#37: Win/Loss Analysis, why people buy, why they leave, and fixing leaks in your funnel

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1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit.

Exit.

Exit.

Hey.

On this episode of the Exit 5 podcast, this is a live session we did with myself and Trenton Rump. He's the head of marketing at Close. This was an hour session all about win loss analysis. One of the better sessions that we've done. Super Tactical will help you get a new tool to help drive revenue, not just through marketing, but through the whole company. I really got a lot out of this, and I know you will too.

Here is the live session on win loss analysis.

Are you in the office?

Yeah, I took over a little storage closet in the office here and turned it into my podcast.

I was gonna say it doesn't. That doesn't look like a little. Doesn't look like a little. A little.

Yeah. If I turn the. If I turn the camera, you'll see, like, our booths are over here and all the swag and it's all just chilling over here, so.

Nice. Nice. That's great. It looks great on camera. So you're good.

Thanks, man. We. We figured out a way to, like, fit three people in here. So we're gonna start doing live workshops with people and.

Yeah. What is the cat. What is the camera on? Is it on a T?

Yeah, I just have it on a tripod. It's like a Sony DSLR camera. And I just put it on a tripod above. And then I just got my laptop pushed way back.

So you see me right now on your laptop?

Yeah, I have the laptop literally, like right underneath and in front of my camera. So it kind of looks like you. Like I'm looking at you, at least. Got it. And then. Yeah, we're trying, dude. We want to build a little bit of a media thing around this, like everybody's trying to do.

So tell me why. As a current operator, I just would love to hear your hypothesis on that.

Yeah, dude. Part of it is nobody's talking about this subject enough. And so I know if we can distribute content really good and create really impactful kind of thought leadership content around it. We've already seen it at events and stuff that we do in person. Drive revenue. I just, like, we need to evangelize win loss, and I think the best way to do that is to get where everybody's at and People are still kind of remote. So we wanted to create this motion of. Call it the Chris Walker playbook if you want, but that's kind of where we're at.

Nice. I think it's great. I think it's smart and I think it's. And I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but I think it's easier when you have a niche and you're focused on a niche, which is like, if you just do win loss for now, I think that's awesome. Where like a lot of B2B SaaS, companies or companies in the space, like, when you try to go too broad, it's really tough to win with content. So I love it. Bunch of people are here. Awesome, friendly faces. Meredith is here. Angelica's here.

Hello.

What's up? Good to see you all. This is Trenton, and we're going to get into the session on win loss, but real quick, I love to just get a sense of how many people are here and who's here. So would just say hello in chat. Let me know where you're writing in from. Trenton is in Utah. I'm Dave. I'm in Vermont. I'm super muddy right now. I just took my dog out before this and now she's a muddy mess. Look at this. All right, we got Toronto, Portland, South Carolina, Idaho, South. Situate, mass, situate mass. Stand up, situate mass. Cape Town. All right, good. So there's some people here. Newton, Mass. Chicago, Oakland, Vancouver, Canada. Okay, so background on this session. Every now and then, I like to do a live session where we go a little bit deeper on a topic than we might on a traditional podcast episode. And I get a lot of emails in a month of companies and vendors who want to sponsor this and do that. And I was looking for something more. A little bit different, a little bit more of a. I don't want to say a niche, but like a more smaller, tactical thing to give people. And Trendon had reached out, like, months ago, and we just got back to doing it and really impressed. We had 686 people sign up for this, which, for a topic about win loss, is. Is tremendous. I'm excited to dive into this. I think my goal for something like this, if you're watching this live or later, is like, can you get one or two new things from this can that you can take back to your company, to your community? I don't want this to be just something that you just listen to. Like, pick one or two things and be like, you know what? Love that we're gonna go try that. And I think especially right now with what's happening in the market, buying is freezing up at a lot of companies. It's getting tough out there where like if you're a nice to have tool, it's going to be tough sledding for the next six months or however long. And so I think now more than ever do you need to be able to do something like this? Because the lessons that you get, it's not just change the website messaging or hey, let's go do this campaign. I think marketing should be able to drive revenue across the entire company. And in order to do that, every team needs to be involved. And so I think this is going to be a great topic today. So let's just do a quick background for people who don't know you and quick background on the company. That would be a good place to start and we'll go from there.

Yeah, Dave, thanks for having me. I've been a fan for a long time. I've been listening to the podcast, even more so now that I knew I was going to be here joining you guys. I've been listening to Exit 5 and I loved Amanda Malkos from G2. Her podcast re interviewed it and then Kylie when she was at. I think she was at Chili Piper when you interviewed her. Those were great. So I've been diving deep more than I have been in the past and I'm super stoked to be here. Yeah. So I'm the head of marketing at Closed. I've been with the company for almost two years. The company's been around for about five and birth of the company, where it came from. Two guys from Qualtrics were to figure out why they were winning and losing and they were like, let's go try win loss analysis. They had some approaches in house, went and interviewed some, some vendors and they just were like, man, this is a space that needs some better solutions. So they left Qualtrics. One of them, like staked quite a bit leaving Qualtrics and believed in the idea so much they left kind of normal story of startups like started in the basement, bootstrapped, landed some cool clients right out of the gate and here we are and now we're growing quick. Our client base is pretty solidly like B2B SaaS, mostly enterprise. Every now and then we get some really interesting ones. One I'll share just really quick because I love the story is so we go out and do buyer interviews, right? We interview buyers. Why did you choose or not choose this Product. We were doing one of these buyer interviews, and it was like the head admin or principal of this private school in New york that's like 50k a year in tuition. And at the end of the interview, the guy's like, wait, wait a second. So you guys go and interview buyers and figure out why they did or didn't choose you? And we're like, yeah. He's like, could you do that to parents? Like, I guess we could. So we started interviewing the parents of the kids from this private school that was like 50k tuition and figuring out, hey, why did you not go to this school? And they're like, oh, well, Beyonce's kid. Is it a different school down the street? Or your school doesn't have, like, the Harvard acceptance rate that we're looking for or whatever it is. And so every now and then we get these kind of really cool niche interviews or emotions that we do with companies.

