Name: Value takes center stage in the 2025 State of Win-Loss Analysis Report
Uploaded: 2025-06-24T17:30:44.981Z
Duration: 21 min 56 s
Description: Value takes center stage in the 2025 State of Win-Loss Analysis Report

Transcript for "Value takes center stage in the 2025 State of Win-Loss Analysis Report": Hello, everyone. My name is Jonathan Johnson. I am the director of product marketing and growth, and I am joined by my friend and colleague, Scott Varner, who is the director of program delivery here at Clozd. And we're excited to talk today about the about Clozd 2025 state of wind loss analysis report, which we did in conjunction with the PMM Alliance. And I think there's some really cool stuff in in this report that we're on top of that. No. That's actually really cool stuff. It's been incredible to see how this report has grown over the last five years in both its scope and then also in how much value in our PMM Alliance, Clari customers that are using win loss are actually gaining. A 100%. And like Scott said, this is the fifth year we're running this report, and I think it's the most comprehensive. I mean, it is the most comprehensive that that we've run. We received over a thousand responses, so thank you to those that took it. And I I think there's some really interesting insights, in this report. And like you said, it's been five years. Scott, you've been in this space a whole lot longer than I have. How have you seen the win loss space just change, over the last over the last five years? It it's been interesting to see how there have been some very forward thinking early adopters that are using win loss. Win loss is a, like, small subject in the pragmatic marketing framework, And now it's a very, like, well grown discipline. It seems like a lot of companies have it as, like, a required discipline. It's definitely gaining a lot of not just popularity, but it's gaining a lot of, like, necessity. Oh, I I totally agree with that. And I think as we go through the report, we'll kind of see what maturity does look like and how you get how you get up that learning curve a little bit faster. One of the things as we put this report together this year, we really wanted to focus on is helping people understand what good looks like. And I think there were several things that we learned, but one that really stood out is how you set up your program and how you run your program makes a huge difference around, how successful your program is. And so one thing we saw from last the last time we ran to this report to this year report is that thirty nine percent of people who are doing win loss are doing it on an ongoing cross functional basis, and that's up from thirty one percent the last time we ran this. And Scott, as you've seen different program setups, what are what are the benefits you've seen and what do we see in the survey to suggest kind of what what good looks like as you set up a program? Yeah. I think as you already called out, we already when we can cover our programs, we make sure we are drawing attention to the fact that cross functional is increasing in terms of popularity of how programs are starting. But even more powerful than that is organizations that are doing it cross functionally are also the ones that are seeing ROI. That three and a half percent are cross functional, 85% of those say that they reported a tangible value from wind loss analysis. Yeah. And I think just to to really show the juxtaposition there, that number drops down to 55% when you just have a a project based, a project based program. So I think that that makes sense and that's intuitive. I'm sure there are people who are watching thinking, okay. That's great. I wanna run a cross functional program. How do I actually do that? As you've worked with lots of lots of people doing win loss, the people that are doing cross functionally, how are they how are they tactically doing that? Yeah. Typically, what you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna identify, hey. What is one very strategic question that our business needs to answer? Because usually, the strategic priority is going to impact multiple pockets of the business. Or you need to go find out what is the one strategic question that each of those departments are trying to answer so that you can get some some representation from those departments to the table. And when we say cross functional, what we really are meaning is you're gonna wanna have sales leadership, product leadership, marketing leadership. You're gonna wanna have, you know, your strategic functions. All of those have some form of representation of a question that they wanna answer so that they can weigh into the the way you're framing the program, and then they're also paying attention to the results as they come in. Yep. I really like that. One thing I've heard other other folks here at Clozd talk about is practically how they do this is as they're putting together that initial interview guide, going around to these different functions and saying, hey, I'm putting together this interview guide. Is there a question you would like to have answered? And what we find is, one, it may it creates the initial buy in, but then once those interviews start coming through, that sales leader cares of, hey. I remember I wanted you to ask this question. What are people saying? Yeah. They're paying attention. They're paying attention because they know this is my question, and now they get to see the answer. And now they can also be because they have that question, that means they probably already had some plans of how are they gonna take action around the information that they got to get the answers. They can actually take action from it. That's awesome. Do you have any any clients you've worked with that you feel like have done