Zoom builds ‘Win-Loss 360’ to align its organization around direct customer feedback

Question 1

Clozd: We’re excited to talk about how Zoom is using win-loss feedback to align its organization around customer feedback. Leo, could you tell me a little bit more about your role at Zoom and the scope of what you do?

Accepted Answer

Absolutely. Happy to be here. So my team is called a competitive market strategy team, and we basically describe ourselves as the outside-in interface within the company. So we look into the competitive landscape, we look into the industry analysts, we look into the market from a customer standpoint, and then we aggregate all those insights and then interface with the rest of the company—specifically the product organization and the marketing team.

Question 2

Where does win-loss analysis fit into your role?

Accepted Answer

The competitive market strategy team lives under the product and engineering organization. The best way to describe where the win-loss program fits is to start sharing how we call the competitive intelligence program a simple ‘IO’ machine—a three-stage process where stage one is about gathering insights, stage two is about the analysis of all those insights gathered, and then stage three is about disseminating those actionable insights. We basically build as many programs as we can from an input or sourcing standpoint so that we can spend most of the time in the analysis stage, and then we have very few high-density actionable programs from an output standpoint to share with the product org and the marketing and sales teams.

Question 3

What prompted you to look into a third-party solution like Clozd to support your internal program?

Accepted Answer

A couple of things. So we have an internal program in place where we looked into gathering win-loss insights from our sellers and our customer success managers. But we needed to get an external perspective too—particularly with our customers—and we wanted to make sure that we got a lot of finesse and detailed granularity in an unbiased way. That's why we needed to have a third party to execute the program. We built it around what we call the ‘Win-Loss 360’ program that we launched last year, and it's something that has worked very, very, very well for us.

Question 4

Can you tell us more about Win-Loss 360 and everything it includes?

Accepted Answer

Yeah, happy to. So the Win-Loss 360 program was basically our way to put the deal at the center and then look for as many perspectives as possible—so we can shape all the insights as accurately as possible. So those would be inputs from our sellers, insights from our customer success managers, inputs from the customer, and then also insights from the partners. With those four personas surrounding the deal, we can shape all the insights in different capacities.

One example of that is in the internal program, which is basically getting the data from our sellers. It provides what we call a high-volume level of data, which gives us the direction of a driver, for instance. So if we determine, as an example, that product features happens to be one of the drivers for wins or losses if or when we want to gain the granularity of that feature, then we can go into the external program or the Clozd database and then look at the customer perspective and see what features they’re asking about. And it could be a particular pixel or a particular widget or whatever it is, but we get the high volume for the internal side, and then the external side of the program of that Win-Loss 360 will give us all that finesse and granularity.

Question 5

Who are the key stakeholders internally that use the data, and how do they interact with it?

Accepted Answer

We started with a standard competitive intelligence team being the primary user, of course. Market intel, any sort of role within the company that has a strategy title that would use the data. But we've been expanding that more and more. So we've given access to the product managers and some product marketing as well because of the uses of the data and even internationally.

We're trying to expand internationally from a geographical standpoint, so on one end, we've expanded the stakeholders from a function. Now, a lot of people are using it—product management and marketing, sales enablement and sales ops on the sales side. Even the legal team has access. And then we've been looking to expand internationally as well. We stumbled a little bit on the European market because of GDPR rules and compliance being a little bit different, but we've been able to solve that now thanks to the program.

Question 6

What are some of the business outcomes you've seen from your win-loss program?

Accepted Answer

We have the typical outcomes, such as developing battlecards and improving the win rate and things like that from a competitive intelligence program, of course. But like I said earlier, our program sits within the product organization, so there's a lot of value that we're getting out of helping shape the product, prioritization of features, things like that. On the product side, that has been brilliant, but then also we have a lot of input around our go-to-market strategy from a positioning and messaging standpoint. When we launch products, for instance, the data is used for making sure that we have the right message as well.

Question 7

Very cool. You have some big initiatives at Zoom with win-loss and competitive intelligence. What are some of the best practices that you’ve put in place that drive those outcomes?

Accepted Answer

Well, to be honest, I believe that Zoom and Clozd have a lot of commonalities, and that helps a lot. For instance, the speed of innovation is one of those. We launch products all the time, and us being able to meet with our program manager on a weekly basis has been very, very helpful. Second, we are both very open and transparent. We understand that this is putting the deal in the middle—it's putting the customer first. So being open and transparent about our initiatives, our long-term strategy, and spending all this time educating our program manager with all those initiatives, it helps shape the program and act really, really fast.

Finally, the technology. We leverage the technology for collaborating in this remote work extensively, of course. So we use Zoom meetings, but we also use a lot of Zoom team chats and the recordings and summaries leveraging AI. We even use the Zoom Scheduler for scheduling the interviews. So all that collaboration has been phenomenal.

Zoom builds ‘Win-Loss 360’ to align its organization around direct customer feedback

Zoom builds ‘Win-Loss 360’ to align its organization around direct customer feedback

Leo Boulton

Head of Competitive Market Strategy & Analyst Relations

Q&A