So I understand it. So it's beyond SaaS. It is like, you actually go out and so you will go out and find people who were going to buy. And by the way, this is not meant to be a pitch. I'm just genuinely curious. We're going to help you. But, yeah, how do you get those people to respond, like, and actually get you interviewed? Because it's hard enough if you're like a VP of sales and you do the VP of sales, like Kevin Dorsey play, which is like, hey, why did you not buy from us? But, like, how do you actually do it?

Yeah, so we. It's a ton of work. And I think anybody that's gone out and tried to do it on their own realizes that it takes a lot of effort. It takes a dedication to do it. So we have an entire team focused on sending out incentives, sending out email cadences, optimizing those, customizing them for each client. Because some buyers are different. Like, a really, really deep security engineer buyer Persona is not going to be as open to sharing their experience as, like, ahead of human resources that wants to talk about everything.

Right.

And so you have to be customized between each customer and really dial in and figure that out. So we have a team that's sending out emails. We do incentivize people to join into these buyer interviews.

Like, what, $25 Applebee's gift card?

Yeah, exactly. How did you know what people do? Yeah, yeah. So usually it's. We utilize tools like Tango Card and we can customize that a little bit more. We leave it a little bit more open. We do incentives. Sometimes we don't incentivize, like, we don't need to in some cases with people that are really open to feedback, sometimes people just honestly want to share. They're like, man, I really hated this experience. And I really want to tell somebody.

Yeah, I was going to ask you, like, are you surprised at how many people do respond?

Actually, no. Like, I. I think we're on it and we're sending it out enough diligently that I'm not surprised. And. And like, when people are thinking about response rates with buyer interviews, like a good benchmark to think about, if you're really good at it and you're around 20%, I would feel pretty good about that.

Right.

So you got to think about the volume. Like, how far do I need to go? How much data do I need to try to get ops?

Right.

And how many people do I need to contact to get that? 20. To get anything meaningful just to pause.

On that for people. I don't want to make sure people. So people love benchmark. A good benchmark on a buyer, buyer research is 20%. Scott wants me to tilt my camera down a little bit. There's literally nothing else to see other than like, unless you want to see more of my teeth or my head, I got nothing else to show you. But the. Hopefully the voice is working. That's 20% for buyer interviews. But is that on the way out or the way in? Is that higher like. Or is it the same on. If I'm trying to. I want to sell you something is the same.

So that's on closed opportunities. So after they've been won or lost and they're closed, and that's with a third party. So us coming in and saying, hey, we're. On behalf of this company, we would like to ask you about your experience buying or not buying from them. So 20% on buyer interviews, on closed opportunities is to get benchmark.

I'm going to plug Winter also because I think that's a good tool for other people on the way in to get research on the way in too.

Absolutely. Totally. Absolutely.

Okay, so what is a win loss analysis? Right. Like, other than like these 10 people didn't buy. I'm going to interview them and get ideas. Why? I'm guessing you have more of a science to this than I would.

Right?

I would hope so.

Yeah.

Win loss analysis in our book is a comprehensive, always on, systematic approach to getting buyer feedback. Can also include sales rep feedback, internal feedback, and truly trying to understand why you win and lose sales deals. That's our definition of it. Like, I'm going to go into the Salesforce report and pull the dropdown. The pick list lost reason. Yeah. Okay. 50% of your deals in that review said it was pricing. That's not going to get you enough. What are you going to do? Send out a 50% off coupon code? It doesn't tell you what behind pricing is driving the decision. And so it's deeper. And we believe it should be based in buyer feedback and even further than that in buyer interviews, like actually talking to them with the specific purpose of figuring out why did you buy our product or not buy it.

Right.

Let's use that. Someone says pricing just in Salesforce. Right. What would be an actual good answer that you might expect to get?

Yeah, so when we interview about pricing, it becomes really interesting. And in a lot of cases, sellers don't have the full truth.

Right.

So they're out there and they're trying to figure out, okay, why isn't this buyer moving forward or why is this deal lost? And, and maybe like I've done this before buying things as a marketer. Like, I'm busy and I don't have time to kind of explain to them all the things. And I didn't find value in the tool, so I'm not going to make budget for it.

Right.

So I just kind of nonchalantly tell them, maybe in an email or on a call, like, oh, it's budget. I don't have the money for this.

Right.

But the true reason is I could have found the money if you had proven value or an ROI behind this tool. You know what I mean? That's where like category creation comes in. Like, the category doesn't exist and there's no budget line item for it until people start to see value and ROI on it. And then all of a sudden in budgets, there's a line item for that tool.

Right.

That's a much more strategic level takeaway where it's. You get that lesson. It's not just go change the website messaging. It's like, no, let's have a leadership level discussion about, hey, one trend that we're seeing is people are not buying. They say it's pricing, but actually it's perception of what we're doing. Okay, how can we go and change the way that we have this discussion? Just to reiterate, like, we had a room full of marketers. I think, like, it's your job to lead the company in this. It's not that the output should just be like, change this one thing.

It's.

And that's a mistake that I wish I made earlier in my career where I would always take it, like, personally as a marketing thing. And it's like, actually, no, that I'm marketing, so I'm kind of like the front end of this and I'm seeing this, but I need to, like, push the rest of the company and drive this strategic change.