this particularly well? Yeah. Actually, I think I can always shout out the awesome team at AuditBoard that when they kicked off their win loss program, it was owned within marketing. VP of marketing said, hey. This initiative that we need to have, we want win loss to be our main customer obsessed metric. So we went and we had some questions we were trying to answer specific to their business at the time. Once we got the first results in, we collected 40 interviews to represent one quarter of business. We took the results and we got the c suite and leaders from the different business, like, business units all involved. What was awesome with that is is we're looking at the results. The CEO kinda planted a flag and he said, hey. We have an all hands initiative that we need to improve win rate, and the organization rallied around that. So then we were taking our our findings and not just sharing the results at once, but we were taking the high level insight so that all of the department owners knew what we were saying, and then we were following up with their respective teams. So they could take a closer look at feedback from customers that touch their direct business units. Product owners could take the feedback about their products and slot it into either things they're already working on or they could create some new goals around the things they didn't already know. We could take the same deck, share that with the sales folk. They could get different insights because they were interpreting the feedback in different ways. They could also make some changes. And now after two years of doing that muscle, we've seen quarter over quarter, framework of goals are set, action is taken, and we see what the results are. That's really cool. I think what you said around, hey, the CEO, what do you want to do to do was ultimately improve win rate. Yeah. Why you do win loss analysis? Just so you can improve your win rate. And so one of the things we always ask in our report is for those running win loss analysis programs, how many per what what percentage of people are actually seeing that happen? And we saw some interesting things in this report that at a high level, 63% of the companies that are running running win loss programs see an increase in their win rate. And what I think is initially significant about that is you actually just need a very small increase in your win rate for it to pay for the entire win loss program. Yeah. Think of, hey, you win a couple extra deals, that's that can be a lot of money depending on your deal size. But what I wanna double click into is as we cut the data and as we looked at it, when you looked at programs that had been around for at least two years, that number increases to 84% see an increase in win rate. I guess, is that at all surprising to you? Do you see and do you have any suggestions on, you know, someone who is starting a program? How do I get up the learning curve faster so I'm more likely to be in that 84% number faster? I think that's one of the least surprising statistics that we saw on the report. As far as how do I get up that learning curve, like, how do I make sure I'm increasing a win rate over time? We also we always recommend, as we said, start cross functional. And I think as you're as you're planting those seeds, as you're pushing insights out, there tends to be a little bit of, like, virality that people want as they find out about the program and they find out, woah, we have a vehicle to just get Canada Bias customer insights. People are gonna want to read those interviews. So my tip is try to just, like, push insights from customers to where users live and make sure that visibility is not gated so that people can can actually, like, be consuming it, and then they can take action. I think it's gonna become a repeated theme of what I've talked about. Yeah. No. I I I think that makes a lot of sense. I think something that I've seen as well is that being able to show those quick wins early on of these very these very tangible, gets buy in and I think gets people more excited about about, you know, doing doing this yeah. This potentially new initiative. Well, as you think you can talk about quick wins for for people that want, like, a very tangible example of that, there are three things that you can look for out of your interviews to look for, like, very small wins is let's look for lost deals that have expressed some indication of, hey. They wanna come back. There was something that they either didn't see in the sales cycle that we know we have that we can go back and show them, or they didn't have budget at the time, but we've got some insight about who would help them build a use case. So help them with a win back opportunity. Or let's look for recent wins that show interest in expanding, or let's also look at wins that maybe have some challenges that we can derisk. Yeah. So if you can even just capture those, it only takes a handful of those people to really see, hey. There's some merit to this in the short term. Setting aside the fact that when you can get, you know, a broad amount of interviews, now you really have, like, some comprehensive feedback to go make product road map changes. Like, that might be a long term investment. No. I I I think that's that's a really good call out of there's both short term and long term gains from the win loss program. But I think we need to be honest that, like, if any new initiative, it it takes some some real leg work to get off the ground. And, you know, here at Clozd, we feel like bringing in a third party is often very helpful with that. And in in the survey, we do ask about is is there benefit to third to bringing in a third party? And whenever we cut the data, I think there's a moment of truth where we're kind of holding our breath