Win/Loss Analysis
A win/loss analysis is an objective, clear-eyed assessment of customers’ experiences with your product, marketing, and sales processes. When done correctly, win/loss analysis helps you understand why a customer did or did not purchase your product. This information provides detailed insight into your customers, competitors, and opportunities to pivot sales strategies or improve products.
How to conduct a win/loss analysis
While calling it an “analysis” sounds formal and rigorous, it’s important to remember that win/loss data can be gathered through thoughtful conversations with customers past and present. Start by identifying won and lost customers for the product or service you want to investigate. That might be a net new prospect your company “won” (they became a customer), or a warm lead that you “lost” (they didn’t buy in the end), or anywhere in between.
Your goal is to gather honest, accurate feedback about their experience with the sales process, their perceptions of the product you were selling, and ultimately why they did or didn’t purchase with you. While these conversations should not require much effort or preparation from the interviewee, interviewers should use the same set of questions for each of their win/loss interviews to collect consistent answers.
Who should conduct win/loss interviews?
Win/loss interviews provide rich insight into your market problems, competitors, and customers’ perceptions of your product and company. As such, product professionals should coordinate and lead win/loss interviews. While sales teams might have existing relationships with won and lost customers, they may not be the best choice to lead these interviews. That’s because the interviewees may not want to share negative feedback or jeopardize their relationship with a salesperson. For that reason, product managers and product owners are often appropriate choices to coordinate and lead win/loss analysis because they can come to the interview as unbiased representatives.
Download The Pragmatic Framework
To learn tips for conducting effective Win/Loss Analysis interviews, download our guide to the Pragmatic Framework. There, we explore essential concepts that help real product teams build and market successful products. The key concepts of the Pragmatic Framework will help align your product, marketing, and sales teams to broader market needs and business goals.