Yeah, exactly. And an analogy I like to use, Dave, that's exactly what you're saying is we like to think win loss analysis is like the ultimate diagnostic tool to shine light on invisible revenue problems. And as a marketer, like, if you want to be in those strategic conversations and you want to be figuring out more and more how every piece of the org is driving revenue, especially marketing, you should be shining the light on those revenue problems and then you don't have to be the one to fix them.

Right.

You shine the light on the sales problems and you send them the data. You send them the X ray and they're the surgeon. They're like, oh, I know how to fix this because you're not the expert on the sales side.

Right.

Also, like, to me, for those of you listening, like, if this is not a thing, that you're obviously VP of sales, VP of marketing are. They care about this.

Right.

But if whoever leads your product organization is not like the first person interested in this, then something is broken. And to me, that means that product does not care about driving revenue. And usually that is because of misaligned incentives where inside of the company, the product leader is not gold in the same way as sales, marketing, and customer success might be.

Yeah, let me like, double click on that a little bit. So at a couple companies I've been at, especially early in my career, like, I started as an SDR and then was like an SDR team lead. And when I was brought into meetings, when we were, we just launched this new product and we were trying to figure out, like, who is the buyer Persona and what do they care about. We didn't have product marketing, right? So I was getting asked all the time, like, what's your team seeing? What messaging is resonating with people? I was like, wait, like, shouldn't this be coming from not an sdr, but like somebody way smarter than me?

Right.

I remember in those meetings, we would have deals come up, we'd have ops that we would created, and then we would lose them. And we always would have this question of like, well, why did we lose that deal? And we'd kind of go around the room and it'd be like, Guesswork, anecdotes and assumptions. And maybe somebody would pull the CRM, be like, oh, the sales rep put this one word reason in there. And we thought about it like, well, we should do a win loss analysis. Like, let's go look at this one deal and get feedback on this one deal. And it wasn't thought about in this comprehensive approach where you're clueing in all the other team members and really passing that data over to product. And I've seen win loss done that way so many times and I think other people have too, that they've kind of put it on a shelf. It's like deprioritize. This isn't that valuable because I've seen it done or I've tried to go do the interviews myself and I don't really know like what data I've got from this or I can't aggregate the data and really spread it and share it and drive action with it. So it's been done so ineffectively that now it's deprioritized. And so you're exactly right. If you can do it the right way and then you can pass and democratize all that data to these different departments, whether it's customer success or product or your pricing and packaging teams like we talked about, or sales or your own marketing team, like you can actually drive really meaningful revenue changes in your company.

Is there a benchmark or guidance around, like, what's the threshold for? Because I could see like me trying to do this inside of the company and someone's like, well, how many people did we talk to? And it's like six and they're like, not, well, we need X number. And so how do you balance that?

It's so amazing. Like you have this interesting conversation with people that aren't statisticians inside your company and they're always like, well, we need statistical significance. And you're like, can you explain to me what statistical significance means? Because I can't and nobody can. I'll think like, we need statistical significance.

Right?

And when it comes to qualitative data, statistical significance should be thought of in a different way. It's thought of what is called saturation. So there isn't like, it's not a quantitative sample set. So you're not actually like looking for the P value of the data you're looking at, okay, what are the themes and categories that keep coming up in our qualitative interviews? And if you've done six or you've done 10 or you've done 20 and you start to realize, like in these interviews, there's no new themes coming up. Like, we've hit what's called saturation. If our interviews are going deep enough and we're running into the same trends and themes over and over and over. Like, hey, your pricing seems too expensive because you guys have included five features that we don't even need, but you're charging me for those.

Right.

So it's like it becomes like a game of pattern matching.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's the theme. Let's go attack it.

Yep. And you won't know. Like, you're not going to be able to say, okay, we need 20 interviews or a hundred interviews to reach saturation. Like, you're not truly going to know until you go try it. And then when you start to see these trends become the same and you start to see that saturation happening, one, you should be taking action on it. And then that changes the interview completely. Because if you change your pricing, all of a sudden you have a whole different layer of feedback. Or if you change the marketing messaging or if you change the buyer Persona or the vertical, you're going after all that changes. So it's like you can't think about it as I'm going to go do this one off thing and what's the statistical significance, amount of feedback to get? I think that's the wrong approach, in my opinion, when you're looking at this.

All right, not to put you on the spot, but I'm going to put you on the spot. So as the head of marketing, as one of us. Well, formerly me, as the head of marketing at a SaaS company, who's doing this? What are some of the reasons people may or may not buy closed? And then how have you taken those and done something in marketing? Because I'm sure you're using your own product. I'm curious about it.

Yeah.

Okay. So I'm very, very excited you asked this question because. So let me give you a story to kind of back this up. And it's. I like to think about it as marketing confidence. Like, what's my level of confidence in my approach to the marketing strategy and in campaign planning and then the way I'm spending and building a team.

Right.

So I joined as a head of marketing at a really, really early stage startup a few years back, and it's kind of my first foray as the head of marketing. I was the only marketer on the team, so I don't even know why they called me head of marketing in the first place. I should Be marketer, right? And I was doing everything like I was like, let's just try it all. I think this company's doing the cool thing here. This company's done that. I've seen this work in the past. So I'm running like Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Twitter ads. I'm trying content, I'm trying direct mail, I'm trying webinars. I'm going in.

