customer experience Archives

The Sales Enablement Guide to Win/Loss Analysis, Part 2: The Customer Perspective

Here’s what a typical win/loss analysis looks like for many sales teams:

The sales manager and the sales reps sit down and look through past opportunities, going through some basic questions to find out why the deal did or did not close. They might come up with a game plan for how to improve in the future, and that’s it. Case closed.

Did you see what’s missing in that scenario?

Just like there are two sides to every story, there are two main perspectives to any sales deal: the sales rep’s and the customer’s. Beyond those two, there are also likely many other people who were involved with the opportunity: channel partners, marketers, sales support staff, etc. Do you really think you can get an accurate picture of what happened with that prospect based solely on the sales rep’s recollection?

Ignoring the customer’s perspective is one of the biggest mistakes we see businesses make when setting up a win/loss analysis process.  (more…)