How to Conduct Win/Loss Interviews

Speakers: Diana Igua, Director of Marketing & Operations, DoubleCheck Research

Diana Igua: Great. One of your buyers has agreed to provide feedback on their recent sales engagement experience. Now the question is how do you make the most out of those 30 minutes with them after all, you don't want them to walk away from that conversation with you thinking, "Gee that was a waste of my time." So today I want to share with you five strategies to help you capture by yours feedback that is insightful, comprehensive and useful to help inform business decisions. So first you want to start by creating your conversational interview guide. Don't get me wrong, we support 100% conversational interviews over a scripted ones. But it is wise to have a set of open ended questions available to you when having these conversations. Think of these questions like the guardrails of your interview to ensure that you are capturing insights that are aligned with your win loss program learning objectives. Second do your homework. You want to make sure you prepare yourself before you go into that conversation. How do you prepare for a win loss interview? You want to have a great understanding of the product or the technology, that's the core of the conversation. So you want to have a good understanding of the features, the pricing structure, the sales process competitors. You also want to do your homework on the interviewee. You want to check them out on linked in check out the company's website. If you have any additional context around that specific deal. You want to go over those notes. We also recommend doing a brief google search on the buyer's company and the technology that they evaluated this will give you a great understanding of the level of experience that they have that the buyer's company has with the technology. Third, be yourself. Don't force yourself into a particular interview style. Just go with what feels okay with you and with what feels comfortable. So if you are the type of person who prefers to engage in a brief chit chat before getting into the actual conversation, go for it. If the interview is open to having that informal conversation before, beforehand, fourth follow the 10 90 rule, what I mean by that is us interviewer when you speak No more than 10% of the time while you're interviewing you want them to speak for about 90% of the time. Fifth you want to end is strong. Have a key open ended question to wrap up your conversation. It could be do you have any other feedback you would like to share or are there any other areas of the sales engagement experience that we haven't touched on? But you would like to discuss from experience? We've learned that those great golden nuggets happened right at the end of the conversation. So make sure you have that question ready. I hope you find this practical tips helpful for your next win loss interview, Happy interviewing.