When businesses invest in Win/Loss Analysis, they learn why they win and why they lose.
But then what happens? What actions have been taken by companies that were successful with Win/Loss Analysis, and what was the impact of those actions?
Case studies are almost always vague about these details, making it difficult to justify the investment in improved Win/Loss Analysis.
Among Growth Velocity’s clients, a key reason for this gap is that Win/Loss Analysis is considered their “secret sauce.” Leadership at these companies is concerned that this advantage would be eroded if competitors launched their own programs or interfered in the operation of the client’s program. So they keep the program’s existence confidential.
As a result, it can be difficult to justify an investment in improved Win/Loss Analysis.
This case study provides a transparent example of how one data-driven company (blinded) acted on the win/loss findings and recommendations delivered by Growth Velocity, and the resulting business impact.
Meet Acme, a Leader in Business Management Software
Acme is an enterprise SaaS company with an average contract value in the six figures. Its customers include Global 2000 businesses in financial services, insurance, retail, entertainment, hospitality, and life sciences. The fast-growing company has a wide range of competitors, from the largest ERP vendors to long-standing category leaders to small, new startups that provide point solutions.
Acme’s leadership team has deep category and domain experience. Although this is generally advantageous, Acme’s new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) was concerned this background caused overconfidence and impaired decision-making. “I had different inputs from the field about why we won and where we were successful and things like that,” he shared. “And so I really wanted to understand the voice of the customer—the voice of the market. What is it that they believe in?”
However, getting a clear, reliable understanding of buyer decision-making would be difficult. This was because, as Acme’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) explained, “There are numerous different decision-making criteria that go into a software platform like ours because it is an enterprise-wide solution.”
Acme’s Salesforce CRM didn’t help. And while Acme’s two-person product marketing team already interviewed customers for success stories, they didn’t have the capacity to conduct a full-fledged Win/Loss Analysis.
Together, Acme’s CRO and CMO made the decision to fund an independent Win/Loss Analysis. Their chief goals were improved efficiency and success of their go-to-market motions.
Acme’s Objective #1: Go-to-market efficiency
In recent years, Acme’s marketing budget had seen drastic cuts. These constraints made it more urgent than ever to allocate resources efficiently, particularly in determining which businesses to pursue or avoid.
By understanding Acme’s true market strengths and weaknesses, Acme could then create a strategic “heat map” for targeting the right customers and improving sales outcomes.
Along the same lines, the CMO shared concerns about having limited influence over closed/won deals despite arming sales reps with “everything they could possibly use to go from discovery to negotiation to close.”
By improving segmentation and targeting, the two leaders agreed they could allocate resources first to best fit accounts. In turn, Acme could then reduce customer churn, increase net retention, and lower support costs.
Acme’s Objective #2: Go-to-market success
Reviewing win rates, Acme’s CRO and CMO noticed they had started to win more deals against their primary competitor. Good news, certainly, but they wanted to understand why exactly that was happening. As the CMO said, “We wanted to really grow and scale our business.”
If Acme clearly understood the mechanisms driving their sales team’s success from an objective standpoint, they could further leverage them to win more deals. In addition, they could shorten the buying cycle by 50%—another of their key goals.
Win/Loss Analysis & Outcomes
Growth Velocity proposed and quickly delivered a baseline Win/Loss Analysis. A sample of 20 recent sales opportunities (10 wins, 10 losses) was interviewed to yield a high-confidence analysis of Acme’s complex sale.
At kickoff, Growth Velocity delivered deal selection criteria and a custom discussion guide, and then iterated them with feedback from Acme stakeholders. Then it contacted buyers from 29 recent deals, 20 of whom were interviewed.
In the final phase, Growth Velocity analyzed the data and delivered its findings and recommendations. This was completed just 12 weeks after kickoff, even with an intervening end-of-year holiday period.
The report provided key insights and recommendations for:
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- Improved messaging in the sales cycle
- Up-to-date, reliable competitive intelligence
- Qualifying out and focusing on the best-fit deals
- Improved buying experience and sales process adjustments
- Closing a product gap that was driving losses
Below, team members share how specific actions taken because of the Win/Loss Analysis improved Acme’s go-to-market efficiency and success.
1. Improved messaging in the sales cycle
Growth Velocity’s interviews and analysis identified the decision-making criteria Acme’s buyers were actually using in their selection process. In its final report, Growth Velocity created a quadrant chart that positioned all criteria by prevalence and win/loss influence. This chart was a major focus of Acme’s Q&A during Growth Velocity’s presentation of findings.
One of Growth Velocity’s key recommendations to Acme’s product marketing team was to emphasize the factors that were most positively influencing sales. It advised updating marketing content and enablement assets to emphasize and explain to buyers why these criteria should be prioritized and how they should be assessed.
According to Acme’s CRO, sellers have been able to swing decisions in their favor “by improving the messaging in the sales cycle to highlight those strengths that are ours and make them decision criteria.”
