Do you really know why your team wins or loses a deal? What makes existing customers buy from you? What do they think about your offerings? If you haven’t had answers to these questions, then you may not have a sales win-loss analysis in place.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the basics of a sales win-loss analysis and how you can implement it to improve your sales revenue.
What Is Win-Loss Analysis?
A sale win-loss analysis is a comprehensive review of factors affecting customers’ buying decisions, sales performance, and sales efficiency. It provides you with strategic insights that can help you fill in the gaps between products and sales enablement, improve sales reps’ productivity, and win more deals.
A win-loss analysis also involves finding a win-loss ratio over a specific period of time. The typical win-loss ratio formula is:
Won opportunities/lost opportunities
Who Is Win-Loss Analysis Essential For?
After reading the proposal, a customer signed up for a contract with your business — it’s a win. If they didn’t, it’s a loss. But it’s one thing to close a deal; understanding what motivated that customer to buy and using those insights to win more clients is another.
According to the book Win/Loss Analysis: How to Capture and Keep the Business You Want by Ellen Naylor, a win-loss analysis when done right, can increase a business’s win rates by 15 to 30%. Typically, it helps you:
- Understand why existing customers buy from you. From that, your sales reps can tailor your messages to connect with them deeper and maintain a long-lasting relationship with them.
- Find out why customers choose you over your competitors. Is it because of your high-quality products or because of your excellent customer service? Having this insight will help you determine your unique value propositions.
- Identify the gaps between sales and marketing, including communications and workflows.
- Provide sales leaders and managers with better insights into how a business is performing overall. They can then use that information to develop success frameworks to improve the business across the board.
Data Needed for Win-Loss Analysis
To conduct a win-loss analysis, you need data. Here are some sources of data you should collect:
- Data from your CRM, sales tools, and revenue platforms
- Data from your sales team collected through surveys and interviews
- Data from other departments like marketing, supply chain, and finance
- Data from your customers and buyers collected through surveys and interviews
- Industry data and market data — it’s useful to collect these types of data so you can know how well you’re doing compared with your competitors and industry benchmark.
Steps for Conducting Win-Loss Analysis
Step 1: Gather Data
As said earlier, you can collect customer and internal data from your sales and marketing tech stack. You may also want to survey your sales team and buyers to capture critical insights into recently closed or lost deals.
Another way to collect data is to interview stakeholders personally. This will bring you broader and possibly more accurate data as the interviewees can provide clearer answers than they could in a survey. Sales automation software can help to gather data from various communication channels automatically and present it in the form of sales management dashboard for further analysis.
Best Solutions from Revenue Grid
Step 2: Analyze Data
Once you’ve collected enough data, you can start analyzing it. When doing that, get your sales reps and other relevant stakeholders involved. This way, you can gain different insights from different people in different roles that can benefit your analysis.
As you review the data from multiple sources, you’ll start seeing trends and patterns in customers’ purchasing behaviors. You may also notice problems to be addressed, obstacles preventing your sales team from moving deals, or new opportunities to pursue.
Step 3: Take Action
The last step is to prepare a win-loss analysis report and act on what you’ve learned from the analysis. Organize meetings or workshops to communicate actionable insights with your organization. In doing that, think of what information each team wants to know.
For example, sales reps often prefer deal-specific information. They want to know how to acquire more leads, where the opportunities are, and ways to improve their negotiation. Meanwhile, the marketing team is often more interested in channel effectiveness, creatives, and messaging.
Revenue Grid Opportunities to Conduct Win-Loss Analysis
Using surveys and interviews to collect data is a common practice, but the problem is you have to spend a lot of time preparing a list of questions, setting appointments, sending the surveys, collecting answers, and more. That’s why it’s time to take advantage of platforms like Revenue Grid to simplify and automate your win-loss research.
Revenue Grid makes it easier for you to consolidate real-time data from Salesforce, email clients, and calendars of all who are involved in sales activities. Revenue Inbox Add-in also automatically collects and stores transcripts of meetings conducted in Zoom and GoToMeeting, so you don’t need to switch between these platforms to look for information.
With Revenue Grid, you can visually analyze sales progress per opportunity and gain a detailed picture of closed deals, lost deals, changes, trends — all in one place. It also provides you with a win-loss analysis dashboard, showing information like:
- How an opportunity is moving forward. Is it on track or at risk and needs more attention?
- How conversations are going with a particular opportunity. How many meetings, calls, and emails have been delivered?
- When the last touch was with an opportunity. Was the conversation positive or negative?
