Win/Loss Analysis

How to Capture and Keep the Business You Want

Ellen Naylor

• Publisher: Business Intelligence Source, Inc.
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780997272222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing Research
• Index: Business

• Do you want to win and retain more business? Nail the competition?
• When you win deals, do you know why you win them?
• When you lose deals, do you know why you lose them?
• When your existing customers choose you again, why do they?
• When your existing customers abandon you, why do they?

If you don't ask your customers and those who chose a competitor, you won't truly discover why you're winning and losing deals. Find out why buyers choose to do business with you or your competition. Learn how they went about making their buying decision. If your company is struggling, losing its visibility or failing in growth projections, you need Win/Loss Analysis. Woven throughout are steps to gather and implement competitive intelligence, customer insight and strategic panache. You will pull insight to develop specific buyer personas. With the guidance of Win/Loss Analysis, you will discover how to remove the guesswork, and gain more business by conducting Win/Loss interviews with your customers and former prospects--after the buying decision has been made. For over two decades, Win/Loss expert Ellen Naylor has guided executives and managers to world-class results with her 12-Step Win/Loss process. Now you will get her inside tips and secrets to lead your company to do the same. Not convinced yet? Research shows that taking action from a formal Win/Loss program can improve win rates between 15 to 30 percent.

Bronze Independent Publisher's award Business/Career/Sales category.

chapter twenty-one

Ethical Elicitation

Trust is the essence of leadership.

—Colin Powell

Elicitation is one of the skills from the intelligence community that works very well in business conversation. According to the FBI, elicitation is a technique used to discreetly gather information. It is a conversation with a specific purpose: to collect information that is not readily available and do so without raising suspicion that specific facts are being sought.

Elicitation is the strategic use of conversation to extract information from people without giving them the feeling they are being interrogated. Elicitation can occur anywhere—at social gatherings, at conferences, over the phone, on the street, on the Internet, or in someone’s home. The use of elicitation techniques encourages people to share. I have noticed that radio and TV hosts use elicitation skills on talk shows.

I learned about elicitation from John Nolan of the intelligence world.6 Rather than asking questions, elicitation is a conversation that flows and encourages people to voluntarily tell you things without you having to ask. Overall you want to minimize the threat to the other person’s ego when interviewing him or her, and elicitation techniques do just that.

In Win/Loss analysis, I tend to use a combination of direct questions and elicitation techniques. You only have a set amount of time for each interview, and people expect you to ask questions. Adding a conversational twist encourages sharing.

How and Why Elicitation Techniques Work

In my elicitation training from John Nolan I learned that people remember questions better than they remember conversation. If you’re conducting an interview where you don’t want people to remember what they have shared with you, elicitation is particularly useful. For example, pure elicitation is often used when you would rather people forget who you are when you cold-call for information or collect information at a trade show.

However, in Win/Loss interviews this is not the case. You want people to remember you and what they tell you, so ask direct questions. If you do not record interviews, you might need to reconnect with them after the initial interview if you missed something. You can use elicitation techniques in your introduction, at certain points in the interview, and at the conclusion.

Eight Human Tendencies that Support Elicitation Techniques

Elicitation at its core recognizes certain human tendencies that promote sharing.

• Recognition

• Appreciation

• Curiosity

• Gossip

• Complaining

• Correction

• Self-Effacement

• Over-Talking When Emotional

Recognition

From switchboard attendants to CEOs, people respond when you recognize something positive about them. They like to show off their knowledge and share it with you. There aren’t enough listening ears these days, especially with all the digital connection in use out there. When you listen and encourage people to share more about something they’re proud of, they will talk.

In Win/Loss, it can be something as simple as, “Since you’re the market leader, we are very interested in improving our business relationship with you. No one builds a better software program for Sales.” This could be worked into your introduction in a Win/Loss interview.

Appreciation

Showing appreciation is related to recognition, and everyone responds to this. Show appreciation for the person’s profession or role in decision- making during a Win/Loss interview.

An example of this is: “You must be so busy as the company’s CIO. They were lucky to have someone so senior to have guided the decision to go with ACME Corporation.”

Curiosity

People just can’t help themselves. We are all curious. If you can arouse curiosity during a Win/Loss interview, the conversation simply flows.

From switchboard attendants to CEOs, people respond when you recognize something positive about them.

An example of this is: “You just can’t believe what we hear from customers around the feature that you just mentioned. Some customers say it is key to the sale, while others don’t value it at all.” Most people will ask you to tell them more, and when they talk again they will often tell you more about how they use the particular feature and their preferences for change and why. Product managers love to hear about how customers value and use yours and your competitor’s product features.

Gossip

People can’t resist the urge to gossip. This is related to curiosity and is the reason why most people can’t keep secrets. This is a useful technique in Win/Loss interviews. I use it often when they talk about the competition.

For example, they will say, “We bought this product from competitor A since they had this feature, which works so much better than yours.” I’ll answer, “So I guess that is pivotal to how you use the product. By the way, I hear that competitor B is coming out with some new technology around that feature. I am guessing you have heard about it too.”

The conversation just flows, and I will find out more about competitors A and B since most people can’t resist gossiping.

Complaining

Complaining is another human tendency. If you notice someone is particularly gruff, working from an angle of complaining about something is effective to entice a person to share more. Pricing almost always comes up during Win/Loss discussions. It is usually a sensitive area.

Here is an example of how this works. The customer might say, “ACME Corporation’s pricing is just too high. My management team doesn’t like how it keeps raising its price when the technology used in the product keeps coming down in price.” I would answer, “That seems unreasonable given what you just said. That must be frustrating for you.”

By simply acknowledging the complaint, a person will often expound on that issue. Pricing is always an issue that you want to discuss in Win/Loss interviews, and I am grateful when the interviewee brings it up so I don’t have to.

Correction

People like to think they are the experts. They want to make sure that you understand what they are sharing. They aren’t sure that you have the ability to understand the knowledge they will impart since they are the expert in this field and you aren’t.

In Win/Loss interviews, this comes up most often when discussing decision-making criteria and the competition. I’ll start with, “So you just said the most importan...

Table of contents

• Preface
• What Is Competitive Intelligence and Win/Loss?
• The Evolution of Win/Loss Analysis
• How You Will Benefit from Win/Loss Analysis
• Diving into Win/Loss
• Why Companies Don’t Do Win/Loss
• Creating a World-Class Win/Loss Analysis Program
• Win/Loss: A Relationship Business
• Setting Up a World-Class Win/Loss Program
• Steps One and Two: Win/Loss Process Development
• Step Three: Assess Company Culture—Yours and Theirs
• Step Four: Create the Win/Loss Interview Questions
• Step Five: Connect with Sales
• Setting Up a World-Class Win/Loss Program
• Step Six: Connect with Customers and Prospects
• Step Seven: Conduct the Interview
• Practical Considerations for Win/Loss Interviews
• Setting Up a World-Class Win/Loss Program
• Step Eight: Tally Results of All Interviews
• Step Nine: Analyze Findings
• Step Ten: Make Recommendations
• Steps Eleven and Twelve: Disseminate and Make Changes
• Using Win/Loss for Strategic Decisions
• How to Improve Your Conversational Skills
• Improve Your Interviewing Skill
• Ethical Elicitation
• Outsourcing Win/Loss Analysis Programs
• Outsourcing Versus Creating In-House Win/Loss Programs
• Hiring a Win/Loss Consultant
• Summary: Win/Loss Analysis
• Final Thoughts
• Endnotes
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• About the Author
• How to Work with Ellen Naylor