How to Drive Action With Win-Loss Insights | Coffee & Compete POWER HALF HOUR

Hey everybody. Adam's back. He has finished up his spelunking trip from the Philippines. So here we have him. Today we're going to be diving in to some really exciting stuff with the power half hour, something that we do every single month, inviting our Clue customers and other folks from the community. And today we're going to be talking about how you take Win Loss insights and use them to drive action. Super excited for it. Let's get into it.

Yeah, we did this one a few weeks back. Awesome. Hanging out with Hunty, whole community. We do these once a month. Yeah, can't wait for more of these in the new year.

Let's dive on in. So today's presentation is going to be on how do you drive action with winloss insights. So quick little introduction. I'm the CE manager at Clue, so I've been managing Clue's compete and Win loss program for, I want to say six or seven months now. Prior to that I spent around two years working on the pre sales consulting and the competitive enablement consulting side of our business. So I got to work with a lot of CLU's strategic enterprise customers, a lot of our upper mid market customers, basically helping them figure out how to, you know, build their own compete program. How do you implement best practices, all that good stuff. So what's been super exciting is over the past few months we've been building out CLU's win loss compete program. And, and what I'm really excited to share today is, you know, what have we been doing, what have we learned and how can you take some of the insights that we've been implementing at Clue and bring them to your own compete program? I am a shawarma connoisseur. You can ask anybody at the Clue office in Vancouver. I eat shawarma just about every single day. So shout out to Mr. Shawarma and I am Adam McQueen's best friend. So just wanted to toss that one in there.

It goes both ways, buddy. Yeah.

Love you man. So today, yeah, basically what we're we're going to be keeping in mind and what we're going to be talking through is how do you build a win loss program that keeps your org informed but also helps drive strategic change? Win Loss insights, super, super impactful. But how do you actually leverage them to drive change? So this is basically the, the, the rundown of what a lot of win loss programs look like today. Set your research objectives, you run your interviews, you run your surveys, you collect your insights and then you store your insights. But the Reality is that a lot of win loss programs, they stop at storing insights. You know, you, you've set your, your objectives, you run a lot of interviews, you run a lot of surveys, you've got, you know, some reports, but really they don't get shared broadly. And so when you don't have a system to share your insights, they, they end up sitting stagnant. And so what we're going to be talking through today is how do you set up a system to distribute your, your win loss insights and act on the findings that you're finding in your win loss information. So there's essentially four different ways that we're building our process to distribute when loss insights at clu. So it's a self serve hub, functional readouts, executive summary and our win loss committee. These are sort of our multi pronged process for making sure that whatever we collect, whatever we find from our win loss information is being properly distributed out to the folks who need it and who can use that information in their own line of work. And so this is very broadly what I like to call the H VAC framework. Not the prettiest acronym at Compute Week. I called this the H CAFE framework. You can mix and match these depending on, you know, whatever, whatever your own process is, whatever the cadence looks like.

But it rolls off the tongue. Hunter. It rolls off the tongue.