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Personal events. Like, I kind of think of myself when I look back not as a one man marketing machine, but like as a one man marketing wrecking ball where I was doing it all on my own and just trying a bunch of stuff and I didn't have like ultimate confidence in it. So let me back up even further like and give you a really direct example. It's like today I'm on this call with you, right, Dave? Yep. And hopefully I'm doing a good enough job where the Exit 5 community is like, hey, this is a pretty cool topic. Seems like this company kind of has an idea of what they're doing. Maybe there's somebody on here that's like, I'm going to go check out close, right? So they jump into Google search or they jump into their community and they start doing some research on us and maybe they turn into an op, right? And we've all played this game. Like every marketer on this call sees their first touch attribution or their last touch attribution and they're building models off of that. And I know in the back of their mind they're wondering, okay, is this real though? Was that actually the first touch? And if I look at that person on the call today, that turned into an opinion. Unless I'm doing like self reported attribution on my form or something, they may not even mention this call today. Like they might not mention Dave. And then we'll wonder, Dave, should we do this again?

Google Search? Then the SEO person is like, yeah, I'm like, you did nothing.

You've been talked about so much. Like marketers know this game for sure. All of us have dealt with this and we're building models and we're selling campaigns and what our ideas are based on this data that we're like kind of not fully confident, right? So one thing I'm doing with our own data because we have a really good motion for this and I'm seeing other companies do now, is they're using win loss analysis to guide confidently guide their marketing strategies and their programs and budgets based on buyer feedback that actually impacts Revenue and turns into wins.

Right.

When you do it that way, I can now see, okay, there's 100 things I could do as the head of marketing at Closed. But on all these deals that are actually we're winning on here's like the five things that keep coming up. And if I go look at my attribution tools, HubSpot or whatever, like, we all know those things don't come up, right?

Yeah.

But it's not only that they don't come up. So many of us like over index on touch points. So like, let's take that example I gave you where somebody's on this call, they go and search closed, and at the same time, we happen to send them brownies as a direct mail ABM campaign.

Right?

So I'm thinking, I look at this buyer's journey and I'm like, oh, organic search. And we did direct mail. Those two things drive revenue based on this model that I built.

Right.

But lo and behold, like, I sent them the brownies and their dog ate them and the dog got super sick.

Right.

And it was a horrible experience. And I kind of hate clothes a little bit because we made their dogs sick. But I'm looking at my tools and I'm like, no, the touch point was direct mail. So I know it influenced revenue. You're like, no, you never went and asked the buyer, hey, how did marketing truly impact your decision? And maybe in that interview they're finally like over their niceties and they say, don't ever send me brownies again. Like, you almost killed my dog.

Right.

That's how I'm using it is it's one layer extra to really figure out, like, tell me how marketing is impacting revenue and then I'm going to double down on those things and I'm not going to do direct mail anymore because it really didn't impact the deal that much at all. Even though it shows as a touch point.

Right.

So that's how I'm using it internally.

Yeah, that's great. I guess my brain instantly went to loss and I actually. Yeah, there's so much offense you can play from a market standpoint if you also. It's like another. And this is. I've been talking about this a lot lately where, like, I think as a marketing leader or anybody that wants to be that marketing lead in a company, like a startup, for example, you have to be able to articulate your marketing strategy. I think that seems obvious, but to me what that means is like, you have to take all these little snapshots and again, even attribution is not a paint by numbers, like approach. Like, here's what you should go do. But it's like, okay, I'm seeing this with this data, I'm hearing this, I'm kind of feeling this. All right, I think this is how strategy and planning gets done. By the way, it's not a playbook, it's like, where are we going to place bets? And so you're like, oh, hey, we did that thing, we did that webinar with Dave. Like, that worked really well. Maybe we should do more of those. And so you're like, okay, what if we do two of those a quarter with these people? What could that drive? And so I think this is an interesting layer to that. And then, and then you add on like the, you have software attribution, you have self reported attribution on the way in, you have the buyer insights. Like, now you're getting this full picture of like, where are customers coming from? And one more thing on that is remember to just get back to basics. Like we love to, and I do this too just to stoke the fire. But like on LinkedIn, we love to talk about like all this acronyms and B2B marketing jargon and nonsense. But like just use your own brain. Like at the end of the day, marketing is like, why are people buying from us and how are they hearing about us already? Why are they buying from us now? How can we go do more of those things? And then the other part of that is like, well, we need to think a little bit ahead. So it can't just be we're going to react to that. But like, based on what we know, what other bets could we make for the future? I just want to like push people to go back and just use that line of thinking. And I like how you kind of came at it from that angle.

Awesome. Yeah, I love thinking about the wins because like you can be a diagnostic tool. Like for example, let's say you could go do a genetic test that tells you if you have like a disease or cancer and you can try to figure out how to fix a weakness. But maybe you go do the genetic test and it turns out you're Wolverine. Like you have the ultimate power to heal and you didn't even realize it. Like you have this hidden strength, right? And WIMOS has done that for me where I can dive into our data. Like, oh man, I didn't even think that that was so such a valid strength that we have with our buyers. I'm going to double down on that, like, I'm going to go create content about it. I'm going to create stuff on the website about it. I'm going to really have our demo, like lean into it and you're winning on strengths instead of always trying to fix the negative.

Right.

So that's another angle for people listening. None of this has been planned or scripted. We decided to ditch the slides and have a conversation. I just want to let you know that Trenton had an analogy, a perfect story and analogy about like a mishap with direct mail and sending the dog brownies and then also had a flip on a DNA test. And what if you realized you were Wolverine? I just want to make sure that those two things were not, we're not lost on this discussion today.

I probably need to use Winter and put those up on the website and see how it resonates.

Right.

All right. This is from Steve. We have done our own win loss interviews and with third party, do you see different rates if companies do it on their own, are people as open to doing it if you do it yourself?

