Today we’re going to give you some tips on how to take all of that long-form, qualitative feedback you've gathered in your win-loss interviews, and turn it into something valuable so you can create an action plan that will drive change and increase revenue.
If you’re running a win-loss analysis program, few things are worse than conducting a dozen interviews, then realizing you have to comb through 200 pages of call transcripts to pick out the trends and turn them into valuable, actionable insights that can improve your strategy and drive more revenue. It can be a daunting and overwhelming task.
But if your insights just sit in a google doc—or worse, in your head—then all your work will be for nothing.
So, today we’re going to give you some tips on how to take all of that long-form, qualitative feedback, and turn it into something valuable so you can create action plan that will drive change and increase revenue.
Win-Loss 101 Week 5 | Decision Drivers
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[00:00:00] Nate: If you're running a win loss analysis program, few things are worse than conducting a dozen interviews. Then realizing you have to comb through like 200 pages of call transcripts to pick out the trends and turn them into valuable, actionable insights that can improve your strategy and drive more revenue.
[00:00:15] It can be a daunting and overwhelming task. But if your insights just sit in a Google doc or worse in your head. Then all your work will be for nothing.
[00:00:24] So today, we're going to give you some tips on how to take all of that long form qualitative feedback and turn it into something valuable and actionable so you can create a plan that will drive change and increase revenue throughout your entire business.
[00:00:37] I hope you enjoy the episode and if you're not subscribed yet this is just a friendly reminder to hit that subscribe button so you get more awesome insights into how to increase your win rate and drive more revenue in your business [00:01:00]
[00:01:21] Hey everybody. Welcome to Win Loss 1 0 1. This is the fifth week in this six week series. We're so excited to have you join us today. Uh, if you're watching live, we would love if you would chat with us in the comments. Let us know where you're watching from or let us know. What role you're in. You could even let us know if this is your first video or if you've been following along with us over the past couple of weeks.
[00:01:43] Um, we're really excited to have you here with us, and our goal is to over-deliver on some value here. So if you're new to the show, I just wanna do a quick recap and let you know what we're all about here. So Win Loss 1 0 1 is essentially a crash course in how to do win loss analysis the right way. And win [00:02:00] loss analysis is essentially reaching out to your buyers, the people who have.
[00:02:03] The most important information that you need with regards to how to win more deals. So you reach out to your buyers, you talk to them, you figure out why they make the decisions they make, you know why they choose you or don't choose you. And then you can make adjustments to your go-to-market and to your sales strategy, um, to improve your win rates and to win more deals and create more revenue.
[00:02:23] And so over the last couple of weeks, we've done some, we've, we've made progress in the, uh, Teaching you how to do win loss analysis. Our first week we identified a specific revenue problem that you wanted to investigate. In week number two, we helped you build out an interview guide to help you kind of investigate that problem when you had the opportunity to talk to one of your buyers in the third week.
[00:02:45] Uh, The third week we talked about scheduling. That's right. Um, so it was how to reach out and pull, get in contact with the right buyers and, um, make them respond to your interview requests. And then last week we talked about how to conduct a successful win [00:03:00] loss interview. So this. The first four weeks have really been, um, kind of the practical, tactical, how to communicate and interact with your buyers.
[00:03:08] But now what we're being faced with is probably the more difficult part of win loss analysis, which is actually turning those buyer interviews into something. Valuable. Something that makes sense. So today I am joined with Jonathan Stevens, our VP of Consulting, and Spencer Dent, our c e o. And these guys have been around the block and they're, we're gonna talk about something, um, today called decision drivers.
[00:03:33] So, Spencer, can you set us up here and talk to me about what, what is the problem if people have been following along and doing their homework every week? What's the problem people are facing right now? Yeah, so, so, Oftentimes when people try to do win loss and win loss interview program, so that's really what we're talking about in this overarching curriculum that we're walking through, is how to run a win loss interview program.
[00:03:54] You can do win loss beyond that. You can survey buyers, you can go engage buyers in other ways, but if you're thinking about interviewing in [00:04:00] particular, which tends to be the best place for people to start because you get the richest, deepest feedback. The two choke points that people run into are on the front end trying to get somebody to act, figuring out who to go reach out to, getting the that person to schedule time with you and get on the phone with you and on the back end.
