COVID-19 has affected many of the world’s industries and countries. Your customers are coming to terms with the new reality, with disruption to both business and personal lives.
They have faced more disruption than ever before and are re-evaluating their strategy and rationalising their spend accordingly. Sales plans and forecasts prior to the pandemic did not take this into account, and yet your and you teams are held to account to sell successfully so your business can survive and then thrive. The pressure to win in your chosen marketplaces has never been greater.
Existing customers are proving to be difficult environments within which to grow your business. The acquisition of new customers takes a significant investment of time, effort and money. Every penny counts in the battle to win new business so understanding why you win or lose in a particular market sector or with a particular offering has never been more important. Market dynamics are changing so fast, that without this information, sales teams are unlikely to be playing their strongest hand.
“It was quite interesting to hear that they want to know what we thought of the process. It’s the marking of a mature corporation that wants to learn from the past and try to achieve better results”
CIO, Government Ministry
“The process has been really valuable for us and shows the commitment from their management”
Head of IT, Major Finance Company
Digital Distance will deliver a tailored and digital Win/Loss Analysis programme for your organisation, structured to provide actionable insight into your sales results and provide critical input into your win rate improvement programme and sales qualification processes.
Working in partnership, we will decide together which bids are selected for win/loss analysis. Selecting bids that have something in common can make the resulting information more valuable as trends start to appear in the resulting analysis. This commonality could be based on the following criteria:
At Digital Distance, we specialise in obtaining that actionable insight and ensuring you benefit from it. How do we do this?
First of all, we build win/loss sessions into the “business as usual” model for all your prospective customers. In other words, we notify them of this activity early in their buying process, not when we have just lost, but well prior to the contract award date. We want the customer to know we care what they think regardless or the outcome, not that we are going to cause a problem for them as we did not win. Making the request early is usually a good time, they want us to bid after all.
We also suggest that you are clear with the customer that this will be facilitated by a specialist third party. This helps to take some of the emotion out of the process. The customer will likely feel better able to talk more frankly with a third party expert as to where the vendor had shortcomings and as to why a competitor was preferable.
Our team have performed very many win/loss reviews with end customers. We have well rehearsed techniques supported by a set of digital tools to help us collect all the data we need.
Our digital survey is highly scalable and cost effective. The broader the reach of the win/loss data collection, the greater the likelihood of gleaning actionable insight. It is a quick and efficient way of receiving direct customer feedback from a wider pool of bids.
To have a more insightful conversation with your customers, Digital Distance also offers a direct customer interaction session. This is more targeted to strategic bids or to support a key marketing campaign. Digital Distance specialists will perform deep-dive interviews with both your colleagues involved in the bid, and critically with your customer stakeholders. Given the ‘new reality’ interviews will be performed virtually via an appropriate digital medium agreed with each customer.
Now we have collected the data from the surveys and any interviews, we move to the next step. Using analytics we identify any commonality, reoccurring themes, and emerging trends. We evaluate all the output data from the end customers and from it we distil key insights, making sure we get to the crux of the matter.
As the surveys and interviews are completed, a report is produced showing trends in win/loss data as well as capturing key areas for improvement or further exploitation. Edited transcripts of any direct customer interviews will be made available to you to support the programme’s findings with key points highlighted.
Digital Distance offers further support by helping identify corrective actions and quick wins as well as areas for future transformation.
Where appropriate we integrate with your CRM function to embed the findings in your systems and processes. For example, we will provide input into any account plans to support growth initiatives.
Engaging Digital Distance in this programme provides you with a basis for honest and open dialogue leading to more insightful results both internally and externally.
In addition to Win/Loss Analysis, Digital Distance can support you with internal lessons learnt sessions and opportunity deep dives. These highlight internal views of success that can be replicated and uncover issues preventing a more effective bidding process. Reviews can be extended to include service transition and/or programme or service delivery. The subsequent analysis feeds directly into your continuous improvement programme.
We are happy to work with under a non-disclosure agreement and ensure client confidentiality at all times. The breadth and frequency of our win/loss analytics service will depend on your exact needs. Please contact us for a free consultation and to discuss your specific requirements and we will be happy to provide a competitive quote for this game-changing digital service.
Whether it is winning net new business or driving new service lines into existing accounts, a structured win/loss programme is the bedrock of a sales organisation committed to a culture of continuous improvement.