Yeah, we've definitely seen an improvement in participation rates when it's a third party for sure. And then we've actually done like, you know how you do bake offs and sales against competitors? We've done bake offs with like internal stakeholders inside companies. So there'll be a product marketer that's like, no, I've, I've done these interviews myself and I understand our buyers so well. I can do these better than you all day long. And like, let's do a bake off. Like, let's just see, it's not going to hurt if we go and get you some more data.

Right.

And what is better, like in that sense, like how do you show who won?

Yeah. So some of that's just the amount of data that you can get based on participation rates. And then the other part is the depth of data. So some people will go out and do an interview and they'll make it like a rigid phone survey because they think I have to do it that way. I have to ask the same questions over and over again so that I can do a comparative analysis on the back end of this thing. And we approach our interviews as these probing conversational interviews based on categories.

Right.

So tell me how marketing influenced your decision. Let's talk about pricing. Tell me what impacted you from the company internally. What was the sales experience? Right. Like they're more open ended questions and conversational. And then we tag the quotes inside of these categories and that's how the comparative analysis happens on the end. We call those decision drivers. So when you are not fully trained and you're not doing this full time, interviewing people and really trying to pull from them the real story. Yeah, you may have the market knowledge or the product knowledge that we probably can ever get to, but our team is very well equipped on these interviews and pulling out interviews. So in some of these bake offs. Yes, like for sure, the product marketer knows the company and the industry way better than we do you.

Right.

But then when we go do it, we're. Our interviewing skills are so much higher that we pull out more data. And they'll say things like, you guys are like therapists. Like when you ask questions, people start to all of a sudden divulge like dark secrets.

The real move would be to let the long term play for your company. Should be like, they should then let you do the selling. Like, and here, would you like to buy this now?

Yeah, exactly. And then the other part of it is just how candid people are. So the, another analogy I like to share is you've been dating a girl for a long time and you guys break up and you go to dinner and you ask her like, why? Or at dinner she's like, hey, we're over. You're like, how come? And she'll say, it was me, not you.

Right.

Like, and they're a little bit hesitant to tell you the full truth. And then you'll go and ask her best friend to tell her the reasons and come report back to you. And she's like unloading on you with the best friend. Like, this guy is the worst at this thing. And oh, he was pretty good at that. Like, they're just more candid for third party. And we've seen that time and time again. We've even had some interviews where like maybe you're sharing too much. And they'll pull up their annual budget on their spreadsheet that they would never show a sales rep. And they'll say, well, look, here is my budget and here's the things I got to prioritize. Here's my headcount budget. And I actually had to decide between like this hire and this tool. And at the end of the day I feel like this hire is more important. Like they're not going to share that whole spreadsheet in our experience with the company.

Right.

What's a bake off for people that don't know. How would you articulate what that is?

Yeah, so a bake off. Like if you ever watched the Great baking show or nailed it. Imagine you have two chefs in a room and one has to make. They both have to make a cake. And then at the end of the day, Gordon Ramsay, whoever's going to test the cake and pick the favorite, right? So bake off in B2B is like two competitors are going head to head on a deal and then the seller's trying to decide, okay, which one's better. So maybe you do a POC the same time or you offer them a demo the same time. Whatever it is, is that's a Bake Off. So, yeah, Head to Head competition.

That's exactly right.

I like this question. Let me share it. From Erica. What's stronger? Intel Churn loss interview. So a customer that you lost or a lost prospect, they each give different views to the business, in my opinion. I feel like we know the answer to that question, but curious to hear you say it.

I think Churn is incredible. But let me take it a step further. So we had a company that joined us and they did Win loss first, and we're still doing that. Then we started Churn program with them. So we're doing those simultaneously. And then aside from that, they were like, well, hey, instead of like just Churn, why don't we figure out why they're leaving before they leave? So now we're doing stay interviews, which is kind of a cool concept. So it's like, think of it as like a CSAT interview, but we actually jump in, like at a certain point in the customer life cycle, and we do an interview with this customer, like, hey, what's going well, what's going poorly? And we categorize all that into these decision drivers. We send it back to this company, and this is amazing. They'll look at that at an individual basis per account, and they'll email back the buyer and be like, hey, we heard your feedback. Here's how we're going to go fix these four things before your renewal happens so that you don't churn. And they've essentially, with their major accounts, have reduced their Churn to zero. So I love Churn analysis. I think they're both super valuable. It's kind of like the dating versus the married example. Like, Win Loss is kind of like you're dating so you can get the perception of how support works, the perception of the product, because they haven't really gone in and they're like, not like a power user versus Churn is kind of a divorce. Like, at that point, they've been with you for a while. They've really tried out the product and everything and they understand it more. So there's probably more in depth feedback they can give you about everything. But that buyer perception is critical. Like I wouldn't ignore it either.

Yeah, I mean it's like a different audience, right? Like, well, you would want to know why prospects are not. Like if you can't even get people in to get a demo. That's why you might go find that out. Let's see if we can do a couple quick hit answers on this one. This one's from Alexa. How do you think product led growth will impact a company's ability to conduct win loss analysis? Is.

Yeah, I mean it just depends. Like we work with some really, really, really amazing, exemplary product led growth companies doing win loss programs with them. Sometimes product led growth has more volume of opportunities. It feels like they're usually a little less expensive than a large B2B enterprise marketing led or sales led growth motion. So you have to think about your pipeline mix and how that impacts your win loss. But I am a believer that any size of deal or any motion you're taking buyer feedback is critical. You got to get it one way or the other. And I think buyer feedback with the point of figuring out why they're buying or not buying is the most poignant way to do it. There's some people, they go to, hey, let's just go to buyer research and kind of understand our Persona. And they'll do these very heady cloudy interviews of like, tell me what kind of content you want to digest or like what problems are you trying to solve right now? Instead of interviewing them and asking, hey, why did you buy us or why didn't you buy us? And then you can really focus in. So I think product led growth, it still is very poignant to do it there as well.