[00:04:18] Okay? Now I've talked to these people. How do I turn all these anecdotes into something that I can synthesize and share? The 30 minute conversation and interview is actually the easiest part. And sometimes people think, oh, I gotta go do all these interviews. That's actually, you have 30 minute conversations all day, every day.
[00:04:37] Um, it's, it's how do you go make sense of it. And that's kind of the methodology that we have behind decision drivers. And when you think about decision drivers, what are the factors that come into play that influence somebody to choose you or not choose you? And how do you capture those? And roll them up in a synthesized way [00:05:00] so that you can see across deals.
[00:05:02] Why you're winning and losing instead of just relying on the anecdotes themselves. Hmm. Yeah, and I've seen, I mean, I've seen this done before. You know, a lot of people, when they're starting win loss, they just, when they finish doing a bunch of interviews, they have these PDFs and they have 25 page PDFs.
[00:05:20] And, you know, in, in other scenarios, You can give that to your stakeholders and have that be your main deliverable. The reality is nobody's gonna read through all that. Like it's, it's just too much data. They need something a little bit more high level. They need to be able to see trends across the data you're collecting.
[00:05:37] And so that's where decision drivers come into play, and that's where we can take basically what's inherently qualitative and then make it into something that's quantitative, measurable, and easier to share with, with key stakeholders. Great. So essentially what we're do doing here is we're looking for themes in the data.
[00:05:54] Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes. Um, can you gimme like a, a, a place to start here? I can, I, I, [00:06:00] my guess is that people who have conducted a few interviews might be feeling a little bit overwhelmed with that. They are looking at, you know, maybe like 30 pages of interview transcripts and it's just a wall of text and it's like, oh man, I, I remember some key points from my interviews, but how do I extrapolate what's most meaningful?
[00:06:16] Yeah, good question. The, the way I would think about this is, You go deal by deal. And you actually have to go deal by deal and thi and, and critically think this is actually where like the intellectual horsepower comes in. And you have to be smart. And that's why we hire really smart consultants at close to do this, is you have to have the ability to go through, read what the buyers are actually saying and parse that into this decision.
[00:06:44] This influenced their decision, this influenced their decision, this influenced their decision. And. Almost categorize those as you go. Like we call it drivers, you could call it themes, whatever, but you have to go deal by deal. That's how you start and you need to have some way of [00:07:00] cata cataloging that. And this is where it can get kind of unwieldy, but this is really important.
[00:07:05] You have to be able to catalog. Okay, I talked to deal a deal I, I read deal B, deal C, deal D. I've gone through each of those and sales. The sales team's ability to like listen really well and understand the buyer came up on a c and d as a negative thing. The, the pricing model actually is really favorable for this company.
[00:07:31] It came up as positive on B, C, and D. And so as, as you start to identify what those themes are, deal by deal and, and catalog them, then you can step back and say, whoa, this is coming up a lot. So the way to identify it is you have to actually get in the weeds deal by deal by deal and understand what is, what the buyers are talking about and an important factor here.
[00:07:57] And we might be, I might be jumping the guy. No, you're fine. [00:08:00] Decision drivers can be positive and negative, and they're independent of the outcome, right? So a really dangerous thing that people do is they focus so much on what we lost and we lost because of these three things, and, and, and they're all negative.
[00:08:15] And we won. And we won because of these three things, and they're all positive. How many interviews have we ever done where everything is bad? Or everything is good. Very, it's almost never, yeah, very few, right? Yeah. Like buyers, they actually give you credit where you deserve credit, and they will mark, give you bad grades where you deserve bad grades.
[00:08:32] So it's important too to, as you're codifying and cataloging the themes or the drivers that are coming up to realize how important whether they are helping you or hurting you, because then when you step back, you can say, whoa, this one thing is really hurting me on my losses. But it actually helps me on my wins.
[00:08:55] And so I'm making a trade off here that my pricing model looks this way, so it's not gonna be favorable to [00:09:00] certain types of customers. That way you don't make a. Really dangerous decision without thinking about it holistically. Yeah. And that that'll be even more true, the larger and more complex your deals are, right?
[00:09:10] Yeah. Like if you can think about a consumer buying decision, there might be one decision driver, right? I might just be looking at two things at the grocery store and I'm gonna choose, okay, whichever has the lowest price, right? But if I'm looking at a seven figure. Enterprise software decision. There's not gonna be just one reason why I made the decision that I did.
