Losing a big deal can be beneficial for your sales, marketing, and product development team.
Leveraging a failed deal to create a win-loss analysis can provide your teams with crucial
customer insights to better understand your buyers needs and win deals.

A win-loss analysis is the process of gathering information to understand the factors that turned
a sales opportunity into a win or a loss. But, a win-loss analysis could reveal a lot more than
that.

This post provides tips for creating a win-loss analysis to strengthen your understanding of your
buyers and adapt your sales, marketing, and product development strategies.

3 Tips For Creating A Win-loss Analysis

Creating Your Strategy

An effective win-loss analysis will provide you with information that you can then take to
strengthen your buyer personas, sales process, competitive analysis, and pricing strategy to
drive strategic growth. Unfortunately, it’s easy to skew the data and make the information
useless– wasting both parties time.

When it comes to conducting your win-loss analysis, you have to plan to ensure you’ve
assembled an unbiased team, asked helpful questions, and established the ideal timeframe.

Pragmatic Marketing suggests that you conduct your win-loss interview in a non-sales
environment within three months of the final decision. A department other than sales should
conduct the interview to keep it unbiased.

Questions To Ask

Once you have created your strategy, you should begin thinking about the questions you’re
going to ask during your win-loss interview with the prospect. Your list of questions should be
adapted to your product, prospects, and industry. However, here are some suggested questions
to help get you started on conducting your win-loss analysis:

1. What challenges were you trying to solve with the solution or service?
Knowing what challenges the prospect was dealing with will help your sales, marketing,
and product teams align the product and messaging with what the user’s pain points are.

If the prospect’s challenges do not align with what your product solves, it could help you
identify new messaging or market-share opportunities.

2. Who were the other vendors that you considered?
Getting a picture of who you’re up against in deals can help you create a competitive
strategy and identifying trends.

3. What criteria did you use to make your selection?
Knowing what matters most to your prospects will help you pinpoint the features and
benefits that should be addressed the next time, if your product can meet the criteria.

4. Why did you select the vendor that you chose?
What was the main factor that led the prospect selecting the vendor? Sometimes it’s
price, other times it’s features.

5. Did the presentation and messaging align with your needs?
Matching your pitch to your customer persona and personalizing it to your prospects
individual needs is vital to winning deals. If your messaging doesn’t align with the
prospect’s needs, it could indicate that there are holes in your buyer personas or that
your reps need additional training.

6. How did our offering compare to the other offerings you considered?
Getting product comparisons from your prospects will help perform an analysis of the
competitive landscape.

7. What advice would you give us?
There may be information that a prospect may be willing to give out, you just didn’t ask
for it. Giving the prospect a chance to speak their mind can open up doors for longer
discussions, more information, and possibly a second chance at a sell.

Using The Information

You have nailed down your strategy and narrowed down the questions you’re going to ask in
the interview, but now what?.All of this work isn’t going to be worthless unless you compile the
data, analyze it, and report findings back to your team.

Using the data collected from multiple win-loss interviews, you can:

• Find patterns for why you won or lost deals
• Identify what your market values most
• Align your buyers wants and needs to your product, messaging, and sales pitch

So, next time you lose a deal, remember how you can use the opportunity to create a win-loss
analysis to help your business grow.