This is a question from Dave.

Hi.

Hey Dave. Hi. Thanks for having me. First time, long time. What are you seeing across the board right now? You know, there is definitely a slowdown in buying. Curious to see internal stuff. Obviously you can't share names and companies, but just would love to hear your assessment. I think it can just be helpful to marketers right now.

Here's my take on it. So win rates are down. Like I'm not going to beat around the bush or sugarcoat it. Win rates are down. And the other interesting worst thing we're seeing indicator of like kind of these headwinds, not only win rates but pipeline is dropping. So maybe a customer or several customers are in the past would send over 300, 400, 500 opportunities for us to go and try to get buyer interviews with. Now we're seeing that number drop down to like 200, 300.

Right.

So pipeline is kind of also shoring up. One thing I think that's cool about win loss analysis and this goes back to that, like marketing confidence, but also in just your normal go to market confidence is if you're running a marketing team right now, or if you're working with sales leaders like most of us are, or the CEO sitting there wondering like, okay, we're losing more now, is it actually because of the economy or are there other factors in play? In my opinion, the only way to really answer that is to ask your buyers and get their feedback and truly know for sure when the sales rep says it was budget and pricing, that it actually was. And so win loss analysis can help you with that. And then you can start to shore up or build strategies around that and know for sure, like, hey, the economy is impacting, like you have that hunch and that assumption. But it could also just be you're missing a major product feature or your sales motion is bad or whatever it is.

Right.

Something else might be causing your loss. So when moss analysis can truly help you solidify that answer, like, yeah, the economy is impacting us big time, what do we do about it?

Those are going to be tough conversations inside of companies right now. It's not going to be like, let's go do two more webinars this quarter. We're going to hit the number. But again, I think it's your job to try to drive that. This is the time to revisit things. Change the pricing strategy, change the ICP to continue on. If you're not closing deals with the same playbook when people are not buying is not going to be a winning recipe. This question is from Meredith, I think, or Meredith also put a bunch of questions in Q and A for us, which is super kind of that people put in chat. What's your take on CRM hygiene? How does that fit into this thinking? Not everyone has the budget to do these interviews. It's up to mandating reps to give as much detail and loss or win rationale for those situations.

First off, if you don't have the budget to hire somebody to do these interviews, like do them yourself, they're so critical and you need to be tied into that buyer feedback loop. And I think we've heard this kind of recently that marketers and I fell into this. I think I'm doing a better job now. But we don't talk to customers and buyers enough with the right purpose of our conversations. Right. So if you don't have the budget, figure out a way to be doing that. CRM hygiene is challenging for every company. Like I said, we work with large B2B enterprises that you would think have all this stuff mastered and they don't. They still have some messy stuff in there. But you can boil it down to like five or six critical things in the CRM to help you do this. And those things shouldn't be that challenging. Like for one, you gotta have the right buyer contact on opportunities. So you need to figure out how to work with your sales team. We power that with like sales rep surveys. So we have a sales rep survey that comes out after the deals one are closed and it asks the sales rep like, what do you think caused this deal? And it's further than just the pick list item and the CRM. But then like the main point really of these sales rep surveys is will you please confirm who the buyer is we should be talking to? And then they'll confirm that and then you know for sure. Okay, this is the right contact. So that's one obviously their contact information. I wouldn't worry so much about some of the other stuff that CRM messiness like includes. Like maybe if the account's a little bit mixed or if there's a duplicate account or if the deal size isn't totally in there. Like we do interviews with people, then they, the sales rep wasn't exactly sure what the deal size was because they didn't get that far along in the conversation. Sometimes you just don't know. But in your mind you're like, oh, that's a great account. Like, well, who cares what the deal size was Exactly. If you knew that was the account you wanted, go and interview them and figure out what happened.

Yeah, you can bucket into like, who are the types of companies that we would want to be customers? Does this fall into what we think? Even if we never got to discuss pricing, there still could be things, I thought you can't do X or you didn't have this security thing that, that we require. This question is from Stephanie. My org does B2B deals with huge corporations. Walmart, Target, Disney, et cetera. This means there are dozens of people in the buying process in these scenarios. Who do you recommend we reach out to for interviews?

So usually there's like main stakeholder on deals that's kind of driving. It's probably your champion Inside, it's usually the person that really wants this thing or has to implement it, but then they got to go convince the buying committee that they should do it. And you need to figure out how in these large deals to enable and empower that person to make the business case. Inside, like the majority of that sales motion is not you on the demo with that person. It's actually that person talking to the rest of their team. And you're not even involved in those conversations. So you need to make sure that person you're keyed into and you understand that really well and what's causing maybe that person is totally convinced and they weren't able to just sell it up the chain. Right. So I would start there with like, who's your champion? Who's your main stakeholder? Who's the main point of contact? And then you can spread it from there and kind of figure out maybe after interviewing those people you start to understand, oh, almost every time they include security or they include the CFO, let's go start talking to CFOs too, because they're the ones shutting the deal down over and over. But I would start interviewing those main points of contact and then you can like figure out, oh, at this main point of contact, over and over, our champion keeps saying the CFO is the jerk. The CFO is the one that won't let this through. So the next step should be, let's go try to interview CFOs, figure out what it is. Why aren't they seeing the value? How do we enable this person to sell the value harder when we're outside of the deal?

Good stuff. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. There's not a lot of fluff in what you're saying and it's always great when someone can walk the talk. So good work so far. What would you say the maturity curve is for win loss interviews? So let's say, let me try to take a stab at this. I would say V1 is like. And even though, like, yeah, it would be great, people go buy like closed after this. Like V1 is like, if you haven't sent out a simple ass email to your last 10 customers that you lost and ask them for a phone call from the VP of sales, like, or chat, that seems like v1, v2 is probably like type of survey. But what do you say, teacher, how would you approach that? Maybe just break it down in like three buckets for people.