[00:09:31] There's multiple different reasons and there's multiple different stakeholders and they might have each had different nuanced, uh, decisions and factors why they're. Why they're making the decisions that they are. Another thing that I would add is something that we've seen when people start to do this decision driver process is they, they kind of boil the ocean.
[00:09:50] They look at each deal and they try to think, they try to capture every little thing that the, that the person that who's making the decision said, the, the problem with that is [00:10:00] once you get done, you actually will lose the forest for the trees, right? Mm-hmm. You won't be able to understand what is really driving the decision, so, There's, there's a delicate balance.
[00:10:10] Balance, yeah. There's a delicate balance, right? Like it's not just one thing, but if you try to, if you try to convince yourself that there's 20 things that influence the outcome of a particular deal, you're not really being honest with yourself typically. Yeah. What we've found is there's like three to six things that really made a difference and really had an impact, and we're gonna, I know we've been talking vaguely about what those are.
[00:10:31] We're gonna go into more detail about that, but, and typically, like Spencer said, which is a really good point, is. There's positives on negatives for both wins and losses, but just, just be careful about trying to boil the ocean and really focus on what drove the outcome of this deal. Yeah. Don't do the interview unless you can answer at the end of the interview.
[00:10:52] Why did the buyer do what they did? You can create whatever interview guide you want, you can have whatever very specific question you want. Sometimes I see [00:11:00] people put in scale based questions, whatever. At the end of the day, none of that matters. If you can't answer the question at the end of why did they do what they did and put it and, and state it back to them.
[00:11:13] Like at, if I'm doing a win loss interview, at the end of the call, I will actually ask the person. I'll say, so let me summarize this back to you in my own words and you tell me how accurate it's, and that means you did a good win-loss interview. Mm-hmm. If, where people get lost is they start, they mention price.
[00:11:30] Well, yeah, they mention price, but did price play a factor? So it's really important to not let every single thing that pops up. Impact you. Cool. So just to summarize really quick, um, look for positive and negative decision drivers in your wins and losses. Yeah. Because you can, there's positives in your losses and negatives in your wins.
[00:11:51] And you should be learning both from both types of, uh, deal. Yes. Mm-hmm. And then number two. Don't be too vague, but also don't get overly specific, especially [00:12:00] under decision drivers because then you can't operate, you can't take action on it. Yes. If there's 300 things that you need to take action on, it's not helpful.
[00:12:06] Yes. We're looking for three to five, maybe six key themes that are showing up in common in multiple interviews over and over again. Yes. Yes. Okay. Well, I, now I want to take a step back a little bit. Um, a couple weeks ago we interviewed the council of the Cams. Yeah. Um, I believe that was, For our interview guide.
[00:12:23] And one of the things that they talked about is how your CRM can tell you what the problem is, but a win-loss interview tells you why. Yeah. And I feel like, uh, the way that we've been talking about decision drivers right now is like a more detailed version of what your CRM tells you. It kind of gives you more specific what Yeah, instead of just one specific what we're getting, like three, four, or five, whats, um, I, I still don't, I don't feel like that's enough information to actually go take action on, like, if, if, yeah.
[00:12:51] Do you know what I mean? So can you help me under, help me understand how we turn these decision drivers that we've been talking about conceptually into something you can take action on? Yeah. So the [00:13:00] key, the key is the danger zone is that you act on one interview, right? So I come off of one interview and we lost this deal because our product is missing some type of functionality.
[00:13:10] That if we add, we would've won the deal. And it's like black and white. Like the buyer said, if you had this, we would've chosen you. Well, that's great. Like that's awesome to know. But it's pretty dangerous to go push, turn the whole ship to go focus on that one thing based off of one. Deal. Mm-hmm. So the way you get conviction to move is across deals.
[00:13:32] What are the factors that are coming up most often? Right? That's telling you the why so, and it's telling you the why in aggregate, right? So, hey, my sales team has really struggled with doing demos, and that is coming up across. A large swath of deals that should give me the conviction to be like, okay, I gotta go do something about the demos.