I know, it really does. It's. Yeah, it's, it's a nice one. Um, okay, awesome. So essentially this is basically what the breakdown looks like. And then we're going to go into, you know, what, what do we actually cover in each of these different phases. So it starts off with creating something called a voice of the market board. This is how we keep our, you know, our sellers informed and really everyone else in the organization informed. When we have new stories that come in, you can see the individual win story, loss story, renewal churn story. We create a self serve hub. So that's what we're going to talk through here on a monthly cadence, doing functional readouts. So sales, marketing, CS product, even some other folks around the organization, making sure that we're actually sharing our anecdotes that are coming up on a monthly basis, keeping people informed with what we're hearing from our buyers on a quarterly basis. It's the executive summary readout, making sure that we are taking our, you know, our quantified themes basically like what showed up at what frequency over the quarter's win loss interviews and sharing that out to our executives and our win loss committee. Now on top of this, once We've done our executive summary readout. We have a Win Loss committee action item planning meeting where we can essentially say here's what we learned from the executive summary. Now what are we going to do about it over the next, over the next quarter? And that leads into another monthly cadence item here which is check ins with the Win Loss committee making sure that we're actually, you know, implementing what we said we were going to. So this is what we're going to talk through today. So starting off with the self Serve hub Voice of the market board. So what the heck is a voice of the Market board? It's a self serve repository of win loss, renewal and churn stories. It's the individual stories. So you can think of the, the atomic unit here being a story. It's, it's like a highlight reel or it's like what were the core win reasons or loss reasons, renewal churn reasons from a particular interview and making sure that those interviews can be, you know, easily found. And the purpose here is really to make sure that people can find, consume or learn from our interviews on a one off basis as opposed to necessarily having to wait until the end of the quarter to see an executive summary or you know, even wait until a functional readout. And this is basically the process that we take here. So as soon as a win loss report is published by our win loss team at Clue or you know, for example, I like to run my own renewal and churn interviews. So I might have conducted that interview. I'll take that interview, use our BYOI product, bring your own insights to create a card, include that hosts that story and then I'll add it to the Voice of the market board. Include on top of that, I'll share it through Slack, I'll share it through the Clue Digest, making sure that we get our reach with the story far and wide. But really it's pointing people back to this central voice of the marketplace board. And so this is really what it looks like here. So we have our voice of the Market board include. People can click on it, they can go in, they can see all of the different stories broken down by you know, we have multiple products, you can see the wins and losses for those different products, you can see the renewals and the churns. I've also started doing some seller win interviews, getting the, the seller side of the story so they can see all of those in there as well. And then at the individual story level, this is what somebody would be seeing. They're going to see the deal details, they'll see, you know, like a two, three minute highlight reel from the interview. The win or loss reasons which have been generated by CLU's BYOI feature and tagged by topic. So this tag by topic part is really important because it makes things a lot more searchable. I can say, hey, this was a win interview against this particular competitor or in this vertical or you know, in this particular segment or something like that. And then if people need to go in and say, hey, I want to see a win story where you know, we won in this segment against this competitor, they can go in and basically filter down and you know, see if we have a win story that, that they can try and replicate the winning strategy of. So that's basically the purpose of this and, and what this voice of the market board looks like.

So when you're, when you're doing this, do you have a team in mind specifically or is this like a full organizational thing? Like what's the primary audience you're thinking of with, with a card like this, like telling each individual deal.

So ideally this is something that, I mean it's accessible to the whole company, but really the focus here is sales. It's making sure that sellers can easily find our win loss stories so that again they can, they can replicate winning deals or sorry, like winning strategies, but they can also try and avoid some of the, the losing strategies. Things that maybe we've learned from. So it's, it is for everybody, but it's a specific focus on sellers.

Penny had a question as well ahead of time here which is kind of related to this. If this is a sales audience, she was asking about just general best practices for getting sales buy in into this process. Has this been one of the levers you pulled, I guess to get sales bought in? Are there other things as well that have been, that have got them kind of to lean into this kind of win loss program?

Yeah, actually that's, it's a really, really good question. So the way that I think we have started trying to drive sales and get maybe not just sales engagement but like, yeah, the initial sales buy in is highlighting when sellers get called out in win stories. So if you're able to do that whenever you're, you're sharing win loss information or you're creating cards like this, if there's a seller shout out like selling sellers absolutely love that. So a recent example of that was we actually had a deal that we won where the, the buyer cited the primary win reason as being the experience that, that they had with that exact seller. And So I made that, you know, basically like front and center when I was presenting this back to the sales team and sales leadership. So next time when that seller is maybe thinking about, oh, you know, do I want to recommend a win story, hopefully they're thinking back to the time when they got, you know, a shout out by the buyer. So that's one way. The other way is something that maybe happens a little bit further down the line which is, you know, it's more on the loss side. Like if you're starting to learn from losses, how you can avoid those types of situations, that's a really, really important way to get sales buy in. You know, essentially saying, like, we don't want to continue losing for the same reason. Let's make sure that we're all kind of learning from each other here.

Quick question as well and then I'll let you get back to it. Nicole was just asking, do you have a, do you have a kind of a blank template for this voice in the market board within Clue itself for any of the customers?

Yeah, I'm not sure if we necessarily have it for customers. That's something that I can probably work with our services team on, but I personally use a template for the win stories and loss stories side of things. So if it's not something that's already available in clu, I will make sure to work with the service team to get that in.

