You can improve your sales and marketing strategies by asking the right win-loss survey questions. Here is how to study why customers choose to do business with you—or your competitors.
Conducting win-loss research is how you can uncover the factors that most influence decision-makers and gain insight into the processes and reasoning that go into how customers make the choices they do.
While your sales team reps can sometimes give you a little insight into why a deal was signed or why a customer went with a competitor, that information is likely highly biased. They won’t want to admit to any of their own shortfalls and customers rarely confide the real reasons behind a decision to them. A survey gives you a complete and unbiased view of the customer experience.
A win loss survey can help you gain competitive intelligence from valuable insights, see what is and isn’t working with your own efforts, identify won opportunities, understand buyer priorities and perceptions, and guide future product development. You will be able to fine-tune–or perhaps completely overhaul–your marketing strategies and sales processes when you have a detailed understanding of how you win and lose customers.
The overall result will be a dramatic improvement in your success rate.
Before we dive into what specific win-loss survey questions to ask, here are a few considerations for setting up the research.
The most important element in designing your survey is selecting the customers and prospects you want to interview. You want to have a mix of respondents to represent won opportunities and business lost. And within customer companies, you want to talk to people who were deeply involved in making the decision. Remember that including the right people in the survey is vital to getting useful B2B data.
Designing the survey is also a critical step. You’ll get a better result if you hire someone with experience to conduct it. Having a sales rep do the interviewing will skew the results. Besides giving you an unbiased view of decision-making, a professional sales rep can help with key questions such as determining how long the win-loss interviews should be, when it can be scheduled, and what questions to ask in what order.
“Be very clear on your objectives,” says Patiwat Panurach, NewtonX’s VP of Strategic Insights and Analytics. “Your objectives drive what goes into the study and who you sample.”
Consider conducting win-loss analysis surveys at regular intervals. While a single study provides an interesting snapshot, you’ll want to track trends and measure the impact of new strategies, messages, and processes as you fine-tune your efforts over time.
Similar to choosing persona survey questions or customer retention questions for a study, a well-designed win-loss survey will need to ask the right things to gain valuable insights and measure customer satisfaction. The list below is just a starting point for thinking through a survey. You’ll want to ask questions that are specific to your industry, your customer base, and your sales process.
With these win loss interview and survey questions, you won’t be looking for personal information. These questions are meant to classify decision makers by title, seniority, and role in the sales cycle. Ask questions such as:
The next set of questions seek to explore details of the process.
The last set of win loss interview questions explore how the decision process progressed and what influenced the end choice.
Other than measuring sales performance and customer satisfaction, the results of your win-loss survey will have far-reaching value, so doing it right is vital. Picking the right people is as important as picking the right questions. Working with a specialist with extensive experience in B2B market research services will save you time, effort and money. Talk to us today if you have any questions about how a win-loss analysis survey can benefit your business.
Adweek partnered with NewtonX to gather senior marketers’ insights into the future of ad spend on platforms and publishers.
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