Win-loss for product marketing: Why every product marketing program needs win-loss interviews.

Why Every Product Marketer Should Do Win-Loss Interviews

Presented by: Clozd
Featuring: Avalara, Qualtrics & Armor Cloud Security
Date: Thursday, March 14, 2019

Clozd’s VP of Operations, Braydon Anderson, hosts a conversation with product marketing leaders from Avalara, Qualtrics, and Armor Cloud Security. Learn from their experiences implementing win-loss interviews, including valuable tips and best practices.

Featured Guests

• ​Sanjay Puri – VP Product Marketing, Avalara
• ​Rachel Barker – Senior Product Marketing Manager, Qualtrics
• ​Ryan Smith – Director of Product Marketing, Armor Cloud Security

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Webinar Transcript

Braydon Anderson:

We'd like to welcome everyone out to the webinar today. We're excited to have you here with us. We're going to give the stragglers a few extra minutes to join and we'll plan to start in about three minutes.

However, while we wait, you can enter into our sweepstakes for a chance to win some Clozd swag. Simply go to clozd.com/webinarsurvey, take the brief survey about your current win loss efforts and you'll be entered into sweepstakes to win. We'll randomly plan to pick five winners. So go ahead and do that and we'll wait for a couple more minutes here.

Great, so thanks to everyone who entered the sweepstakes. We'll keep that survey open throughout the webinar for those of you who haven't had a chance to take it yet, so take that and you'll be entered in to win some Clozd swag.

But now let's get started with the webinar. To start we have a few housekeeping items. First, this webinar is being recorded and we'll plan to email the recording of it to you all afterward. Second, due to time constraints, we won't unfortunately have time for live Q&A. However, if you do have questions for the guests, please submit them through the chat box and we'll plan to respond via email later on.

Let's get started. We're excited to talk about win loss analysis and specifically how win loss interviews can be of value to product marketers. So we invited three product marketers and practitioners to speak with you today. I'd like to introduce myself and our guests. So my name is Braydon Anderson. Currently I oversee operations and marketing at Clozd. Clozd is a provider of win loss services and technology.

Our first guest is Ryan Smith, who is the Director of Product Marketing at Armor Cloud Security based in Dallas, Texas. Also joined by Rachel Barker, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Qualtrics based in Provo, Utah. And our third guest is Sanjay Puri, the VP of Product Marketing at Avalara, based in Seattle, Washington.

We're excited to have them here to share their insights on the benefits and practices of win loss analysis.

To begin, I'd like to briefly just set the stage and explain a little more about what win-loss analysis is and how we define it here at Clozd. Simply put, win-loss analysis is the process of systematically tracking and analyzing the reasons of why you win and lose sales opportunities. Rigorous win-loss analysis helps companies evaluate their strengths and identify areas where they can improve in order to increase their win rates.

For B2B organizations that sell sophisticated solutions, a win-loss interview with the buyer is one of the most effective methods for learning why a deal is won or lost. Firms like Clozd specialize in these kinds of interviews.

In most cases these conversations with buyers last 20 to 30 minutes and drill in demanding areas including the product or solution offering, the sales experience, pricing and packaging, the competitive landscape, etc.

Clozd then delivers these insights back to our clients via innovative software, making it easy for users to consume and share the findings across the organization. The insights from these interviews enable organizations to fill critical product gaps, refine their pricing strategies, optimize sales messaging, track competitive and market trends, fix sales execution problems and more. In fact, according to one Gardener study, win-loss analysis can help organizations to improve their win rates by as much as 50%.

Clozd was founded in 2017 to bring a new perspective and new technology to the win-loss space and we've been fortunate to deliver win-loss programs for the three companies that are represented by our guests here today, Armor, Qualtrics and Avalara.

So without further ado, we'll jump into some questions with our guests about the benefits of win-loss interviews for product marketers in particular. As well as hear their tips and suggestions for those who are looking to implement win-loss analysis for the first time.