All right, Nicole, hit up Hunter after this. Hunter, that's on. That's on you now.

All right, awesome, awesome. All right, so let's talk about functional readouts. So we've talked about the self service hub. That's basically whenever a new story comes in, add it to the hub, share it out, make sure that people know where they can find these stories. Now on a, on a monthly basis, what we've been doing at, at Clue with our win loss program that we have found a ton of success with is functional readout. So basically taking our win loss insights and presenting them to, to different teams to basically highlight, you know, here's basically what we found that we think is going to be really relevant to this team in particular. And we do these on a monthly basis. So for product, customer success and, and marketing, These are typically 30 minute presentations. With sales, we've got a slightly larger team because we're including SDRs in there, Revenue enablement as well. So, so we, we make that one 45 minutes. But these have been really, really impactful. Essentially what we're doing is I'm going to walk you through in a Moment here, the exact insights that we share. But it's great for basically saying, here's what we've learned over the past month. It's not necessarily an executive summary, although it, it does share some, some similarities. But it's really, here's some anecdotes that we're hearing over the past month. Basically, here's how we're trending. If we need to make pivots on the fly in terms of maybe, you know, running an impromptu enablement session or something like that, this is a really powerful way of basically, you know, starting the conversation for, for doing that. So for each of these different teams, though, we share slightly different insights, or at least the conversation ends up being a little bit different depending on who we're talking to. So for example, with sales, we're basically bringing what are the high level why we win reasons, the why we lose reasons, and then any like, topical or competitive insights that are coming out in our conversations that we, we need to be aware of from our buyer's perspective when we're talking to product. They also love going through the why we win, why we lose reasons. There's typically, you know, a degree of product in there, so it's really helpful to do that. But two specific product feedback. You know, whether that's really positive feedback that's coming through, I love hearing that with the product team. Or it's maybe more constructive feedback in some cases. Like, you really want to try and understand, like if you've got a particular piece of the product that's really resonating with a buyer, you want to be able to show, share that with your product team. But then if you're noticing that maybe you've got some product gaps against a competitor that buyers are calling out, that's super important for the product team to know about. On the customer success side, this is basically where we're bringing in our renewal and churn insights. So at Clue, we on top of our Win Loss program, we also run a renewal and churn program. So I run those, those interviews personally using our BYOI product. And essentially what we're sharing here is why are our customers renewing? Like, what are the big value drivers that they're finding in the product or services? Why are customers churning that maybe we can start to mitigate a little bit earlier in that process or you know, create strategies or playbooks to mitigate and then competitive insights. These are always really, really important as well for sharing with the customer success team. And then on the marketing side, we're essentially covering, you know, why are we winning? Why are we losing? Evaluation drivers, you know, what are our buyers looking for when they're first coming to us? What are the problems that they're looking to solve? And purchase influencers. So purchase influencers could be like, you know, where are they actually like going to, to make their decision? Like, who are they leaning on to make their decision? That could be Gartner, it could be Forrester, it could be, you know, industry news, could be, you know, blogs, could be G2, could even be other folks within the industry or, or, you know, special communities as well. So these are always really important places to share with the, the marketing team because understanding purchase influencers might understand where you want to invest your reach your content and where you want to live to engage with your buyers. And when it comes to the functional readouts, the question that I get a lot is like, what do these presentations actually look like? There's a million different ways that, that you can set up a functional readout presentation. But I want to really quickly go over just how simple our setup is at, at Clue when we're presenting these to different teams. So this is an example of the win loss reason. We put it on one screen and we're essentially just saying like, here's our top three win reasons from this cohort. These are our top three loss drivers. And then what we've found to be really impactful is video clips. Not just saying, here are the, you know, here are the, the win reasons and loss reasons, but also here are some examples of the buyers actually talking about those reasons because you get a lot more context, you can hear the tone of the buyer and typically this sparks a ton of conversation in executive summaries. When we've shared buyer clips like this, it just, it opened up a huge wave of conversation. So including buyer clips into your presentations, if you can, is really, really impactful. Okay, so now we've gone over the functional readouts, which is something that happens on a monthly basis. Again, those are 30 to 45 minute presentations to different teams sharing, you know, basically the win loss insights from that particular month. Now, getting into the executive summary, this is the quarterly rollup. So this is a presentation at the end of every quarter that we do. Senior leadership team and win loss committee all being a part of this, typically around 60 to 90 minutes. We've done 90 minutes on, on the, the longer end when we've had to cover a lot more content. And again, this is something that's done on a quarterly basis. So this is not monthly. Some folks do this on a bi annual basis. But we really like to do this on a quarterly basis as just part of our Win Loss program. And essentially what we cover in this presentation is we go back to our learning objectives. So what were we actually trying to understand from this cohort of, of Win Loss interviews and who did we talk to? So which interviews were completed, which products, what industries were they in, what segments, that type of thing. We'll go over a summary of our findings. So keeping things, you know, relatively high level, keep in mind that we don't really want to get like super, super into the weeds here unless there's something that's extremely topical that we want to hit on. We do kind of want to touch on more of the, the higher level themes on top of our, our learning objectives. And then when it comes to the actual insights that we're sharing, this is essentially what we're doing. Like you can, you can basically split this up whatever way that you want. You could do, you know, win loss, business driver, selection criteria, pricing, sales, whatever. But what we have been finding is that mainly what our sale, or, sorry, what our senior leadership team and Win Loss committee wants to be hearing about boils down to what are our overall win reasons? What are our overall loss reasons separated by product, of course, course and competition. So these are really the three areas that, that we try and cover. And this is a question that we actually get a lot, which is if we're, if we're going to run an executive summary, how do we, I mean, so to speak, avoid boiling the ocean. There's a million different things that you can touch on, but ultimately I think what we found is people typically resonate with the overall win reasons, overall loss reasons and competitive insights. The one thing that I might add on to this is is there something topical that you can hit on? You know, like, did a, did a competitor come out with like a new release that maybe you want to dive deep into? Or was there something in your learning objectives around, you know, understanding product apps against a particular competitor that maybe you want to dive deep into from like a product perspective? These are some, some of the things that maybe you, you want to deep dive into a little bit more and creating maybe more of that topical section. But those are just some things to keep in mind, some guardrails.

