Win Loss Assessment Services

Are you receiving unfiltered information regarding what your customers like and dislike about your organization and its offerings? As you might already suspect, several factors including internal politics can prevent your leadership team from ever seeing the unedited feedback on your products, services or initiatives in the marketplace. Obviously, if you don’t continually know what customers and prospects really think, you could be at an enormous disadvantage when developing business strategies and tactics.

Let Proactive Worldwide help you create a customized win/loss program suited to your business. We can help your organization evaluate its sales team’s performance against a range of variables (e.g., company size, industry segment, lead source, competition, type of decision-maker, etc.). Depending on your need, we can help provide your organization with the knowledge it needs to:

• Identify unique value propositions
• Improve customer retention
• Increase future sales conversions
• Optimize processes
• Tailor product strategies

Proactive Worldwide Win/Loss Program consulting services get executed in an ongoing manner, help you see the real truth, and enable you to act with confidence. We position you to see trends on a routine basis, allowing you to recognize problems before they escalate to drops in market share or customer loss.

Considerations for your win/loss program

Unfiltered information and the means by which you accumulate it are two crucial elements of a win/loss program.

You want to know how the marketplace views your product, service or company. You want to know which messages you communicate are actually important to those receiving them. Also, how does the marketplace perceive you in comparison with competitors? Those are some of the insights you will come away with after a Proactive Worldwide win/loss assessment.

How you go about getting the information matters a great deal. A simple online survey usually fails to provide the detail required. This type of survey also leads organizations to avoid asking tough questions – simply because tough questions are difficult to write. Consequently, the kinds of questions that lead to useful insights get watered down or removed.

Ask the right questions

• Seek a balance of positive and critical questions as well as when and how you present them.
• Talk to customers live, especially for the tough questions. We provide a neutral voice and elicit honest answers and critiques.
• We modify language as needed, which can be done without influencing results.
• Avoid watering down questions. We ask people what they dislike versus asking them how you can do better. It usually results in a more useful answer.

Build trust and buy-in early

You can imagine how your sales team might react to win/loss assessment results if they weren’t involved in the process early on. At Proactive Worldwide, we work directly with leadership and believe in allowing all relevant parties to participate in some way. It demonstrates to them that they are a part of the process, not a victim of it. It builds trust behind the process.

We help you outline how results will be used and what the process entails. We describe the survey, our role, reporting frequency, troubleshooting processing, target audience and how to handle critical feedback.

A Proactive Worldwide win/loss assessment encourages transparency. Think of transparency as a charter or agreement between leadership and those who may be impacted by the win/loss assessment.

Pursue direct quotes

Direct quotes from customers and prospects go a long way in helping your leadership grasp the importance – or lack thereof – of the assessment they’re reading. Quotes enable you to recognize differences in tone. Your win/loss report might contain entire section of quotes from a particular question.

In rare cases, a Proactive Worldwide win/loss assessment may include recorded discussions, with permission from the person being interviewed, enabling you to understand nuances.

Oftentimes, respondents don’t take the time to write in detail about their experiences. They often provide little feedback unless they are very unhappy with an outcome. Our phone interviews are vital to capturing details and nuances.

How we work with internal teams

As mentioned, it’s important to work with internal teams early on. The surprise of negative feedback is one of the largest triggers for contention. It can prevent meaningful discussions about causes or solutions.

• Provide updates to ensure affected parties are aware of potentially negative feedback.
• Provide parties a copy of the report before the final leadership team. While output does not get amended, this timing allows for a response or solution to the critique.
• Create a list of possible solutions. No one likes to hear what they are doing wrong. Besides, ultimately, you’re seeking answers and suggestions.
• If an output is likely to have strong pushback by affected parties, include a section in the final report for rebuttals or disagreement. While this is not an ideal approach, when needed it can de-escalate emotions and keep everyone moving toward resolution agreement.