Our first guest is Rachel Barker. Rachel is currently a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Qualtrics. Rachel focuses on go to market strategy, messaging and positioning. Qualtrics is an employee experience platform. We're excited to hear from you today so thanks for joining us.

Rachel Barker:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Braydon Anderson:

Now if I remember correctly Rachel your win-loss program was actually run through the sales team but it's widely used throughout the organization? Product marketing team, is that correct?

Rachel Barker:

Yeah, we do. We use our win-loss as far as anyone would actually like to see them. So we allow quite a few users and try to get those almost everywhere: sales, product management, product marketing. Definitely our sales ops and our sales leadership team as well.

Braydon Anderson:

Cool, that's awesome. Specifically on product marketing, how do you use the win-loss insights in your role?

Rachel Barker:

Yeah, that's a good question. Product marketers really sit at this crossroads, there's a lot of different teams. We're responsible at Qualtrics for getting those insights to other leaders. So how do we look at those insights to determine, to work out a market strategy, are we doing what we need to be doing to win the market and I've mentioned this to others before but at Qualtrics we don't like to lose and when we do, we want to know why and when we win we want to know why even more. And you combine that with this intense drive to make sure that the customer's getting what they need and want. Win-loss insight has become really invaluable to us.

And we look at those win-loss insights to really understand what strategic decisions we need to make right. Sometimes it's a small pivot of look maybe our sales pitch on this new product isn't going as well as we thought and let's go in and figure out why, or strategically we're really seeing a gap with this type of deal of this size and this industry and let's go figure out what we need to do to adjust there.

There's all kinds of decisions that win-loss insights can influence and it's something we happen to benefit... For me on the product marketing side, just sort of strategic decisions we make cross function, leadership, I'm looking closely at those insights to determine what sort of messaging and content we need to support our deals. Often times we'll hear little snippets from the customer... The customer service is really great or we were really excited about the technical services but we were unclear about x, y and z and to me that tells me that I have a sales rep or some Qualtrics representative who's working with the traffic, that was not able to clearly communicate and that's something I've got to address in our organization pretty seriously, to go back and say okay where was that broken and how do we ensure we're delivering that better, whether that's training or documentation, messaging or potentially rethinking our messaging, is this the right thing we should be saying and is it helping us compete and be clear in the market.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, that's great. So really from a sales side it sounds like it's helping you nail the messaging both on outsourcing and with the sales team but then things that you can do better but also it tells you your value props it sounds like, right? And you're doing better than any of your competitors, that gives you a value prop against many of those sort of competitors, is that right?

Rachel Barker:

Yeah, it can validate or it can kind of negate the value of something we think is working and might need some tweaking. Often times you will get specific feedback from our competitors, but other times we will right? Competitor number one had a much stronger value prop than your team and we really felt compelled by this element of their offering. That's not always the be all, end all, one data point, but those can be valuable data points and powerful data points if you see them crop up, repeatedly. Often times they're really great to take back to the team. Whether it's just the product marketing team to go make changes or larger leadership team, which are product marketers to help influence their overall decision across the different functions of our full experience program.

Braydon Anderson:

For sure. So it sounds like you guys definitely see the value of doing win-loss and you've been doing it for a couple of years now. Why did you guys decide to go out and use a third party rather than have someone internally try to do these interviews or run the program yourself?

Rachel Barker:

Yeah. That's a great question. I was not the original buyer that you mentioned, it's actually gone through our sales team. So I probably can't comment on the original decision but I can tell you why I love it and why I think it's really valuable.

First I think about bandwidth. As a product marketer at Qualtrics, we are growing so quickly that it is really... You're always having to prioritize. This is probably most people in high growth stage as well. I know that at the end of the day when I have four things on my plate and I only have room for two, competitive intel and those types of interviews tend to fall by the wayside. So this ensures that we get those interviews done and that they also service a single course of truth. Having a third party do that keeps them regular and keeps them top of mind for our organization in a way that tends to not happen as much as we want it to. In an ideal state it would happen or in a large company that maybe doesn't deal with high growth, they might be able to ensure that these are a regular. But the third party keeps us doing that. Clozd helps us get that done.