Hunter, I think you're going to get into this as well, but Kathy had a good question because you mentioned there on these executive summaries you're bringing in SLT and the Win Loss committee. Kathy wanted to know who's on The Win Loss Committee, Clue and what have you seen typically in other companies?

Well, we are just about to get into that, so I'll touch on it. Very high level, the Win Loss Committee. There's a lot of overlap actually Clue, between our Win Loss Committee and our slt. But there some folks who aren't on our SLT that are, you know, they really, really need to be in that room when we're doing this executive summary. So an example of that is, you know, we have our, our principal product manager for our Win Loss product, not necessarily on our slt, but because he oversees basically the entire Win Loss product at Clue, we want to make sure that he is in the room to hear, you know, what's coming up over, over the quarter of Win Loss Insights. Also it's really, you know, impactful for, for a variety of other people who might not necessarily be on slt, but you know, have a lot of, you know, influence. Probably want to hear what's going on from a Win Loss perspective. All right, so one of the other things that I think is important to talk about here too, and this really comes back to the whole purpose of this conversation around how do we drive action for our Win Loss Insights. And so after our executive summary meeting, what we're, we're starting to implement is basically having action items that come out of that meeting. So we've presented the insights. Here's our quarterly roll up, here's what we found, these are the themes. Now let's come together with our SLT and our, our Win Loss Committee and basically come up with what are the three things that we're actually going to do this quarter to act on these insights. And so this is the format that we follow. What's our, you know, our action recommendation, next step of the action, who's going to own it? Timeline, baseline metric, target metric. You might not necessarily have to go through all of those. Maybe you can keep it a little bit more simplified, but this is just one of the ways that you can actually take those insights, bring them to slt, bring them to Win Loss or sorry, to your Win Loss Committee and start creating some tangible action items. So getting into the Win Loss Committee. Kathy, to answer your question a bit more thoroughly, this is essentially what our Win Loss Committee at Clue is comprised of. So we have folks from our, our marketing team, sales product, customer success, research services with within sales. We also have revenue enablement in there as well. And essentially again, what we're doing is we're, we're getting together at the end of the Quarter we're coming together on top of, you know, when we're meeting with our SLT to basically come up with our action items. But then on top of that we're, we're essentially reviewing progress towards those action items on a monthly basis. So instead of just saying hey you know, this is what we're, we're trying to achieve, we're actually basically trying to keep ourselves accountable here. And because the when loss committee is made up of, you know, mainly functional leaders, it's a really, you know, good team to basically be owning a lot of the, the implementation of some of our recommendations and the action items that are out of our executive summary.

