Product Marketing and the importance of win-loss analysis

A Product Marketing Professional Discusses the Importance of Win-Loss Analysis

Talya Heller G

Competitive Positioning Consultant

Founder of Down to a T Consulting, Talya Heller has extensive knowledge of best practices—including win-loss analysis—for go-to-market (GTM) teams. In this session, she discusses the importance of using win-loss insights to inform strategy and competitive positioning.

Spencer Dent, co-founder of Clozd, hosts Talya Heller to discuss the importance and execution of win-loss programs during Win-Loss Week. They explore the evolving role of product marketing and competitive intelligence professionals in these programs. Talya shares her background in product marketing and her transition into consultancy, helping SaaS B2B companies with competitive positioning and go-to-market strategies.

She recounts her initial exposure to win-loss programs, emphasizing the broad-ranging insights they offer—not just competitor-related but also valuable customer motivations, decision processes, and product feedback. Talya outlines the practical steps for new product marketers tasked with initiating a win-loss program. She advises starting with CRM data, forming hypotheses, talking to internal teams, and conducting as many customer interviews as possible, focusing on prioritizing key questions.

Both highlight the importance of disseminating insights across different organizational functions to drive meaningful action, emphasizing that win-loss programs shouldn't be siloed within one department. Talya also shares her experience of running win-loss programs internally and how they significantly contribute to understanding the market, improving product features, and refining messaging strategies.

Spencer and Talya touch upon the logistical challenges of initiating win-loss programs, like engaging customers and managing extensive data collection. Spencer notes successful programs often involve broad access to insights, suggesting the function should reside where cross-functional collaboration is strongest, often within product marketing but potentially elsewhere if more effective.

To conclude, Talya emphasizes that win-loss programs are a strategic tool for product marketers to elevate their role within a company, providing depth and breadth to their market understanding and enhancing decision-making efficacy. She encourages new practitioners to start small.

Q&A

Spencer Dent: All right. Hi everyone. This is Spencer Dent. I'm one of the co-founders here at Clozd, and today I'm super excited as part of win-loss week to welcome Talya Heller. She is the owner and leader of a company called Down to a Tee. And what they do is they provide product marketing managers and competitive intelligence professionals consulting and services and guidance on how they can excel at their jobs. Super excited to have her here today, and we're going to talk a little bit about how product marketing folks and competitive intel folks can be successful in running a win-loss program and maybe some of the bear traps to avoid when they go out to do this.

Talya Heller: Thanks for having me, Spencer.

Spencer Dent: Thanks for being here. Thanks for being here. This is going to be fun. Okay. Before we get into it, maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, the company that you're running.

Talya Heller: Yeah. I've been in product marketing for the last seven or eight-ish years, both at established pre-IPO companies and at smaller startup companies. Before then, I was in product and before then, even as a PMO in quite the opposite of smaller companies at a very large company. I think all these roles have in common that they're very cross-functional.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: That's been really helpful along the years. And about a year ago, I started my own consultancy working with other SaaS B2B companies mainly, helping them with competitive positioning and go-to-market strategy.

Spencer Dent: Awesome, awesome. Before we jump into this, I got a question for you because product marketing is one of those roles that if I ask one person what they do and they say, "I'm a product marketer," and I ask another person what they do and they say, "I'm a product marketer," it could mean totally different things. In all these different companies that you've consulted and in your own experience working with bigger companies and smaller companies, tell me a little bit about the range of how you define the role and what sits in the role and what makes somebody a great product marketer.

Talya Heller: Yeah, that's a loaded question.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: Funny enough, I think a lot of the people that you ask will describe a similar thing, right? When we think product marketing, we think about the circles, the event diagram, we think product marketing, sales, and that intersect. Maybe some people will add the customer success too, but I think in reality you are absolutely right. It does look entirely different. The larger the company, usually the more specialized the product marketer is.

Spencer Dent: Yes.

Talya Heller: For example, some of them are only going to work on launches and even that can really vary, right?

Spencer Dent: Right?

Talya Heller: Some of them own the process, some of them get Slack every once in a while and being told, "Hey, we're launching something next week." Some of them lead the entire process in the entire organization. Looks totally different with the companies. I think that another thing that is not spoken about enough in that definition of product marketing is the fact that you have to be very close to the market. It's not just being at the intersect of between all these teams internally, it's also having your ears and eyes on the market and bringing the feedback back to the market as well as make sure that, again, all these internal teams communicate the value that you bring to the market.

Spencer Dent: Love it, love it. That's why I think it's hard to define it because we've seen it. In all the time we've worked here, we work with folks from all sorts of different disciplines of a lot of product marketers, and it's interesting to see what sits within the role. One of those things that often sits within this role that obviously you're very familiar with from your background is win-loss. How did you get started using win-loss in these various roles? When is the first time, if you think back that you were like, oh, we should go figure out why we're winning and losing these deals, and how did you attack it?

Talya Heller: Yeah, my win-loss origin story. This is a funny one. I heard about win-loss for the first time when I really, I just got started in product marketing. I used to be a part of this local Austin product marketing meetup group. It was pre-pandemic. We actually meeting person once a month and every time someone else would host it and we will have different sessions. And one of the sessions was about win-loss. And I really remember that because I remember the guy started the session by asking, "Which one of you is actually doing win-loss on a regular basis?" And literally no one raised their hands. I was new to product marketing, so I didn't really know what that was. And while they were giving out their process and how they're doing it and what insights and feedback they've been able to get, I just thought it was like, this is great, this is wonderful. This is a fascinating thing. At the time I wasn't even working at a B2B company, I was working at a direct to consumer company. And I know win-loss is typically more of a B2B thing.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: And I was determined-

Spencer Dent: To try it.

