Acquia uses win-loss insights to turn their weaknesses into strengths

Acquia SVP of product Deanna Ballew has been a champion of win-loss analysis for the better part of a decade. She built her own internal DIY program and eventually expanded its reach, efficiency, and impact through a partnership with Clozd. Over time, she’s been able to demonstrate the value of win-loss analysis for teams throughout her organization, to the point where Acquia’s leadership team now leans on win-loss data to make key strategic decisions. One such decision—to revamp their strategy around integrations—enabled them to turn an area of weakness into a key driver of client acquisition and retention.

Starting with a small, DIY win-loss analysis program

Running your own win-loss analysis program is rewarding—but it’s also a lot of work. Just ask Acquia SVP of product Deanna Ballew. When Deanna—then with Widen Enterprises—got her first role in product management back in 2015, she quickly realized how important it is to understand exactly why you win and lose business.

“I embarked in product management training, and that’s when I learned about the wonder of win-loss analysis and the ability to use it to really understand the market and why you're losing,” she said. “It’s a key piece of a product manager's toolkit.”

Uncovering win-loss insights was so important to Deanna that she single-handedly took on the responsibility of organizing and running her company’s DIY win-loss analysis program.

For her, the win-loss process kicked off when Widen’s sales team would reach out to her for assistance—often at a point in the sales cycle when they felt they were going to lose the deal. Deanna was happy to help—and she was also happy to use these interactions to plant the seeds of a better, less reactive way of doing business.

So when Widen ended up losing a deal, she requested to personally interview their buyer to find out why. Once she completed the interview and found time to review and analyze the conversation—and then organize that analysis in a useful format—she would then pass along what she felt were the most important insights into why they’d lost the deal.

This took a lot of time and effort, but it also laid the groundwork for increasingly impactful things to come.

After some initial friction, the sales team realized that win-loss analysis could really help them improve, especially after difficult losses.

“Once they understood that we could support them when they had hard losses, they tapped our shoulder to do that,” Deanna said. “But it was really emotionally driven at that point. They wanted to be involved and sit in on them. They wanted to actually use that information to try to re-invigorate the deal and to bring it back. So it was being done in a very reactionary way.”

Moving from reactionary to strategic

In 2019, Deanna partnered with Clozd to amplify the positive momentum she’d already created around win-loss analysis.

Instead of having to rely on the sales team to access buyer contacts, Deanna could leverage Clozd’s tools to proactively go through Widen’s CRM and harvest her own opportunities. Clozd also streamlined the process of performing in-depth interviews, identifying key trends and insights from those interviews, and then delivering that data back to key stakeholders throughout Deanna’s organization.

“The notifications that every salesperson gets once an interview is published have been amazing,” Deanna said. “Because then they can access it on their own time. They won’t have to wait for us to give it to them, and it’s not hidden with any barrier.”

Creating an open, more transparent line of communication with the sales team has fostered a stronger working relationship between the two departments.

“We were able to use the tools in the Clozd Platform to show our sales team the power of these buyer interviews,” Deanna said. “And that really changed the whole conversation with sales and how they saw our win-loss interviews. It was no longer a guess as to why we'd won or lost a deal.”

That knowledge gave their sales team greater confidence to double-down on the areas where they were winning. It also provided the product team with a specific list of things that needed to be built or fixed if they wanted to be more competitive in the market.

“Having the transparency of those full transcripts in the Clozd Platform just revolutionized the way that we, as a product team, were able to engage with sales on the roadmap and how we were prioritizing work,” Deanna said.

Widen was subsequently acquired by Acquia in 2021, and during that transition, win-loss analysis played a critical role in helping their team understand the market’s perception of their brand and identify specific areas where they might be falling short for their customers and prospects.

The first area Deanna’s team set their sights on improving was their integrations.

Turning weaknesses into strengths

“We found through some of our interviews, especially where we lost, that we were losing because of integrations,” Deanna said. “Some of the integrations we didn’t have, and some of them we did—but we weren't doing a great job of letting our buyers know about them or try them out.”

Her team went back and looked at the data from previous years, and then—after presenting their findings to Acquia’s leadership team—they revamped their strategy. They put additional resources behind the marketing and positioning of their current integrations, and they assigned a small team to create new integrations. They also changed their packaging to make sure integrations were a key part of the conversation.

“We did all of those things throughout 2021, and as we did win-loss interviews with those buyers in 2022, we found that we were then winning because of integrations,” Deanna said. “So we were able to take a clear ‘why we lose’ and now turn it into a differentiator to ‘why we win.’”

Empowering—not diminishing—the sales process

As Deanna has worked to expand the win-loss analysis programs at both Widen and Acquia, she’s been able to see a clear difference between what buyers will tell her sales teams versus what they’ll share with an objective third party like Clozd.

By necessity, salespeople work to build a strong relationship with their buyers. This closeness, however, can sometimes have negative effects. Many buyers won’t be honest with the salesperson they’ve been working with because they don’t want to damage the relationship.

“Many times, when we interviewed our buyers, they just wanted to tell us all the nice things and not share any of the problems,” Deanna said. “The candidness we get from a third party, however, has really allowed us to look at the information and pick it apart without our own emotion tied to it. Having a third party handle these interviews also eliminates that desire to want to please somebody or make sure you’re not ruining any relationships you might want in the future.”

The most useful buyer feedback is often critical in nature, and when that feedback is delivered in a constructive, non-emotional way by an objective third party, it’s more likely to be accepted and have a positive impact.

"Clozd helps us gain valuable, open, honest feedback about our solution,” said Sam Schnepf, senior enterprise sales advisor at Acquia. “As a salesperson, I love seeing unfiltered feedback about a customer or prospect's sales process to learn how I can improve in the future. I always learn more in these Clozd reports about the buyer's process and who we were up against and all the factors that went into their decision than I ever would have been able to uncover on my own by asking."

It’s been a process, but Acquia’s win-loss analysis program has expanded to the point where teams throughout the organization are now using win-loss insights to guide their overall strategy.

“The entire leadership team is now making use of the same data that we're getting from win-loss analysis—not just for sales or product, but also for CSMs, for our engineering team, for service and support, for our churn analysis,” Deanna said. “The win-loss insights that are being provided have now matured beyond just helping the sales and product teams understand what buyers like or don't like—to how the market is perceiving the overall experience that we’re now able to give our customers.”

Get to know: Acquia

Founded in 2007 and based in Boston, Acquia is a SaaS company that provides enterprise products, services, and technical support for the open-source web content management platform Drupal. In 2013, Acquia was named the Fastest Growing Private Technology Company in North America by Deloitte, and in 2014 they were identified as a Leader for Web Content Management by the Gartner Magic Quadrant. In 2021, Acquia acquired Widen Enterprises, a privately held technology company that designs, develops, and provides digital asset management and product information management software as well as digital asset management services.