So would you say on the like committee side of thing here that even though, especially for clues case because we're maybe a smaller company than actually some of the other folks on the line here that there is some overlap between SLT and the committee, but the key difference is the committee are folks that are kind of more on track to make sure that whatever decisions or actions get agreed upon are getting implemented rather than maybe that exact summary is kind of informing leadership, but there's less mandate on them to drive change.

Yeah, and I think the win loss committee could look a little bit different at larger organizations too. I had a conversation with someone who runs a win loss program at a relatively large company. You know, a few thousand people kind of thing. What they'd essentially mentioned is their like kind of go to audience is mid level managers, folks who can implement some of these recommendations but might not necessarily be like, you know, the most senior people, the slt, that type of thing. So that can be a really impactful way of setting it up at maybe a larger organization. So what did we cover today? We talked about how do you create a self serve hub. So when you've got new interviews coming in, whether that's renewals, churn wins, losses, how do you take those and then create a place where people can go back to them, review them and find some insights that then they can leverage in their sales deals in particular. Again the focus here is really around sales. Also SDRs, they love the, the self serve hub number two, we talked about functional readouts. So on a monthly basis basically doing a roundup of the interviews that you've conducted, presenting those insights to different teams and focusing on the specific things that those teams are going to find value in. So sales is going to care about why we win, why we lose, competitive insights, product. They're mainly going to focus on product feedback, those types of things. Executive summary being the Roundup of the end of the quarter. So how do we take three months worth of interviews, find the themes in them, present that to our SLT in our Win loss committee and then we talk about our Win Loss committee being really the owners of taking those insights, putting them into action and, and staying accountable to those. And that's the show folks want to say big thank you for everyone who, who came today. This was, this was great. Again names Hunter Sones. Feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn if you have any questions about this. Would love to go deeper so you can always find me on LinkedIn.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Hunter, I've got a question. Anyone else has questions that we can get to before we wrap here? I know we're just coming up tight on time. There was a really good question from Nicole ahead of time too here and I wanted to share and also I kind of want to get folks takes before they hop off here too. If anyone is working at a company that's got a wide portfolio of solutions or products and maybe you're serving multiple industries, Nicole was wondering like how do you run a Win Loss program that has that kind of complexity? I know at Clue we're multi product but maybe not the same as again if there's some folks that are going 8, 9, 10 solutions like have you, how are you talking about and how have you seen others.

So at Clue essentially we have, we don't necessarily have the same degree of complexity. We have two products but we do operate in, you know, a few different geographies. For example, Norm Amea and so one of the ways that we have basically tried to tackle this is it sounds a little bit simplified but running a stakeholder survey with our SLT to basically understand like what do you want to learn, what are the top priorities for you? And then incorporating that into our actual, you know, win loss research schedule. So that's one way of doing it. There are other ways. But basically, you know, working with the Clue Win Loss team, our research directors, they've got a lot of experience there, best practices around how to do that and you know, different types of companies, different levels of complexity. Sweet.

All right, well thank you everyone. That's 10 o' clock on the dot here over at Pacific on Pacific time on the West Coast. Appreciate everyone tuning in, dropping in their questions, contributing as well. And that's, that's it for the year for power half hours. Jen, if anyone's interested in our Win Loss product too and some of the things that Hunter touched upon, you can check that out at our demo arena, where you can take the product for a spin at clue.com/win, loss. And of course, the recording will be out Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday. So we'll be getting that over to you. And last but not least, Hunter and I do a podcast here at KLOOT too, Coughing the Beat. So we'd love for you to come check it out, like and subscribe. Be part of the be part of the show too. So thank you everyone, and if we don't catch you this year, have a great holiday season and we'll see you in 2025.

Ram.