Talya Heller: To make it happen, yes.

Spencer Dent: Yeah. Love it.

Talya Heller: I changed the process and of headed into what we needed at the time. Even years later, it was like one of the projects that I ran at that company that I was the most proud of.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: I'm pretty sure just me talking about this project also helped me to get the next job that I had.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: I'm pretty sure it had some role in that. And again, with no coincidence, that was literally the first thing that I had to do at that new company, which was a SaaS B2B company. In my first 30 days at the company, I was supposed to somehow whip up a win-loss, and we just kept doing it on a regular basis.

Spencer Dent: Yeah. That's awesome.

Talya Heller: I'm a huge fan of the program.

Spencer Dent: Yeah. What's so interesting about it is a few years ago, when we first started Clozd back in 2017, when you go talk to product marketing managers, you would find most of them weren't doing anything, but when you'd talk about it, they'd be like, this is pretty obvious. And the first thing they would do is do what you did. Okay, I'll just go figure out how to do this. They do it in-house. Doing it in-house, what were the hardest parts about running this process in these companies?

Talya Heller: A few things. I think first of all, there aren't that many win-loss frameworks or templates or anything like that.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: It's kind of like...

Spencer Dent: Totally, totally. What should I even ask these people? Oftentimes when people come to us, they're like, what should I even ask?

Talya Heller: And that's even a question, right? How many people should I talk to? Should I even talk to anyone? Do I look at win rates? How do you calculate win rates? All these things. I do find it's unlike other, there's a million launch frameworks and processes and how do you cluster features by tiers and all of that. And for positioning and messaging, there's so many best practices for so many other things, not for that.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: And I think the second challenge is even once you figure out what you want to do, again, if actually talking to customers is a part of that, that can be super challenging.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: And then the last thing I would say there, even when you talk internally with teams or if you are overly reliant on CRM data, what your sales team is putting in there. Again, I think there's so many blind spots-

Spencer Dent: Yes, totally.

Talya Heller: That we're trying to, well, the CRM says so, so that must be the reason. And when you actually talk to them, I think sometimes you get the sense that I don't know if that's what really happened.

Spencer Dent: Totally. It's so interesting. I think we've seen this over and over at Clozd where someone's coming in and they want to do this, and in some cases folks have run pretty effective teams internally that run win-loss, but it is a pretty big resource investment because as they start the process, they realize that there's so much that happens before and after you actually collect the feedback. Whether you collect the feedback through an interview or some type of video-based interview or a survey, there's so much that has to happen on the front end of I got to get a list of names and I got to figure out which people to reach out to, and I got to figure out what questions to ask them, and I got to get permission from the sales rep maybe. And then I got to actually reach out to them and get them to schedule.

And then I need to have a mechanism for collecting the feedback. And now I've got the feedback, how do I turn that into a summary or some type of deliverable and how do I aggregate it and then how do I share it out? And it's almost like the stuff on both ends of the data collection itself chokes a product marketing manager and eats up so much of their time. I can't tell you the number of times we saw somebody say, I'm going to go do this and I'm going to do it myself, and I want to do 40 interviews a quarter or 20 interviews a quarter, and then six months later when we follow up with them, they've done five. I guess the advice I would give to somebody doing this is don't underestimate the amount of effort it's going to take because there's a lot that goes into this.

Talya Heller: Yeah, I agree. And I think for sure in that process, just having experience in product before and running beta programs and things like that, which is also very project management heavy type of assignment. I think for, again, specifically for me with my experience, that was helpful.

Spencer Dent: Yeah.

Talya Heller: Yeah, I mean I can imagine that folks that don't have that experience are probably really overwhelmed.

Spencer Dent: Totally.

Talya Heller: And you touched on that at the end, but I think we can probably spend 15 minutes alone just talking about that topic with what do you do with the insights that you gather because that's the art part of win-loss.

Spencer Dent: Totally, totally. And the challenge that I think companies run into is they spend, and this is where product marketers get discouraged. They spend so much time trying to get to the insights that they short themselves on the amount of time they need to take doing something about it.

Talya Heller: Mm-hmm.

Spencer Dent: Here's a good example. One of the things that we talked about in prepping for this is you start to go to collect the feedback and going back to that, can I get people to even talk to me on the phone? Well, if you aren't using the best methods for driving participation and leveraging technology, a platform like Clozd, for example, within Clozd, we have all the functionality for you to go out and engage buyers and get them to schedule and participate in a win-loss interview. If you're doing this on your own, you might have to use some type of email server or whatever or call people or whatever, some win-loss vendors in this space, they can do the interviews, but they actually require you to schedule them for them.

There's a lot that goes on there. But one of the things we talked about is it's always easier to get wins to talk, right? Obviously, they're more likely to talk. Also, if you ask your sales reps for who you can talk to, guess who they're going to refer to you? Wins. Wins, sometimes people are like, well, I got so many wins. You want to get a good balance. But a funny thing is people tend to be a little more interested in the losses and they're just a little more visceral and a little more like, oh man, what really happened there?