Best Practices for Running a Game-Changing Win-Loss Program

Thousands of Programs Later: Best Practices, Tricks, and Tips to Running a Game-Changing Win-Loss Program

Brady Tengberg & Cameron Turnbow

Cameron Turnbow, Director of Program Management at Clozd, and Brady Tengberg, Head of Customer Success and Delivery, discuss win-loss programs. They emphasize the importance of gathering customer feedback, creating an environment where customers feel comfortable sharing their insights, and fostering internal adoption of win-loss programs. They share personal anecdotes to illustrate these points and discuss strategies for broadening awareness within an organization, such as involving senior leadership and conducting targeted training sessions. The conversation concludes with a focus on driving substantive change based on the insights gained from win-loss analyses.

Cameron Turnbow and Brady Tengberg, executives at Clozd, discuss win-loss programs and their experiences with them. They focus on two primary goals: gathering more feedback from customers and prospects and increasing internal adoption of win-loss programs. To gather customer feedback effectively, they highlight the importance of making it easy for buyers to participate in interviews and providing multiple feedback mechanisms (e.g., surveys, video interviews, live interviews). Brady shares a personal anecdote about his wife's confrontation over a poor-quality salad at a restaurant to emphasize the challenge of encouraging critical feedback in transactional relationships. They emphasize the need to make feedback processes immediate and relevant to increase participation. On the topic of internal adoption, they stress the significance of involving various departments and senior leadership. They discuss the benefits of creating awareness campaigns, such as win-loss days and communication via Slack channels, to distribute win-loss insights throughout the company. Training sessions tailored to specific departments can also facilitate broader adoption. The importance of driving actionable change based on win-loss insights is underscored, with real-world examples of how effective feedback mechanisms can influence a company's success. They conclude by highlighting the professional growth opportunities for those who spearhead effective win-loss programs within their organizations.

Q&A

Cameron Turnbow: Hi, I'm Cameron Turnbow. I'm the Director of Program Management here at Clozd. Today I'm here with Brady Tengberg. Brady is part of our senior leadership team here at Clozd and the Head of Customer Success and Delivery. Today we're going to talk about our experiences working with different win-loss programs. Together we have conducted thousands of win-loss interviews and conducted hundreds of win-loss programs for our clients. Brady, today I'm excited to chat with you a little bit. We're going to talk more about, one, how to get more feedback from our customers and prospects, and two, how do we help grow win-loss program internally and really gain internal adoption.

Brady Tengberg: Cam, I'm excited for it. It's going to be a fun day today.

Great. Well, Brady, maybe to start off, let's talk a little bit about how we can get more feedback from customers and prospects. What are your initial thoughts on that?

So honestly, Cam, it's a really good question. One of the key parts about win-loss analysis is actually finding opportunities for your buyers or people to participate in the interviews themselves. When I was first looking at coming to Clozd, one of the things that stuck out to me was, why aren't people just doing this naturally? And I couldn't quite grasp my head around why there needed to be this third-party solution, why it needed to happen. And there was this really funny story where my wife and I, one time, we were at a restaurant and it's this restaurant called BJ's Brew House or a Brewery and Pizza House or something like that, it's in California primarily, and we went to this restaurant and Mary, my wife, who you know, she ordered this salad. And first mistake there, you don't order a salad at a pizza place, but it's okay.

No shame on salads.

Okay, that's fair, but we can forgive it. But she ordered the salad, and the salad was supposed to have these beautiful, these grapes on it, candied pecans, roasted Brussels sprouts, goat cheese, strawberries. It was supposed to have this really ornate whole plate put together. And I remember as the waitress brought the salad out to my wife, it looked absolutely terrible. The Brussels sprouts were frozen, clearly still in the process of thawing, there was one singular grape on the plate. The whole thing was just a disaster. Now, I'm a very non-confrontational person, so there's a very good chance-

There's not a chance you said anything.

...I wouldn't have said a darn thing. I would've said, "You're right. This looks better than what I would've ordered myself. Thank you, sir." But my wife, she's definitely not afraid of confrontation. She raises her hand and says something to the extent of like, "Hey, this actually isn't quite what I had in mind." And at this point I'm starting to cringe a little bit because I don't like confrontation. And the waitress takes the salad back, she brings out a new one, and at this point she's added one grape to the salad plate, which an improvement, yes, but probably not quite what we have in mind.

