Ryan Sorley for Ryan Sorley - Target Pillar

Speaker: Ryan Sorley, Founder, DoubleCheck Research

Ryan Sorley: Hi. My name is Ryan. Sorley, and I am the founder of Double Check Research. We are win loss analysis firm out of Boston. We work specifically with B2B technology companies and conduct thousands of win loss interviews with buyers around the globe annually. My focus for this video is going to be in three areas. The first area is why you should really not go to sales as the single source of truth for win loss insights. The second area is what five things could you do immediately to up level your win loss program, and the third area is how you move a program that's flat, that's not adding value to something - that's actionable, insightful. That makes a big difference within your organization. If you have any questions after watching this video, feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn, or you can email me at ryan.sorley@doublecheckresearch.com. Thanks a lot.

Ryan Sorley: I can't tell you how many people come to us who have a win loss program in place. And their win loss program includes pulling data from a reason code, drop down or reaching out to sales when a deal is won or lost primarily when it's lost and they take all of that intelligence, they slap it together, and they use that as analysis to help drive change within their organization. It drives me crazy because as a win loss analysis firm, we speak to buyers every day and we speak to sellers and we see just how big the gap is between the two. Let me tell you a quick story. I'm going to read it. I apologize because I want tp make sure to get all the points out clearly. A few years back, one of our clients who's in the marketing automation space had reached out because they lost a really big deal, and they wanted us to interview a chief marketing officer who had made the decision to work with another organization. This company was in the financial services space specifically, and that's important for this particular story. As I prepared for the interview I reached out to the sales person to find out what they thought. The reason for the loss was. They were pretty confident. They walked me through some details associated with the loss, but they were pretty sure that they lost on price. They felt their competitors undercut them, and it was a tight race and it came down to that. It was a huge loss for the company. So with that information from the sales person, they went out. They signed up with the pricing consultant, an actual firm. They spent a lot of money to secure that relationship and get kind of a new pricing structure in place. Started the process anyway. That's why when we completed the interview, they were shocked. Toe read the results. The outcome really had nothing to do with price. It actually had to do with wardrobe, Believe it or not. In the final meeting between our client and the other vendor and, of course, the buyer, our client came to the meeting very casual. This is a financial services organization, so they're conservative. A lot of them goto work wearing suits and ties and things of that nature. Our client wore jeans to the meeting, and they were ripped jeans. I'm sure they were super expensive ripped jeans while their competitors mirror that particular buying organization. They were in suits as well. It was such a close call. It came down to what each particular organization was wearing and the cultural fit that came through in that particular attire. Right? So our client with super casual didn't match the culture of the organization. The competitors, all things equal, seemed to match culturally. So our client lost that deal. It just goes to show you, buyers don't always know why they lost deals. They rarely do, and sometimes they don't really know who they were competing with. So it's really incumbent upon us to reach out to the buyers directly. Whether you're doing it yourselves, you're doing it through a survey interviews. You're using a third party, whatever, but go to the source, ask for insight. You'll really be shocked by what you hear.

Ryan Sorley: All right. There's a ton of things that make for a super successful win loss program. For this video, I'm going to focus on just five. The first one is gaining leadership. In most successful programs that we come across start with leadership, actually asking for a win loss program and pushing it down to product marketing. It could go the opposite way, too. But either way it goes, you need to have those executives bought into the program, and they need to have a really clear, concise vision for how they're going to use the insights that you're going to collect. Number two on this is really important. Win loss programs are not for product marketing. This is not your thing. This is a tool that should be used in support of others within your organization. Sure, you're gonna get some go to market strategy insights out of the program, but you're really looking to serve sales and competitive intelligence and product management with your program. This is the thing that will make you look like a rock star. So as you're starting your program design process, goto all those people ask them what they want to get out of the program and collect their thoughts and questions and use those thoughts and questions as a basis for building your program. The third area which ties into this is make sure you have a really specific set of learning objectives that aligned to the needs of your stakeholder group and of your organization. You want to go into these programs with direction, and you want to know what's really important to your peers at that particular moment. But you have to be flexible because needs change in the market changes. So you may start up with a set of five or six key learning objectives, but be prepared in three or six months for those to change and go back to those people to ask them what is important to them today as compared to what was important to them when you previously spoke with them. The fourth area is you need to have technology and a place to be able to store your information. So as you're interviewing people, you're gonna want to record them using zoom or views or something of that nature, and you're gonna want to take that recording and have a transcribed using a tool like rev dot com. They're great for transcription services or any transcript service that you that you have out there. The third area is you want to take that transcript and you want to dump it into some sort of a reporting tool, And it might be in Excel spreadsheets. It could be a Google sheets, something of that nature. Or you can use it to, like dovetail, which is what we use quite regularly to bring your data into that tool and start text coding all of your content so that you can build charts and research alerts to start to show themes that emerged in key areas like sales or competition. And the fifth area that I'm going to focus on is have a plan for sharing your insights. Don't hoard them. Product programs that failed are with people who get the information, hold it and are scared to share it with anybody. That makes for a really poor win loss program. You wanna have a plan, whether it's quarterly meetings where you're presenting to your executive team or regular updates as an interview is completed? Getting that interview summary into the hands of your colleagues as quickly as possible research summaries or research pieces that you can put together that air focused on competition that serve battle cards or research insights around sales, execution or product feedback. There's a lot you can do when you look at slices of the data that you've collected but have an actionable plan for being able to share that insight across the organization on a regular basis.

Ryan Sorley: all right, This is a quick one. Win loss programs fail when nobody takes action. Based on the insights that you've collected, I can't tell you how many organizations start win loss programs with the best of intentions, but they just stopped doing it. They fail because people lose interest, other priorities come up. And the reason is that when you're putting a win loss program in place, you need to keep the end in mind. You need to have some sort of an action plan for Well, what are you going to do with the data that you've collected? So if you go to your stakeholder group as you're building your program or refreshing your program, one of the questions that you need to ask them is if I'm able to answer the questions that you've given to me about what you're interested in, what are you going to do with the insights that I've collected for you? Like what specific actions are you going to take? And are those actions measurable? Are you gonna take the information and feed it into your battle cards? Are you going to use it for sales enablement activity? Are you gonna use it at Sale's kickoff. Are you gonna use it toe higher pricing consultant? Are you going to use it to justify development efforts in product gap areas? Are you going to do it to invest in competitive knockout campaigns? You have to have a plan. If you don't have a plan, your program will fail.