Yeah, our methodology is, and this is our point of view on it, buyer interviews are the best way to get this feedback. So optimize your entire program towards that. And the reason I say that is there's a lot of people out there that think, I got to go get the statistical significance behind the data or I'm going to survey first. Because that's easy. It's like low hanging fruit. But what happens there is you send out a survey to 100 people, you have a really bad response rate because surveys are just bad. You know, participation rates was like 3 to 5% if you're good at it. And then they think, okay, I'm going to take that 3 to 5% response rate, which was like five people, and I'm going to go try to interview those five people. But now you've asked them to do two things and usually people aren't going to do the survey and the interview. So you maybe if you're lucky, you get like one interview out of that and your interview participation rate is 1%. So index towards the most important feedback, which is buyer interviews.

Right.

The other thing I would say is so many buyers, they tell us this too. They're usually afraid to accept stuff from sales or accept or give feedback to sales, mainly because they think that sales is just going to try to win them back or they're trying to overcome their objection like, well, the only reason you want to talk to me is to figure out why I really said no so that you can sell me again. I don't want to do that. I don't have time for that. So I wouldn't have it be from the VP of sales. I would do something like, hey, I'm head of marketing or I'm a product marketer and I'm doing some research or I'm the, I'm the experience manager here and I'm just trying to understand, like, do it a little bit like that so that they feel more open and more inclined to talk to you. I think I might have gone off on a diversion on that.

I think it's good. I can see what you're saying about the perception of like, oh, does this person just want to talk to me so they can sell me something again? Good lord, this is a good one. How often have you seen deals get revived from loss analysis? Kind of somewhat related to what you just mentioned.

Yeah, exactly. It happens. For sure. We're exploring right now, building it in our product. Like, we'll have an interview and they'll be like, as we're talking, I'm thinking maybe I should like check them out again. Like, it was pretty close call and we're still having these conversations or whatever it is. So we're considering putting in our product where if we find that, if our consultants interviewing and they see that they can tag that opportunity and then the company can realize, oh, and then the cool thing is they have all that buyer feedback to like, figure out, how do I really like go win this again? It happens quite a bit, but if that's the main focus of your program, it's gonna suck. Like the main focus of your program should be. And people lose sight of this, which is crazy. It's like it's a win loss analysis program. Your purpose is to figure out why you win and lose. And sometimes people will go do interviews and at the end of it they'll be like, I still don't really know why we won or lost that deal. Like, they get so in the weeds. This happens to product marketers and marketers all the time because they start to get like, well, what do you think about this messaging? Or what do you think about this? Or what if we do that? And product happens? Because they're like, hey, if I was to build this product would have influenced your deal. And they're trying to do user research for product features. Like, the point of it should be, tell me your experience, what drove the outcome of this deal? And if you're not doing it that way, if you're sitting there thinking, let's do this motion to win back deals, people are going to realize that. And you're not going to get good data. You're not going to get the purpose of the, of the analysis in the.

Q and A. Melanie said, and if your sales team is against the win loss interviews, I would say there's probably something more toxic laying under behind the scenes, like which team would not want to know why people are not buying from you if you're asking them to do. We're not asking them to do the interviews anyway. So it's just an additional data point or a checkbox in Salesforce, right?

This is an interesting topic. So when I joined Closed, I thought for sure VPs of marketing would want this data. Like, I thought that was probably one of our biggest buyer Personas. And then as we got in, I knew product marketers do this, but I'm realizing we realized like, oh, that's like our main in for the most part right now or competitive intelligence. And I'm like shocked sometimes at how protective VPs of sales are over this information. And it comes from a couple of reasons. One is like nefarious in my opinion. And the other one is them being just very strong stakeholders and careful with their team.

Right.

They're like, careful about what, though? Like, what would you uncover that would be bad? I guess so.

The nefarious part is they're like, I don't want people to know that I'm really bad at coaching my sales reps how to demo or how to do this.

Right.

Okay, sorry. Sorry to interrupt you.

Like, I. I could.

Now I get. I can totally see this. Which is like, if something comes up and it's like, holy, we do all these things, why are we not telling people them then?

Exactly.

Goes on to like, why are we not training? Yeah, I got it.

Yep. And we've seen that where they're like, we have a customer who was demoing to, like, buyer Persona A product feature one.

Right.

And then buyer Persona B started to enter their market. Who cared about feature two, but they just took the same playbook from buyer Persona 1 and applied it to this buyer Persona, and we were demoing the same, and they ignored feature two, and, like, we're talking about feature one the whole time. And then we did the win loss analysis, and they realized, oh, buyer Persona 2 cares about feature 2 and not feature 1. Why are we losing these deals? We do feature 2 really, really well, but the sales team's never talking about it. It's not even in the demo, like, what's going on.

Right.

So that reflects a little bit harshly on, like, wait, you're not training. You're not thinking about your buyers. And sometimes in a company that has a culture that doesn't have a growth mindset, that isn't humble about, like, learning and growing, they are protective of that, and they're honestly just scared of, like, people are going to realize I'm bad. And it comes back to marketers, too. Like, if you get feedback in there that you almost killed somebody's dog with your brownies, like, everybody's gonna be like, oh, you're dumb with marketing. Like, you did the direct mail campaign that really almost lost the deal for me. How would you do that?

Right.

So it goes both sides.

