She’s done an incredible job at finding new questions to ask and problems to solve using the methodologies and technology of modern-day win-loss analysis. It will give you an idea of the immense value companies get out of having ongoing conversations with their buyers.

Kyle Coleman, the CMO at Clark, has experience working across the entire revenue organization. One of his greatest strengths is helping to create alignment by helping teams cultivate empathy for each other, and for the buyer. In today’s episode, he gives his recommendations on how to be a stellar SDR or SDR leader in today’s economic climate.

Our guest on today’s episode is Peter Spear, a corporate ethnographer and brand consultant. Throughout his career, he has helped big brands like Gatorade, Coca-Cola, the Discovery Channel, and AMC to understand their buyers    through qualitative interviews — which is just a fancy way of saying that he talks to them and asks them thoughtful questions. This episode will resonate with anyone who wants to bring more curiosity, empathy, and understanding into their business.

What I hope you take away is that you ALWAYS have something to learn, and the fastest way to learn it is to engage in meaningful dialogue with your customers and sincerely listen to what they have to say to you.

I hope you enjoy the show.

Find out why Rex decided to outsource their win-loss program, and just some of the direct benefits they've seen since doing so. 
 

"Why did we lose that big deal?" 

"What product features are we missing?" 

"Which competitor is undercutting our pricing?" 

Finding answers to these questions is like being given the cheat code to improve win rates, and drive more revenue. 

In this episode, Cam "The Win-Loss Guy" England explains the natural evolution a business goes through as they seek answers to questions about why they win and lose business and how much more confident leaders become when they get their answers directly from buyers and customers.

How will a buyer respond when they pull together an entire buying committee to check out a demo, and you spend 25 or your 30 minutes qualifying them? 

👎 What happens is... you lose the deal. 

They might tell you it's because of pricing or timing... but really, it's because your responsiveness and sales motion is too clunky, slow, and tailored to your needs, not your buyers. 

In this interview with Tom Rowe, SVP of Sales at ChiliPiper.com, you'll learn what B2B sales teams should be doing to convert more leads into buyers simply by improving responsiveness.

He then helped them scale through a seed round, a series A round, and a series B round of funding until they reached a valuation of over $350 million. Michael hired, coached, and trained dozens of salespeople and built out processes for the entire revenue org from scratch, including STRs, AEs, and account managers.

Ever since he started selling, he noticed that it was really difficult for sales teams to figure out how to grow and expand customers once they landed them—And that's why he's founded his new company, Calypso, which is dedicated to helping companies expand and retain their current customer base. 

In this economic climate, I can't think of a better guest to have on the show to learn more about how to drive net revenue retention, their Michael Tuso.

That means revenue leaders are feeling more pressure now than ever to hit revenue goals. Sales and marketing teams are being required to do more with less—more emails, more cold calls, more demos leaving reps and leaders alike on the brink of burnout.  

But some revenue leaders are taking a different approach. They know pipeline isn’t the only lever they can pull to help them hit quota more confidently and consistently. In today’s episode, we’re going to hear from Clozd co-founders, Spencer Dent and Andrew Peterson. They’ll share the metric savvy revenue leaders are focusing on to hit quota consistently despite unpredictable pipeline, and what you as a revenue leader can do at your company to do more with less without burning out.

Today, you’re going to learn how to report your biggest and most valuable win-loss insights to other leaders in your company in a way that gets them excited to make changes to their processes and strategy to ultimately win more deals and generate more revenue.

As you’ve conducted win-loss interviews you’ve probably discovered some valuable nuggets of information for the product team, the sales team, the customer success team, the marketing team, and things you want to make the executive team aware of. Understanding what’s important to each team and how granular to get with each leader will have a big impact on whether or not they take action and actually make changes based on what you share with them during your readout.

This is another episode where you’ll want to have a notepad handy. I hope you enjoy it.

And if you’ve been with us through all 6 episodes in this series, thanks for tuning in! We hope you subscribe and come back for more valuable episodes about B2B companies are utilizing buyer feedback to improve win rates, and drive more revenue.

But if your insights just sit in a google doc—or worse, in your head—then all your work will be for nothing.

So, today we’re going to give you some tips on how to take all of that long-form, qualitative feedback, and turn it into something valuable so you can create action plan that will drive change and increase revenue.

In case you need a quick refresher, the Dunning-Kruger effect is what happens when you completely overestimate your own competence while underestimating the difficulty of a task.

When most leaders hear about win-loss analysis, they make the same mistake I made with those raspberry rose macarons. They think, “All we need to do is call a few customers, have some conversations, and voila—we’ve got ourselves some valuable win-loss insights that can drive our strategy and help us generate more revenue. But if you’ve tuned into the past 3 episodes of this show, you know there’s a lot that needs to happen before you ever get on a call with a buyer if you want to build out a program that continuously impacts your business strategy, increases win rates, and drives more revenue.

In today’s episode, the rubber hits the road. Chase Pendleton and Scott Varner—two of our best win-loss program managers here at Clozd—are going to give you a crash course on how to conduct a top-notch win-loss interview that will reveal to you some of your greatest weaknesses as a company, and often some of your greatest strengths.

Buckle up and grab a notebook; this is going to be a great episode.

So, how do you get them to schedule time to sit down and talk with you?

There’s a science to it. The operations team here at Clozd is always testing things like email subject lines, incentives, and even the timing of outreach to optimize the performance of our win-loss programs. Today, Braydon and Riley will share some of their best tips and tricks to get buyers to agree to sit down and reveal to you what happened behind closed doors during their sales journey.