So at this point, I'm ready to change Mary and my plate. "Just take my pizza, I'll take the salad, whatever, we'll get over it." But she raises her hand again and kind of says, "Hey, this still isn't quite what I had in mind." And as someone who doesn't love to give critical feedback to people who I don't know very well, I was not excited about this whole thing. And after a little bit, I start to see the chef poke his head out around the corner in his little chef outfit, and I'm starting to think we have offended this poor man, and where do we even go from here? So the chef walks out and he has a beautiful salad, exactly as it was supposed to be on a plate. And he comes out and he says, "I am so sorry. I saw what they brought out to you, and I couldn't be more embarrassed at what they brought."

And it was a really interesting thing for me. And obviously things like this happen to all of us all the time in restaurants or other situations, but what was so fascinating to me is how I hadn't internalized before how unwilling I would have been to give critical feedback in the moment to those individuals. And there are a lot of situations in life where this happens, whether it's a restaurant or a breakup or even a B2B sales process where we have things happen, but because it's largely a transactional relationship, you're not going to see this person again, you might not have the same appetite of actually speaking up and telling someone that they really screwed up.

Yeah, that's interesting because if you think about it from the chef's perspective, the chef is probably so grateful you said something. Right? And the feedback probably didn't get back to the chef for a while for probably two or three rounds of that. And so as we're thinking of this and as we even tie this into win-loss analysis, I think one of the big things that we really are trying to accomplish as we're doing win-loss analysis is how do we get the Brady's to speak up? We obviously have the Mary's, right? The Mary's are going to speak up.

Always. They're always going to say something.

They're going to say something, they're going to make sure that their feedback is well known. But those Brady's, how do we create an environment, how do we create a situation that they will feel energized to share that feedback? Because as they share that feedback, we're obviously going to be able to have much more of an influence in how we direct.

Yeah. So Cam, you've obviously been at Clozd for a very long time. You've seen all kinds of customers, all kinds of industries, personas, etc. And for customers that you've worked with, how have you seen them been able to get more of the Brady type people to actually speak up?

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. When I think about it, we have what we would call a win-loss curve. It's something that we've seen over time of how our customers evolve and how we work with them. The majority of customers prior to starting win-loss analysis, they tend to come to the table of really just thinking of guesswork and here's what I think is happening within my company. Once they get to that point where it says, "Okay, I think there's this problem going on," they start to say, "Well, what can I do about it?" And they evolve a little bit more into maybe they start digging into their CRM data. Maybe they start ask, talking to people. And even thinking of the example with your chef, specifically with Mary's salad, probably initially, a, first, nobody would've heard about it. As you guys provided that feedback, maybe the chef start to says, "Huh, what actually is going on here?"

He may start to collect a little bit more data and feedback, and that might just be talking to the waiters and waitresses. And as he starts to collect this feedback, similar to like a lot of our customers do with CRM data, they start to identify, "Oh, there actually are problems, or maybe there's gaps of where we want to improve and where we want to be better." And so that a lot of times leads them into what we would say is a one-off project. And I think that's where a lot of our customers start to engage with win-loss analysis, is that they're looking to solve a problem on a specific area. And so specifically with your chef, what that might be is it says, "Oh, we need to figure out this specific salad. We're struggling to make this specific salad." For our customers it might be like, "Oh, we're losing a lot of deals in North America to this specific competitor."

And so they become very focused on that one specific area. As this continues to evolve, we then start to see that project that they run is successful, and then they say, "Well, we actually want to do this on a little bit of a broader scale." So now there's maybe doing these projects more ongoing, but really where we want them to get to is we want them to do this on an ongoing basis, but also covering their full pipeline. And so tying it back to the salad once again, "Oh, this is, we know all of our customers, their orders, what's happening when they're having good experiences, because then we can go ahead and address this."

And that's really kind of our goal here I think with win-loss analysis is that we want to get to that full pipeline coverage and be able to really see these are the certain people we need to talk to. Now, that's tough to do. Right? I bet it's tough to be able to get to that full pipeline coverage, and we'd love to hear your thoughts maybe of how our customers or people we've worked with have achieved that full pipeline coverage.