of, hey, let's see if no. You know the numbers. You know the the numbers actually show that. And looking at this year's report, I'm confident saying that they really do. And I think there's two stats that really show that. As we ask around about satisfaction both with the depth of the feedback that people are getting and then with the accessibility of that feedback. And we saw that those that were using a third law a a third party win loss program were twice as likely to be satisfied with that than with people who are just doing it in house. As someone that has worked for a third party provider for a while, why do you think that is? What do you think we at Clozd or at others are providing that makes that makes accessibility and depth of feedback so much better? Yeah. I think there's a lot of challenge and a lot of time that comes into figuring out. How do we how do we have a system where we can identify deals to get feedback from? If you can have a third party that has tools that can are just designed to do that, you can help automate that process. That saves time. If you have someone that has best practices on how do we send invitations, what language do we use, how do we incentivize this to get a good participation rate up, that drives efficiency while saving time? And then just that matter of I've collected insight. How do I synthesize it? If you have throughput, I can do that. That's one. And I think all of that's kind of stepping us outside of one of the most complex things, which can just be, how do I navigate someone's decision making process? How do I ask questions in a structured way without sacrificing the ability to leave room for organic responses? So if you have an expert that can navigate that conversation, it's also maximizing, what you can learn within a thirty minute session. No. I I think all those things make a ton of sense. And I think, intuitively, having someone that is an unbiased third party on top of all of that, I think provides just more candid answers. I think when it is someone from the company, there's always some concern that, oh, they're gonna try and sell me again. If I if I really tell them why I didn't make that choice, they're gonna use it as selling opportunity in that moment. I think that probably closes people up a bit. I think a common story is when we work with some teams of product marketers, they might be kind of constrained for headcount, and they feel very, very pressed for time. They feel like they're trying to answer a ton of questions to do a ton of things. So when we look to sit down and operationally figure out how much time we're saving, we find that just in the scheduling and conducting interview process, by outsourcing that to us, they could save 50% of their workload on a given week. So then they can do all of these other things, invest a lot of other time. But then once they actually started getting customer interviews, it wasn't just about having win loss insights. They realized, well, when we when we talk to wins, we're identifying some very passionate customers. We're finding some strong promoters that talk about innovative use cases. Now they've got a vehicle they can tap into to get some cool marketing content that they can go spin up case studies. They can drive go to market messaging with their new product launches, time saved and then totally maximized. Yeah. No. I think I think that really touches on something where throughout this conversation, we've been mostly focused on using win loss to increase win rate. But there are a lot of additional benefits that companies and teams are seeing because they're running running win loss reports or win loss interviews. And what we saw is that of those running win loss programs, 75% are using those insights in three other kind of additional use cases. And you've touched on one about product road map and, customer stories. Are there other high level ones that you've seen be successful kind of taking those insights from win loss? I actually think one of the cool things that we saw out of this iteration of win loss is how popular win loss has become as a sales training tool that 70% of people were reporting that it was used in that. A specific example is one of the clients we work with, they took their insights and they have leveraged some some AI tools to create deal war rooms that they can take the the scenarios from win loss, and they can have it in environment that reps can come in and they can practice not just, like, how to handle theoretical objections, but they can practice how would they handle real objections that we collected during the sales cycle. And then by leveraging the win loss interview that includes, like, the postmortem perspective, they can go a step further than just leveraging a call recording software because they don't just have the data on what happened during the sales call. They can use the win loss feedback to then gauge the sentiment the customer had about what happened. The but now I can have a deal war room that's not just built on how is my demo seen, but what did they actually say about the way that our competitor talked about us when we weren't in the room? Yeah. I think what you touched on there is is so critical that as you run a win loss program, making it a tool that sales can use and not as something that sales gets defensive about Yeah. Opens up so many doors and opens up so many different use cases, whether it's, like you said, sales trainings or war rooms. There's there's lots of really rich and in-depth data that can that can help in their sales process in addition to the other tools they're using here. I'd say there's another story and another use case is over the last eighteen months, over the last two years in b to b SaaS, a lot of plants are seeing a huge spike in losses to no decision. So