your own. You’ve figured out what win-loss analysis is about, and it makes sense to you. After all, what sales team wouldn’t want in-depth feedback on exactly why they won or lost that big deal? 

But then you found out the price—anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 per interview. How can you make a business case for that, since each of your deals is only worth a few thousand dollars anyway? So even though you know that honest feedback directly from your buyers is critical to your business’s success, you simply can’t justify spending that kind of money. 

What do you do? 

Well, we have a solution for you—Clozd’s new Flex Interviews.

What are Flex Interviews?

Flex Interviews are adaptive win-loss interviews that are completed asynchronously. The interviewer (the person asking the questions) records questions ahead of time, and the interviewee (the person taking the interview) answers at their own convenience. 

Because of the asynchronous nature of Flex Interviews, they’re much more efficient and affordable than traditional Live Interviews—yet they still capture powerful feedback straight from the mouths of your buyers.

Why Flex Interviews? Because our clients asked for them

Some of our clients have told us that they wanted more data points, more insights, more Clozd—but the cost of doing more win-loss interviews was prohibitive. A robust win-loss program was out of reach for anyone smaller than an enterprise company. 

At the same time, many of those companies were using surveys—a more cost-efficient option—but weren’t getting the depth of feedback they needed.

We listened to our own win-loss feedback, got creative, and figured out a way to offer robust win-loss insights to mid-market and SMB-sized companies. Flex Interviews are ideal for anyone wanting to scale their win-loss program up and get more fresh insights.

This was the case for Tirrah Switzer (senior director of product marketing) and Jessica Lovell (senior product marketing manager) at Community Brands. 

“We’ve done interviews with Clozd, and for one of our smaller products we started using buyer surveys,” Jessica said. “We had a decent response rate, so we were getting data—but it also felt like there was some information we were missing out on. But for this product, it didn’t make sense to do the full interviews.”

Unhappy with the depth of their survey feedback, they decided to give Flex Interviews a try—and they’ve been thrilled with the results.

“I didn’t know quite what to expect with the Flex Interviews, but the results we got far surpassed what we’d been getting from our buyer surveys,” Jessica said. “In our surveys, it felt like they were just trying to get something off of their plate. For the Flex Interviews, I felt like they gave very thorough responses. It’s not quite the same as live interviews because they can’t respond in the same way, but if you’re looking for that sweet spot in between, it’s perfect. We’ve gotten so much more thorough and insightful responses from our buyers than we ever would have gotten through the surveys.”

How Flex Interviews work

We leveraged innovative new technology to let you create an adaptive interview once that you can reuse over and over. You or your Clozd program manager record video questions that your buyers will answer. You can add multiple-choice questions to the mix, and based on interviewees’ responses to those questions, you can branch to relevant follow-up video questions to capture more detail. 

Interviewees can answer with audio or video, so you can hear them explain, in their own voice, why they did (or didn’t) choose your solution. All the insights you capture are transcribed and analyzed in the Clozd Platform—the same as Live Interviews, so you can mix and match feedback channels and compare the results in an apples-to-apples way. 

The result? A flexible, lower-cost option that allows you to capture more win-loss data.

Not to be forgotten (and a shameless plug!), the Clozd Platform enables you to gather and analyze this feedback at scale. We’ve built several features that make this possible:

• AI-generated summaries: Crisp, automated summaries are generated as soon as an interview is complete.
• Smart Tags: Set up keywords that are important to you, and the Clozd Platform will automatically tag them as interviews are completed. Subscribe to notifications for tags that you’re most interested in.
• Industry-defining win-loss methodology: We have the best-in-class interview structure and approach, best-in-class participation rates, and the best-in-class team. Check out where we landed in Gartner’s most recent magic quadrant (hint: we’re the leader).

Best of all? They really work

I know: You may be thinking that this is too good to be true. Well, doubt no longer. The audio and video our clients have seen has been remarkable in its detail and candor. Are all the responses high-enough quality to publish? No, but we also don’t count those responses against the number of allotted Flex Interviews you purchase. Flex Interviews let us be much more, ummm … flexible as a vendor—and we pass that flexibility on to you.

Is there anyone who should not use Flex Interviews?

This might surprise you, because even though we’re thrilled with the easy process and depth of insights, Flex Interviews aren’t for everyone. If you have a low number of deals going through the pipeline each quarter, or if each deal is worth multiple tens of thousands of dollars (or more!), we’d still recommend doing traditional win-loss interviews. Clozd’s expert, adaptive interviewers will be sure to maximize the insights you gain from each interview and give your buyers a white-glove experience. 

Additionally, if Flex Interviews make sense for some but not all of your pipeline, you can mix and match interview types. Again, you can compare the results of Flex Interviews and Live Interviews in an apples-to-apples way, with Clozd’s proprietary blend of Decision Drivers, quotes, and tags all working seamlessly across both Flex Interviews and Live Interviews.