[00:13:53] Hmm. Yeah. Right. It's not just a one rep coaching thing, it's a, we fundamentally aren't doing a very good job on this. [00:14:00] Right, right. But the other thing to remember too, this is one reason why it's fluid is decision drivers should evolve. And so to your point, right, we, we just talked about, you know, I go talk to the first 10, I do the first 10 interviews, and those 10 interviews are going to give me directionally, some areas to go focus on.
[00:14:19] Don't overcomplicate it don't have, you know, there's 50 different factors within sales that are driving this. There, there aren't. Yeah. Okay. There aren't, we've never seen that, but, As you go through interview 10 through 20, 20 through 50, 50 through 100, you might actually see those things start to become, certain things start to become more pre prevalent.
[00:14:41] And so when we talk about decision drivers and curating decision drivers, that is an ongoing model. And it's almost like a N L P model that you have to constantly be tuning your yourself to, to make sure that you are seeing, oh, okay, when somebody says the [00:15:00] demo, am I, is it that we didn't actually explain the product very well, or we didn't actually do it relative to their use case, or we didn't actually.
[00:15:11] Show them the breadth and depth of the, of the functionality, or is it that we made it seem too complex to use and so realizing that it can't just be that one over time. You, if, if, if demos showing up the most, what is it about the demo? Mm-hmm. So you have to peel the onion even further and that's where you tune your.
[00:15:30] Your interviews more so like, wow, this is coming up a lot. What are the second and third and fourth layer questions that I need to ask about that topic so that I get smarter so that that specific decision driver becomes more actionable. Right? Yeah. So going all the way back to your question about being more actionable.
[00:15:46] What are the things that are popping the most? Then let's use that to inform us on what questions to go ask on the next batch so we can get even more precise about what needs to change. Fantastic. Yeah. So, so dispenser's point, like the curriculum that we've been [00:16:00] talking about for these last three weeks, we're talking about 'em in kind of a linear fashion.
[00:16:04] They're also fluid, like a cycle, right? Yeah. Like basically we, we look at the interview guide, we conduct interviews, we, we tag decision drivers, and then we've gotta determine. Okay. Do we need to go back and revise the interview guide? Think about different questions that we're going to ask in the interviews to make this more actionable and, and useful.
[00:16:22] And not only that, you should be revising your interview guide. You should be as you learn more. And, and the other thing is, the whole purpose of this is to make changes in your business. And this is another thing you were alluding to is, you know, your, your decision drivers are gonna change because hopefully you're making improvements in your business and making changes.
[00:16:38] Yes. So maybe your demo, uh, was, was off initially. Because you were like leaving out, you weren't talking about key features that were important to your buyer. Yeah. So you go in and fix that, and then you still get feedback that your demo might be a problem, but it's not because of that reason anymore because you fixed it.
[00:16:53] Right. It might be because of something else. Or maybe your demo stops showing up as much and now a new problem is surfacing. Yeah. [00:17:00] And so, or maybe it flips. Like that's the coolest thing to see, right? Yeah. Is like, oh we are, we have a problem with our demo weakness. With strength, and we go train and we go train our team on that and the next quarter and it becomes, everyone's talking about how this is awesome.
[00:17:12] Like that's the real impact of it. Yeah. Right. Of all of a sudden you see, wow, for three straight quarters everybody was dogging on our UI and we redid our ui. It was a huge lift and all of a sudden it's a key factor for while people are choosing why people are choosing us, like. That's awesome. Do you guys have any stories of clients that you've seen turn a negative decision driver into a positive that you'd be willing to maybe like strip out the details and share with the, with the, like those two examples that I just gave, like our real world, like one, one of our, one of our very early clients, they were getting a ton of feedback about how they were losing to a certain competitor cuz that competitor's UI just seems so much easier to use and.
[00:17:49] For this client, we were doing churn and new business deals, so it was interesting to see a lot of the churn. They were seeing the other clients and they were shifting to the other client because they thought it would be easier to u [00:18:00] to use. So over time they've redid their UI and what was interesting was to see over a two quarter period, see, okay, they released the new UI and all of a sudden there's new business being won because of the new UI and churn business still occurring because of the old UI and seeing how actually the change is flipping the business.
[00:18:21] And improving the performance like in real time. So that, like tons of examples like that. Yeah. That's very cool. Yeah. I'll give you another one that we found. So there was a client we were working with a little while ago that had some, had some packaging issues. Essentially they were selling a core product and they wanted us to do interviews specifically for people that were considering a purchase of an add-on product.