2. Up-to-date, reliable competitive intelligence (CI)
Growth Velocity’s analysis also identified that low pricing by new startups was driving Acme’s less than 2-3% win rate at lower-end enterprises. Acme’s leadership has since committed to not losing on price in this segment. As a result, its win rate has improved to “more than 10%” according to Acme’s VP of Sales Operations.
Acme’s product marketing team has also used the win/loss buyer interviews to arm the field team with up-to-date, reliable competitive intel. This CI has been a key input for the sales battlecards created in Crayon, as well as for the competitive session the product marketing team leads at the annual sales kickoff.
3. Qualifying out and focusing on the best-fit deals
With a reliable understanding of their offering’s true strengths and weaknesses, Acme’s field team has been able to qualify opportunities better. For instance, Growth Velocity found that “extended capabilities” was a key factor in losses at greenfield opportunities because those buyers tended to have broader needs and tighter budgets. This made Acme’s best of breed point solution less attractive.
Acme’s VP of Sales Operations said of the impact, “We fail faster. So we don’t spend cycles on something where we’re not as competitive or where we’re not as strong.”
Additionally, he shared, “We’ve improved quality of pipeline, meaning it stays in the pipeline past six months. Part of it is ABX, but some of it is this. We’ve increased our quality by 60%, meaning stuff isn’t falling out in the first six months.”
4. Improved buying experience and sales process adjustments
Growth Velocity discovered that buying experience issues were driving losses. Most concerning was dissatisfaction with Acme’s handling of contracting because this had caused several recent late-stage losses during negotiation. But even Acme’s wins called contracting with them “painful.” The problems went beyond contracting. Buyers were also negative about the responsiveness of Acme’s sales team, customization of its demos, and leadership’s lack of engagement.
Acme responded to these findings with sales coaching, performance plans, and sales process changes. Compared to before, Acme now brings in contracting and legal “basically two months earlier … just because of the LOL and some of the terms and the liabilities that we have,” according to the VP of Sales Operations.
After the Win/Loss Analysis, “we closed a lot more of our late stage business,” the CRO reported. “Our last two stages of the sales cycle were 84 and 92% conversion rates. And we moved it up to like 88 and 94.”
5. Closing a product gap that was driving losses
Growth Velocity’s analysis of the initial 20-interview dataset pointed to integration as a key factor driving losses. This finding was confirmed and elaborated with survey and interview data from the continuous win/loss program launched afterward.
In this way, the Win/Loss Analysis revealed a critical area for improvement in Acme’s product. The lack of integration features forced customers to use multiple vendors, an issue that Acme was previously aware of but did not view as urgent.
Acme’s CRO said, “This integration gap was bigger than perceived in terms of its impact on sales cycles, and the internal solutions were far less effective than the team thought.”
Business Impact
By tapping into Acme’s losses as well as its recent wins, Growth Velocity uncovered actionable recommendations for sales, marketing, product marketing, product management, operations, and professional services. Since working with Growth Velocity, Acme has:
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- Increased its overall win rate by 4-5 percentage points, more than 50%
- Shortened the average sales cycle from 9 months to 8.5 months
- Increased by 60% the number of opportunities that stay in the pipeline past six months
Acme’s team attributes the overall 4-5–point increase in win rate to closing the gap in its product’s integration capabilities, better messaging in the sales cycle, fewer losses on price with lower-end enterprises, and improvements to their buying experience and sales process.
In addition, across the company, Acme has seen greater cross-functional alignment.
Acme’s CMO described Growth Velocity’s report and presentation as a “very much facts-based discussion… The recommendations for improvement were presented in a very constructive way, which motivated people to want to drive changes to improve that buying experience.”
In this way, Growth Velocity’s Win/Loss Analysis helped Acme’s team overcome organizational and cultural blind spots that threatened business growth. Issues that might have previously been written off as another department’s responsibility were brought to attention, with each party made aware that everyone plays a role in enhancing the buying experience.
Acme Has Made Win/Loss Analysis a Continuous Process
Based on the initial Win/Loss Analysis and its recommendations, Acme decided to extend its partnership with Growth Velocity. This way, Acme could continually monitor and adjust to evolving buyer decision-making and competitor go-to-market approaches.
Growth Velocity’s ongoing program uses a mixed methods qualitative-quantitative design. It sends a win/loss survey to all closed opportunities, including wins as well as losses from Discovery all the way to Negotiation. Growth Velocity then conducts interviews, which provide competitive intelligence and a more nuanced understanding of the high-level win/loss patterns revealed by the survey.
This program is also used to track Acme’s progress improving key factors like buying experience. Quarterly reports have shown a sustained improvement in buyer satisfaction with sales responsiveness, customization of demos, leadership engagement, and contracting. As one example, Acme’s top box score for sales demonstrations has increased to 63% in 2023 from 39.3% in 2021.
Get Your Impact Estimate
Get in touch for a customized estimate of how much Win/Loss Analysis could improve your go-to-market performance. Growth Velocity will fine tune our model to your situation, so you can be more confident of the projected impacts on win rate and retention.