Does it goes back? Yeah. I've been in that situation where it's like, we're not winning deals because of our pricing is confusing. Like, marketing needs to make a better pricing page. And it's like, I think you have to be able to look at yourselves from the, you know, take that objective view. And so I think, like, if you're rolling this out and you're doing it in secret and you're not telling Anyone. And then all of a sudden at a management meeting, you're presenting like, win loss reasons. I think you gotta like, if I was the head of marketing and I wanted to do this, I'd be like, hey, first let's have a leadership team level discussion. Like, hey, I want to roll this out. Here's why. I'm happy to like be the person that manages this project. But just FYI, it's going to touch every department. Here's how it's going to work. I think you need to like, be proactive about that in order for it to be well received. And if it's not well received, this happens all the time. People get territorial and defensive. So know that. But if it happens, like, then you gotta double click and be like, hold on, there's some real actual, like kind of bullshit that's holding us back from getting better here.

And then the other side of it is like, not all sales leaders are like that. Sometimes marketers have botched the customer relationship and they've done things that have jeopardized an opportunity or jeopardized the relationship with the account. And sales reps are protective of that for good reason. Like, they've put a lot of work and effort into creating relationships, into driving deals. They're working really hard at that. And then sometimes we'll just blindly send like a horrible marketing campaign, automated email or something to that person and it like ruins the perception.

Right?

And so it's happens too. And so sometimes sales can be protective and like, I don't, I don't really want you talking to my customers because truthfully, there's a lot of ops, and I've seen this a lot in my career. There's ops that close, but they're not ultimately lost. Like, maybe in six months or a year, you work on things, you keep that relationship open and you eventually close them. It's not like the game is over. You know what I mean? So sales reps are careful of that. So you need to like to do this the right way. You need to show them, hey, this isn't a stick. Like, we're not here to punish with the data. We're all going to grow from it on every single department. And we're going to use it in a humble way and learn and do better and just be better for our buyers. And it builds true org buyer empathy. Instead of every org being like, well, I know the buyer the best, I know the buyer best. And especially on the product team, they'll be like, you'll go up and Say, hey, we should do this feature. Sales will go tell them, hey, I just lost a deal from this feature. And the product manager is sitting there thinking, well, that's just recency bias. I know the buyer way better than you do because I've done all this research and it doesn't matter who knows the buyer best. You should all know the buyer really, really well and align on that knowledge and then do the best thing for the buyers.

Right?

For a good, strong org, like, and a healthy team, I could see it being a very strong thing to, like, align everyone, for sure.

Definitely.

One thing that I saw in Q and A that didn't get to somebody said. Your take on using these interviews to also build podcasts, I think of as just another input of, like, you can't create any content without knowing the needs and wants and desires of your ideal customer. And so whether that's through customer interviews, call recordings, whatever, I think of it as another insight for that. Obviously, I wouldn't use the audio from those calls on podcasts. Podcasts. Unless they were explicitly given permission. You never know. But this has been amazing. I want to give people time to, like, go to their next thing and I want to make sure you have time to just. Why don't you send us out of here? We're just like anything else that you want to get to or a plug or a recap. This has been great. I've learned a bunch from this and I. The chat has been blowing up with some just really positive stuff.

So.

So thanks for doing it, but why don't you send us out of here?

I know I didn't get, like, super tactical in here about how to actually execute or drive a program like this or do the interviews. And like, I've had experiences as a marketer where I've completely failed, like, totally failed, and did really dumb things. And I've also had really great wins and I've come to a place now I really want marketers to win and I want salespeople to win. Like, it drives me when I. It hurts me, actually. When people on my sales team hear Ms. Quota, I'm like, that's on me. Like, I didn't give them enough pipe. Right? I want people to win. And so I don't honestly, like, totally care if you hire closed. I just think as from using winloss personally here now for almost two years and not doing it before like this, it's made me a way more confident and better marketer. And that's where I want to pass on to the audience. Here. And like I said, I don't care if you use close or you do it yourself. So in like the spirit of that, we have a live workshop like starting next week called winloss101. We're not going to sell. We're just going to talk about how to interview the right way, how to structure the data the right way, how to do outreach, how to get participation rates up. We're going to share tons of our secrets and so you can go to winloss101.com to check that out. If you are thinking this would be cool, I want to go try it. I want to get more tactical, I want to get better at this and it's going to be live. We'll have Q and A. So if you're also like, hey, I've been doing this forever and I want to share some of my experience, we welcome that. That would be really cool as well. And anybody, we have this offer in there that anyone that does. It's a six week course. Anyone that does at least three of those courses, we're going to go out and do a free buyer interview for you and kind of like kickstart that and show you. Here's a good example of how to do it. Here's how I'd structure it, give you access to the closed platform that can show you all that data analysis. So I'm excited about it. I think it'll be a really cool way to get better at this skill and it gets you better at the buyer feedback part and just being a great marketer. So yeah, I can sign off with that. Dave, thanks so much.

That's great. Also just to make, because I got to make everything a marketing lesson like for like I think having a good offer is so underrated in SaaS and marketing and I think like you could have easily just been check out our website, go get a demo. This is great of like just as a marketer, forget closed loss. But you're thinking about like, you know, your funnel. Okay. We can get people in if we do this win loss analysis thing. Like I think it's great and I, I wish more marketers would spend time on like developing that offer. You need more offers than get a demo and contact ells. And I think that's a great one. So cool to end that meta marketing lesson, check out close close.com check out. I put the link in there. It's winloss101.com a bunch of people will go there today. We'll have this on the Exit 5 podcast soon, but trend and thank you. People can look you up. People can go check out close. This was a great session. I love the comments that we got at the end right now. I appreciate it and I'll see you later.

Okay, thanks Dave. See you.

See you all. Enjoy the rest of your day. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

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