they're not going with competitors. They're not doing anything. Mhmm. More they also are seeing challenge with clients saying, hey. Our budgets are very limited, and we're having to reduce our spend. That's driving a lot of companies to get really creative about their pricing and packaging initiatives. So they've been able to tap into a third party to go actually plant some seeds about pricing and packaging revamps, price packaging overhauls. We did a project for a company recently that had just a churn problem, and they had some proposed steps. So we went and we we talked to 20 of their recent churn customers in just about a month period, and we could get very specific about finding that one of the features that they were planning on stripping would have been just a total deal breaker, would have been a total train wreck for their customer base. So they could test that pricing and packaging without having to actually implement it live and get that loud feedback. Yeah. And pricing and packaging can be something where it's such a black box. It's so hard to really discern. I think that's why almost 50% of of those surveyed said they're using this these insights to help inform that because any piece of data you can get to help get to a better a better number and a better package makes a huge difference. Scott, it wouldn't be a tech webinar without us talking a little bit about AI. And AI is something that we did talk and ask about in our survey this year, and we asked how people expect to use AI in in their win loss analysis. And people touched on AI summarization, some data analysis, some data collection, and a couple of other items, which I think were were interesting but pretty obvious answers. This is a space that is evolving so quickly though. I would love to understand what where you think AI is taking the win loss space and how people are gonna use AI, for this in the future? Yeah. I was unsurprised to see that that 78 stat was people expect to see AI summarization. That's the one that not just for win loss, but for any of our clients that are asking a question about AI. AI summarization seems like that's pretty table stakes. Let's put some let's put a large text file in front of somebody, and let's have AI summarize that. Let's have it guess at some cool actions to take. Where I see AI really changing the space is by being able to capture a methodology, capture the brain of the way that different cross functional people want to consume win loss and combine those two things. Or it could take closed win loss methodology, and it could help suggest to you, who you should reach out to, help you synthesize your pipeline. And based on your pipeline composition, maybe recommend some suggested segments to reach out to, some suggested questions you should ask that are very, very targeted to that person. Ingest information about your your company's objectives and status so that we can dynamically inform what we need to be captured from interviews. And then even once we have that that wealth of information captured, actually have the AI not just summarize that information, but have it factor in macro factors. Have it think about what actions you can take and pay attention to those changes over time. I 100% agree. And I think on top of that, there's there's two things. One, I think it opens up the opportunity to collect this type of feedback, not only at these very distinct moments of a win loss or a churn, but across lots of other parts of the customer journey. And then two, to your point, I think it's able to get the exact feedback that is relevant to your CRO or to your CMO in a way that is just hard to do manually. And from a from a cost and time perspective, sometimes a win loss program means we're we're being very targeted. We're we're limiting who we're reaching out to so that we can have a sample speak to our pipeline. I see a world where AI is handing a microphone to every person in our pipeline, and it's having personalized adaptive questions to that audience, so that you're learning as much as you can from every deal that goes through your pipeline. Yeah. I'm excited already to sit down with you next year and see where we're wrong and, you know, where we were right. We're gonna wrap up now. And as we wrap up, I would love to hear your thoughts on if someone's gonna take away one, two, or three things from today. What are those what are those things for you? Yeah. I'll say it until I'm blue in the face. Start your program cross functional. Have that cross functional buy in so that you're set up to give insight to the entire company. The second thing I would say is avoid the temptation to think that you have to have all of the answers and you need to shepherd those answers. You're far better off if you give people, I guess, teach them how to fish. Give them a tool that can let them get access to customer feedback so that they can read it, so that they can recognize trends and insights and themes that they are only capable of seeing in their role that you're not gonna see from your limited perspective. And I think the third thing is don't be afraid to leverage a third party expert to leverage their tools, leverage their expertise, and, maximize your time and efficiency. No. I think those are those are all three great takeaways. So thank you. And thank you everyone for for joining us today. We realize that you all are busy, and we hope that this has been, an interesting interesting time. There will be a QR code that you can scan and you'll be able to download the report and you'll be able to, look through it for yourself. Like Scott said, we wanna teach you how to fish. And so please look through that. Thank you again, and thank you for the PMM Alliance, for helping us put this report together. Hope everyone has a great day.