It is a really good question because whenever I think about full pipeline coverage, there obviously are trade-offs to that. It is expensive and time-consuming to interview all of your business. That's very hard to do. And one of the things that we've tried really hard to do at Clozd is we've tried to create different interview mechanisms, whether it's a survey, a flex interview, a video, or a live interview to make sure that based on different parts of your pipeline, you actually can reach out to them and can give them a chance to speak up. I think first and foremost, if you're not even asking your customers or your prospects to speak up, it's going to be hard for them to offer a response.

So I think first and foremost that the idea of casting a wide net is really just making sure that you're even opening the door to feedback in the first place. But I think once you start to overcome that first hurdle of even just asking people, the next thing I like to run our customers through in terms of a step-by-step exercise is starting to figure out next why might people not be responding. So going back to this example about the salad, because obviously very personal to me, When I think about that instance, my willingness to speak up, which was nil essentially, which was nothing, me and my wife or both of us, our willingness to speak up was much higher because it was in the moment. So if I were to ask you, "Hey, how was your lunch today?" versus how was your lunch five and a half weeks ago that you had on that Monday, you're probably going to have a different level of answer. Right?

Oh, totally.

So for our customers, one of the things that we encourage a lot is to actually drive people to participate in these interviews, is you have to do it in the moment that they're making their decision. So if for example, someone makes a decision not to go with your company today, well, if you wait six months to ask them to interview, they're probably not going to participate because it's not fresh anymore, they don't care anymore. So I think first and foremost, finding opportunities to really ask those questions right when it's fresh will make it not only so that you get better answers, but they're actually more likely to participate as well. What are some of the things that you've seen help to drive participation rate with programs that you've run?

Yeah. One of the things that I think we've found to be very helpful, and how I would describe is you need to meet people where they are, I think especially early on, it's tempting to just rely strictly on email, for example. A lot of times we're used to responding to surveys or anything business-wise, a lot of times happens to email. We've found a lot of success here at Clozd by branching outside of some of those communications. We've obviously developed a type of interview that is much more asynchronous that allows people to answer on their own time.

Sometimes we are running projects with business owners that they're on their feet all day, they're not at their computer, and so it's hard for them to be able to sit down and maybe have a 30-minute conversation with one of our consultants. And so it might be easier for them to do more of an asynchronous type of interview or type of survey, but in order to even reach them, how do we do that? Obviously, email is still critical, but we'll reach out to them by phone and catch them in the moment, and a lot of times just conduct the interview there on those calls. Other times we'll reach out to them on LinkedIn. Especially in the business world, that's one area that a lot of people are very active and looking to engage with us on.

Yeah, I can see especially with business owners who aren't at their desk, that'd be really helpful. I think the last couple of things that I've noticed in the last year or so at Clozd, we've started to see a lot of programs who have very high participation rate, and it's largely because they're starting to introduce the idea of win-loss earlier in the sales funnel. So you can imagine if we were to reach out to a customer at the very end of their procurement process and ask about their feedback, but it's their first time hearing about the idea of win-loss, they might respond, they might not.

But if, for example, that company has actually introduce the idea of win-loss early in the sales process and said, "Hey, at the very end of this, we're going to have a company called Clozd reach out to you and do a win-loss interview, where we want you to give your full unbiased, fully candid feedback. Whether it's good or bad, we want to hear it," companies that are doing that early in the sales process, they're seeing really, really strong participation rate. So it's really fun to see how even across companies who are largely homogenous or similar participation in terms of their customer's willingness to participate, it can vary quite a bit.

**Yeah, no, that's interesting. One thing that is staying with me, going back to even thinking of your story with the salad, I found it interesting that the chef did care enough to come out. It would've been so easy for the chef just to send his messenger, the waiter, waitress out to actually come solve that issue for them. Tying into this next part, we obviously want to talk about how we get more buy-in across the entire organization. How do we take win-loss just from being interesting information and really tie it into being actual digestible insights that people can actually do something with. What are your thoughts there? How can a company go from just being, "Oh, ..."

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