TIMESTAMPS

• 0:00 — Inroductions
• 5:50 — Are you nervous about CRM hygiene?
• 7:35 — Make sure you interview losses AND wins
• 8:57 — Outreach should change based on buyer persona
• 10:34 — Factor in deal recency before reaching out to buyers
• 21:24 — Outreach best practices
• 26:44 — Email cadence
• 31:03 — Incentives
• 36:07 — Tools to improve efficiency
• 47:45 — How to get 3 free win-loss interviews from Clozd

If you ask the wrong questions, or you ask the right questions in the wrong order, or you spend too much time on one topic, or you accidentally introduce bias into your buyer’s mind—you could end up with inaccurate feedback from your buyers, and damage the value of your win-loss program.

In today’s interview, some of the top win-loss program managers at Clozd will walk you through how they develop an interview guide to help them ask the right questions and deliver the highest-value interviews possible for our clients.

This is the most important part of the process at the practitioner level. If you you don’t plan out your questions, you’ll have bad interviews. And if you have bad interviews, you’ll end up with bad data. And if you have bad data, you can’t use it to make strategic changes to improve your win rate… which is the main purpose of your whole win-loss program.

TIMESTAMPS

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 3:38 — Win-loss analysis is like having an MRI machine for your business
• 8:06 — Why is an interview guide important for conducting a win-loss analysis program?
• 11:21 — How to structure your interview guide
• 24:43 — Open-ended questions that get buyers to talk
• 30:33 — How to keep your guide efficient
• 34:26 — You can't treat all buyers the same
• 37:12 — Don't try to make your guide perfect
• 45:16 — How to get 3 free win-loss interviews

In business, nothing is more important than the perception of your buyers. It doesn’t matter how good your sales process, marketing messaging, customer experience, product, or service are… if your buyers perceive your sales process as being confusing, or your marketing messaging as annoying, or your product as inferior to your competition.

So if you’re building your strategy around YOUR perception and not your BUYERS’ perception, you’re leaving valuable revenue on the table.

In order to build your strategy around your buyers’ perception, you need to be talking to them to better understand what they perceive your strengths, weaknesses, and what they think about you in relation to the competition. That’s where a strong win-loss analysis program comes into play.

Over the next few weeks on the win loss show, we’re going to be teaching you how to get your first win-loss analysis project up and running so you can start getting a clear picture of how your buyers perceive you—and more importantly, what in your business you need to change in order for you to start closing a higher percentage of the deals you’re involved in. 

If you want instant access to the full video recordings of these lessons and bonus materials to help get your program up and running just visit winloss101.com and you can get access to it all for free.

Our goal is simply to help you understand your buyers better so you can win more. 

TIMESTAMPS

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 3:02 — Announcements for Win-Loss 101
• 5:47 — You can't start a win-loss program without choosing a revenue problem to investigate
• 7:41 — Your CRM tells you WHAT is happening, not WHY
• 9:04 — 5 areas you should focus your win-loss program on
• 12:57 — Common roadblocks you might run into
• 21:43 — Examples of win-loss program successes
• 30:06 — Q&A session
• 42:00 — How to get 3 free win-loss interviews from Clozd

We looked at the CRM data of nearly 1,000 closed-lost deals. Then we compared the competitor that was tagged in the CRM on those deals to the what the buyers said was the main competitor in their win-loss interviews.

65% of the time, what the CRM said, and what the buyer said did not match up. 

That means the CRM data was wrong on nearly 7 out of every 10 deals.

This just goes to show that buyers aren’t always transparent with your sales reps about what’s going on behind closed doors.

If you’re a sales leader, a product marketer, or someone who works in competitive intelligence, what’s the cost of basing your strategy on highly inaccurate CRM data?

You could be spending countless hours and dollars creating a strategy to take down the wrong target.

On today’s episode of the Win-Loss Show, we sit down with two of the best Competitive Intelligence professionals in the business, Alysse Nockles and Monique Eddleton to better understand how they use win-loss analysis in their Competitive Intelligence programs to understand who their true competitors are, and how they use that information to empower leaders in their company to confidently create a rock solid strategy that results in winning more deals and delighting more customers.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 - Setting the stage
1:52 - Introductions
3:31 - Every Competitive Intelligence program needs this...
8:34 - The value of using a 3rd party to talk to buyers and customers
11:46 - How to use win-loss data to validate CRM data
20:26 - Making your data tell a story
22:27 - Creating change is contingent upon your company's culture
23:51 - Advice to CI professionals

Reading that question might give you flashbacks to some of the most stressful moments of your career.

The executive team is frustrated you missed your quarterly targets. They’re feeling pressure from investors, and the board to perform. They’ve invested in you, giving you additional headcount, call-recording software, sales training software, sales enablement tools, and software to help your scale their personalized outreach.

You’ve increased pressure on your teams to increase pipeline generation. Everyone is making cold calls, and sending out emails like their life depends on it.

Yet despite all these changes and improvements to your sales motion, you still failed to hit quota.

Questions start to pop into your head:

• Is it the economic climate?
• Is our product missing features that are important to our ICP?
• Is marketing just sending us crappy leads?
• Are we getting outpriced by the competition?
• Or do I just suck at my job? 

Logically, you run some CRM reports, talk to some reps about some of the bigger closed-lost deals from the previous quarter, and you develop a hypothesis about why you’re not hitting quota. 

You show up to your revenue strategy meeting and present your answer, hoping that it reassures your leadership team. Then, you propose your plan to do better next quarter. Yet, despite the confidence you projected to leadership while presenting your plan, in the back of your mind there’s a sliver of doubt as you think, “I hope I’m right on this…”