Win-loss reviews are the process your company develops and follows for reviewing and analyzing the reasons you won or lost a customer or sales opportunity.

According to Pragmatic Marketing, win-loss reviews provide the most important sources of market intelligence gathering for product and sales development. Yet, very few of you will take advantage of this valuable and well-defined source of information. Most of you will not conduct structured win-loss reviews, and those of you that do will often rely on the opinions and perceptions of the sales teams who were directly involved in the bid process. In fact, you are more likely to take the time to interview your own staff as they exit your business than you are your customers or prospects.

‘We lost because our price was too high’, or ‘we won because we had the best relationship and the best product’ will no doubt sound familiar as internal reasons for either securing a new client or failing to win a new business opportunity.

Truth is, these comments are simply the opinions of your sales staff and have little to do with the real reasons you won or lost an opportunity. Whilst interesting, the opinions of your own sales and marketing people are irrelevant. The opinions that counts are the priceless market insights that comes from a deep and timely understanding of the buying process, buying criteria and actual buying experiences, from your customers or prospects perspective.

Some of you will already conduct internal win-loss reviews. But do these reviews include detailed and independent persona based customer interviews, do they seek to gauge and qualify your customer’s view of the buying process, or do they largely result in consolidating your own internal opinions and assumptions?

Conducting win-loss reviews will provide you with a detailed insight into your customers buying process. They will give the teams involved in your go-to-market strategy a detailed understanding, not of the product they are selling, but of how buyers think and behave when buying that product. Repeated win-loss reviews will capture the patterns and trends that are key to ensuring your go-to-market teams can build sales and marketing campaigns focused on buyers, and not on the product itself.

The time to gather win-loss market intelligence is just after your customer has left, or you have won or lost a competitive bid. You should have a formal process in place to engage with your customer or prospect and be prepared to invest in conducting one-on-one interviews with each of the different ‘personas’ within the customer organisations involved in the buying process. You will be looking to understand their perceptions prior to engaging you, what problems created their need, how they selected you as a potential vendor, which personas were involved, where you were strongest, where competitors were strongest and the surprising comments or insights they provide you during the interview process.

You will undoubtedly discover amazing things about how real buyers’ evaluated your solution. So often you are so convinced of the benefits of your own products that when you actually get out there and listen to how real buyers think, you start to see patterns in the data. You will discover factors about your product, service, solution or company that are critical in the purchasing process – many of which you will not otherwise have be aware of.

Gathering the information is the first, critical step in leveraging win-loss reviews. The second step is taking the insights you learn and leveraging them across everything you do in developing and evolving your go-to-market strategy.

Committing to customer centric win-loss reviews will deliver game changing insights, arm your customer marketing & sales teams with valuable customer centric knowledge that translates directly into creating true market competitiveness.

For more information on win-loss strategy and methodology, or to discuss our  win-loss related consulting services, contact us at Hemingway Partners.

I am still being sent an invoice each month from telecommunications provider TelstraClear, informing me I am in credit balance for a broadband service I disconnected over two years ago. This despite many calls and conversations with them to cease billing me for a service and relationship we no longer share.

There is a direct cost to TelstraClear in their failure to cease business with me in a customer friendly manner. If we assume a nominal cost of, say, ten dollars to process a paper invoice and send it out to me then they have incurred at least a $240.00 overhead since they stopped earning margin from my custom. I sometimes wonder at what point this will exceed the lifetime value of my prior business with them.

Ironically however it is the reminder of their customer experience shortcomings that the arrival of their invoice each month brings that probably impacts them the most. How can I return to or recommend them as a business when they are spending hard earned margin each month to remind me how difficult doing business with them was.

Bottom line – the experience a customer has when ceasing to consume your services is just as important as when they are a current customer.

The iPad is a new device category folks. It’s not a smartphone and it’s not a laptop. Sure, staging feature releases is a great way of ensuring your user base has a reason to buy the next iteration of your product. But it is also a good way of minimizing confusion around what consumers will compare the new product against. In other words, the more the iPad can do, the wider the comparisons and alternatives the consumer will weigh up before making an iPad purchasing decision.

The industry has spend billions of dollars in advertising and marketing teaching consumers how to choose the right product to solve problems and enhance their personal and business productivity and enjoyment. A new product category has the added challenge of un-learning consumer behavior.

So perhaps there is is more than one legitimate reason why Apple might initially limit the iPad’s features ?

Early yesterday I popped in as I usually do, and noted that the crew were different, I guess the original owners had moved on and a new set of early risers had taken over. At the counter I made my usual request, and a somewhat unengaged sales clark pointed towards a shelf on my side of the counter. It was laden with sliced, bagged bread.

‘No’, I responded. ‘I want one of those behind you. The ones that are fresh from the oven and not yet sliced’. The retailer looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and impatience, and explained in slow sentences that the bread on the shelf was exactly the same, and would save her having to cut and bag a loaf specifically for me. Clearly she felt I had some kind of mental impairment requiring her to take extra care over the delivery of her message.

‘No thanks, I want a fresh one please’, I replied.

Retailer now squinted at me through a grotesquely furrowed brow, and explained even more slowly that the bagged bread was every bit as fresh as the loaf I wanted behind her. Perhaps, I was told, I should be a little less demanding and more cooperative. After all, I should be used to selecting pre-bagged bread as this was common practice in a whole range of supermarkets and other retail outlets.

I smiled, no-doubt interpreted by retailer as a mentally ill spasm, and left. For good.

Bottom Line: The experience is the product. If you are neither aware of or true to your experience then your product is no different to every other commodity provider you compete for business with.