Speaker: Andre Csapo, Research Director, DoubleCheck Research
Who should be interviewed for win/loss programs?
Andre Csapo: one of the questions we get a lot from people who are doing win loss programs for the first time is what bars should we talk to. So today I'm going to talk about some considerations you should think about when you're selecting the bars you'd like to talk to for the first time. They can be by decision type, their involvement in the evaluation. I'm going to introduce the idea of cohorts and also, lastly, the idea of picking buyers who might represent outliers. So first off, often when people are looking at doing a win loss program, they're thinking about buyers and they often say, you know, we really just want to focus on lost decisions. I would strongly recommend that you also consider doing interviews with the wind buyers. Why? Because that way you're getting a full 360° view of these buyers. If you only focus on the lost buyers, you're missing out on a whole segment of buyers who are also considering you and those are the ones who actually chose you. Another way to think about this is that when you're looking at lost buyers, they are on the flip side for your competitors. They are, they're lost deals. So you really want to understand why are your competitors losing and winning with you. So I would always recommend balancing uh, win and lost buyer interviewed by type. You can do to different ratios. It doesn't always have to be a 50, 50 split, but I would definitely encourage you to have representation from both groups. Secondly, I want to talk about decision involvement. Another way you should be thinking about who you should talk to is by their involvement in the deal. Normally we really like to talk to the sponsor. We all know that was the primary point of contact in the evaluation. They're the ones who worked with your sales team the most. So they'll be able to give a good understanding and talk about the full extent of the deal from the very beginning to the end because they were deeply involved. They can also give you great feedback on the demo process and your sales executives. Thirdly, I want to talk about this idea of cohorts. When you're doing a program you don't want to be too broad or too unfocused. And what I mean by that is if you select buyers who represent to many different cohorts such as by product size of industry segments or persona, then the feedback you get might not be meaningful because they'll just be a small sample sizes. So it's going to be hard to compare the feedback. For example, if you have multiple product types, then you might say, well it's hard to get a good understanding of the win and lost reasons because they're talking about different products and the types of buyers are very different. So when you're thinking about looking at buyers also try to think about the mess cohorts, do we have enough buyers who are representative of similar ideas or similar products. So that when we compare them we're feeling like we're getting a good comparison of behaviors and that there's the results are going to be meaningful. Lastly and maybe a little bit contrary to what I just said. Sometimes I also see buyer people doing this focusing on buyers that are too narrow. They only are focusing on the core market. There's an opportunity to also talk to what I would consider. Outliers. Maybe there are buyers who are slightly outside who your regular buyers are, but they can be very meaningful because they can give you insights on where your product might be going or a new opportunities and segments. For example, if you sell predominantly to the mid market and your sample size is big enough, sometimes it's useful to also pull in a few buyers who might be representing smaller buyers. And let's say the sMB segment or larger buyers or an enterprise. Conversely, you can also, and I really like talking to this type are buyers who are really intensive users of your product because then you're going to get some very interesting use cases from them because they're going to be very particular and really focused on some of the product features that they need. So these are some considerations that would keep in mind when you're thinking about who should I talk to uh in terms of buyers for my one last program