And then the other element of this is the product marketer, I really value that relationship I have with my customers and I try to make sure I'm contacting them for the right reasons at the right times. We have so many people at Qualtrics that could be contacting our customers. Our customer reps are reaching out to them and our sales reps reach out to them, I reach out to them and so how do you make sure you're not over contacting the individual and asking them for a lot and ensuring when you do ask them for things you're providing more value to them than you're taking from them.

So I like to think of Clozd as a way to help us manage those customer relationships so that we're not going out and asking them all the time to be answering questions. Instead they sort of have a little bit more, I think transactional's the wrong word, but another party, another person that's getting these insights to them and if they have any big issues or they want to really talk highly of the company, it's not as sometimes awkward to do so directly to Clozd as it might be to me, who's also the one talking to them about webinars or coming for a big conference or asking them about product functionality. So it's nice to have a little bit of a buffer there, to work with a third party.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, seems like we're constantly asking our customer's to do stuff. I'm always asking for references or asking them for a case study and it's just one more touch point that now... It's on another party rather than on you to keep that relationship solid between you and your customer, having that third party seems like a definite benefit in that area. A little bit easier for you.

Rachel Barker:

Yes definitely.

Braydon Anderson:

Cool, that's great insight. Maybe just another question is, what's benefit of, from these win-loss insights that you get, maybe from a competitive intelligence stand point.

Rachel Barker:

Yeah. I think competitors intelligence is not something product marketing necessarily own an organization regardless of whether your organization tell you as a product marketer, you're in charge of this. There are other people that are going to be a great channel for that and that are going to need that in their jobs. I would say customer success, sales reps for sure and we, even being the largest organization, I looked at just SAT versus us and the different functions they might have for competitive intelligence but Qualtrics has and has had in the past. And it's really for that competitive intelligence gets to all those different places. But often times we'll see, someone over in sales or customer success going and giving their own competitive intelligence and not having that contrast, can create some difficulties.

And so what I like about Clozd, what I like about these win-loss interviews from a competitor stand point is that you kind of do have that single source of truth. You have an interview that has documented, it's recorded, it's accessible to these different parties throughout the organization and can clear up to either six together, competitive intelligence that I might be getting on my own from private company, that our sales leadership is getting, our sales reps are getting and we can tie it back to specific deals that have quantifiable opportunities attached to them.

I think that's a really valuable thing when you're looking at different data points and trying to get the right insights to take impactful action off of. We're always really focused on not just making big decisions about one single data point and ensuring that we get all the different angles on something before we go move forward on something big. It's important to do and that's helpful when you look at the competitive intelligence from different spots and ensuring that it's kind of all streamlined in one place. And I think that the third party stuff does that.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah for sure. That's really good insight. Well Rachel, this has been awesome. Really appreciate you taking the time. Maybe if you have one or any suggestions for other product marketing managers that are in similar shoes as you, specially around win-loss, any addition insight you would give there? Or any suggestions you would have for them?

Rachel Barker:

Yeah, that's a good question. I think for me it's really just comes down to, make sure you're always listening to your customers. Just because you have one phone call three months ago with a customer and making their anecdote be representative of what you're actually doing in the market, I think would be a big miss. And so that continual stream of listening to what's going on and understanding what's happening in the market is going to position you to play better for a longer period of time. If you're not doing that, it's really easy to get caught up or surprised by something. A competitor coming out with a new offering that you just weren't aware of because you weren't listening. And I think, yeah listen. You get really good at listening as a product marketer and that will help you stay ahead and be innovative and think creatively to address the customer needs.

Braydon Anderson:

Awesome, that's great, we really appreciate your time today and hope you have good one.

Rachel Barker:

Thanks.