There's a tremendous amount to be learned from every sales campaign - whether the outcome is a win, a loss or a "no decision". But even sales organisations that are disciplined about conducting win-loss reports frequently fail to ask all the questions that could enable them to find and win more of the right sort of prospects in the future.
What are the common characteristics of your most successful sales campaigns? How can you identify your most promising opportunities early on in the sales cycle? What are the winning strategies adopted by your most successful sales people? How can you use these insights to qualify more effectively, shorten sales cycles and increase win rates?
Finding answers to these questions can have a significant impact on overall sales and marketing performance. Marketing can do a better job of targeting campaigns at companies that reflect your “ideal customer profile”, and sales can become more effective at qualifying good deals in and bad deals out earlier on in the sales cycle.
This learning should not be restricted to the apparent reasons for winning or loosing - if it is to be truly useful, it must identify the trends and trigger events that caused your prospect to start searching for a solution in the first place, understand who they turned to for advice, and clearly identify the critical "moments of truth" in their decision making process.
By conducting these conversations through an independent third party you'll find that your customers and prospects are prepared to share much more information - and offer many more invaluable insights - than they would normally be prepared to do when talking directly to you as a vendor.
We work with clients to establish independent win-loss analysis programmes that dramatically increase the learning that can be gleaned from an analysis of recent sales opportunities. We then help our clients to identify the underlying patterns and to implement the lessons learned in the form of more effective sales and marketing programmes.
Take the Next Step
We would be pleased to share what we’ve learned about helping high-growth-potential organisations to implement independent win-loss analysis as part of a balanced programme of sales and marketing performance improvement. As a first step, you may find it useful to self-audit your current sales and marketing processes.
As soon as you are ready to learn more, please email us at win-loss@inflexion-point.com, or call us on +44 (0) 118 975 0595. We look forward to discovering whether we might be able to help your organisation to improve its performance in this critical area.