8 Ways Win/Loss Sales Analysis Boosts Sales
Win/loss sales analysis helps your company:
1. Understand your prospects’ needs, pain points and how your competitors are positioning themselves so you can enhance marketing messaging. You are able to heighten your differentiation against competitors and create marketing materials that highlight the aspects of your product most relevant to clients.
2. Redefine your target market. You may uncover that the industry or company size that you have been addressing is wrong, or your offering fits better in some industries you have targeted than others.
3. Finesse your sales presentations. It could be that your sales presentations are not aligned with the marketing collateral creating doubt in people’s minds. Or, it could be that the sales presentations miss on some of the key points that decision makers are looking for.
4. Pinpoint the new products, features or services clients need and want. If a prospect bought from the competition because they offer a something that’s not a part of your offering, you’ll want to evaluate if it makes sense to include it.
5. Compare your prices to the competition. Are you losing sales with high prices or are you leaving money on the table?
6. Identify flaws in the sales process from building rapport and identifying needs, to presenting solutions and closing the sale.
7. Detect errors in client handling. Did your team follow up effectively? Were they available when the prospect needed them and did they provide necessary information?
8. Provide constructive criticism for sales people. The only way to learn is to understand your mistakes.
When you put all these changes to sales, marketing, and product development together, you have a blue print for revving up your lead-to-sales conversion rates.
6 Ingredients of Win/Loss Analysis That Get Results
Savvy business managers recognize that the intelligence they gain from win/loss analysis can strengthen the demand curve. But to make sure you collect unbiased data you should take the following steps.
1. Use a third party to talk with prospects and customers. They are more likely to be impartial and interviewees will be more open with them.
2. Select randomly from newly won and lost opportunities across all industries, company size and deal size.
3. Diversify -- perform the analysis on a few companies from each industry, company size, and deal size to identify patterns.
4. Make sure the interviewers have access to the marketing and sales materials used during the sales process.
5. Get both sides of the story by interviewing some of the sales people to understand wins and losses from their perspective.
6. Understand this isn’t a one-time fix. Make win/loss analysis part of your ongoing marketing plan. It is the best way to keep your ear to the ground to identify changes in the market and competition.
