Importance of Win Loss Analysis by Mike King

Mike King

A company should evaluate how it is performing in key areas of their business – whether business is bad or even if it’s good.  We recently asked some clients and prospects – people who chose CleanSpeak and people who haven’t yet – what they think about Inversoft, our product and our customer service approach.

Win Loss Analysis

This kind of inquiry can be uncomfortable to make, but the feedback helped us understand our customers better, which led us to make further improvements to our technology and our service.

What's to be learned

What we learned about the opportunities we lost was revealing in some very positive ways.  We discovered there were some companies who simply couldn’t incur the cost of a premium enterprise technology.  In some cases, they

chose not to implement filtering and moderation technology, while others opted to build a very simple solution internally.  The best part is that there was only one lost opportunity that selected a competitor over us.  In this case, they wanted the comfort of a vendor located in the same time zone.  By contrast, the companies that recently switched to Inversoft’s CleanSpeak solution from our competitors came for reasons they consider critical to their business.

The companies that chose Inversoft did so because they wanted a solution that was reliable, had a comprehensive set of useful tools, and was as quick and easy to implement as enterprise software can be.  Some of the newly converted customers told us the integration process with competing technologies was so painful that they never got the value they sought from the other offerings.  The clients indicated that integration of the competitive solutions took many months to install and configure while the process of integrating with CleanSpeak only took a couple weeks in total.

Affirmation goes a long way

By performing the win loss analysis, we learned new ways to adjust our processes to make onboarding with CleanSpeak even faster, and included client-requested enhancements in our latest software release.  We also received affirmation of our approach to business – most prospects we interviewed told us they loved CleanSpeak 3.0 and many indicated they still plan to adopt the software in the future.  New clients told us they were pleased that CleanSpeak was as easy to integrate as we’d promised and they told us our customer service and support is first class.  All the positive feedback is really nice, but we also learned some things we were able to use as the basis of improvements in both product and process.

The right questions

No matter the state of your business, you can benefit from a good win loss analysis.  The important thing is to identify the right questions to ask so clients and prospects can provide the most specific and candid feedback.  The best questions are open-ended and address the areas of the business where you most want to gain insight.  These areas may include feedback on products and services, sales process, pricing, customer service, buying influencers, buying process, and competitive intelligence.

Our analysis had three key outcomes.  We got positive affirmation of our products and customer service.  We learned that companies are willing to pay a fair price for premium technology because they understand they get what they pay for.  And, we were able to take what we learned from clients and prospects and use it to make our company even better.

 

 

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