WHAT IS WIN/LOSS ANALYSIS?
A NOTE FROM BLUE LEMON'S FOUNDER
Over the past 30 years, I have had the opportunity to see the challenges of building a repeatable and sustainable sales process from nearly every vantage point. As a VP of Sales for a large software firm, I was the person responsible for driving results. As a COO of a SaaS provider, I was responsible for ensuring all functional groups were focused on the most highly impactful strategies to build the business. As a CEO of a services firm, I needed to determine how to best invest in Product, Customer Success, Sales, and Marketing in order to drive maximum revenue performance.
Looking back, I can identify a common thread across all these experiences: If we understood the barriers to success, we could develop strategies to overcome them. Unfortunately, we did not always have the proper levels of insights necessary to develop fully informed strategies, and in talking to other executives in the software and services marketplace, I discovered this issue was not unique to my organizations.
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Like most executives trying to figure out what was needed to drive growth, I worked with my management team to scrub our CRM data in order to better understand the issues. Unfortunately the CRM data told us what happened but it rarely told us why it happened. We analyzed the reason codes but quickly discovered that the quality of that data was inconsistent at best. As it turns out this was not a unique phenomenon either. Market research shows that reason codes are incorrect over 60% of the time, which makes sense considering the person entering the code inevitably has some level of bias. As an example of that bias, I have met very few salespeople that would identify themselves as the reason the business was lost.
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While what I am about to tell you is obvious, you might be surprised how few organizations have a repeatable process to achieve this. If you want to know how to drive revenue growth, you must constantly learn from your experiences with customers and prospects. Because, in reality, they have the answers!
I fully appreciate that this is easier said than done. Even if you actually built this capability in-house, most prospects won’t be frank about the issues with an employee of the company; it's in our human nature not to want to offend someone.
This desire to help other organizations understand the why of their lost sales efforts was the premise for launching Blue Lemon Partners. BLP is an unbiased, independent, third party research firm that can help your organization get at the root issues that are limiting revenue growth. We do so through the implementation of our Win-Loss Analysis and Customer Experience Analysis services. In today’s competitive landscape, market intelligence can provide a competitive advantage for those who wish to become market leaders in their category. Insights into the reason you win/lose business will enable your organization to reinforce what is working and to develop organizational strategies to address the issues limiting revenue growth. In addition, our Customer Experience services focus on developing an understanding of the customer’s state of mind prior to contract renewal period while there is still time to address any outstanding issues.
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We would welcome the opportunity to discuss your needs.
Mike DiFranza
Managing Partner