[00:18:43] What we found is that the add-on product was actually more expensive than the core product and. There wasn't an effective paywall between the core product and the add-on product. So an intelligent buyer was figuring out a way to use all of the features of the add-on product without actually [00:19:00] paying for it.
[00:19:00] Oh, that's funny. And yeah, it's like ridiculous, right? But we, we, we gave them this feedback and they, they were just kind of surprised. They, they didn't know what to think about it. And, and so what they did is they totally revamped their packaging. They made it so the add-on product was priced more.
[00:19:18] Intuitively compared to the core product, and they put in effective paywalls. And so it seemed like a true add-on, and they started actually selling that add-on, and then it became a positive. People really liked the way this product was packaged after that, so that was one case where, We got feedback, we shared it with the client, they made changes and it turned a negative into a positive.
[00:19:39] And just to illustrate tho to those who are viewing, these two examples are perfect examples of problems in the business that were preventing the company from generating revenue that they didn't really understand how big of a problem they were. Yeah. Until they started talking to buyers. Totally. And so like that's the magic of win loss analysis, is there's these invisible problems or opportunities in your business for you to generate more revenue.[00:20:00]
[00:20:00] But you can't, you can't uncover them or take advantage of them. Yeah. Unless you know they exist and the only way to know they exist is to talk to the people who are actively buying or not buying your products and services. Yes. Watch out for the echo chamber of your own organization. Yeah. Oh yeah. Right.
[00:20:14] Like so dangerous. And determining if it's a trend, right? There's, there's a real danger in, you know, when we talk about these drivers, there's a danger in one big deal being lost for a particular reason. You don't know if that was reflective of the, the overall story, right? And that's where these decision drivers become so powerful.
[00:20:32] Some of the people we work with really focus on, they say, I just want to select like a few really important deals that I want to interview. That's actually a dangerous way of thinking because. You don't know if the type of decision drivers that you're selecting from those deals are actually actually representative of your entire pipeline, right?
[00:20:51] Mm. So you've gotta collect a bunch of data and start to see trends across several different deals. I had a client once who they were selling to a really [00:21:00] large company. You can probably guess who it is. They're like a Fortune five company, right? And they said, you've gotta interview this deal. We've gotta know like why they, why they won and lost, and.
[00:21:08] Like we played along and I, I, we, we interviewed them and we collected the decision drivers, but the things that we found on that deal were totally different than every other interview we'd done for that company because it's not reflective of the whole, right. And so you can't really make business decisions off of just that one piece.
[00:21:25] You've gotta really think about what are the trends across the business. And once you do, you can take the right actions to, to flip your revenue in the right direction. Yeah. The key is to put it all in perspective. Hey, if you wanna win Fortune five, five companies, These are probably that might be representative of the Yeah, true.
[00:21:43] Your core business is not Fortune 500, fortune five companies Then. Be aware, yeah. Of who you are, how you compete, why you compete the way you do, where you're strong, where you're weak, and use that as your foothold to grow. Well, and the beauty of this is that if you can start kind of [00:22:00] pulling out these decision drivers and, um, associate them with a specific deal that they were, that they're.
[00:22:05] That they're connected to. The beauty is that then you can start filtering your data. Yeah. And you can say like, oh, maybe I did 30 win loss interviews for this specific per like up against a certain competitor that we lost to. And then you can filter those by like enterprise deals versus like a mid-market deal.
[00:22:21] Yeah. And then you can go, oh, actually. We're winning way more of the enterprise deals. Yep. And this is a strength that we have. Yeah. So it's not against the specific competitor we need to worry about. It's actually our, our go-to go-to market or whatever our, our, our, our demo at a lower tier. Yeah. Yeah. Not, not all companies are multi-product companies that run across multiple segments.
[00:22:40] Right. It's interesting to see our, for our bigger clients, To see how they actually do have almost separate businesses that compete in an enterprise segment versus a mid-market versus an SMB segment. Right. But the, the sm they're SMB competitors that is a bridge too far across to jump all the way up here.
[00:22:57] Yeah. And so, but sometimes you'll [00:23:00] see these companies try to move their way up and they don't even understand that, like the, this is a totally different ballgame. So that's why understanding your decision drivers relative to the focus area that you're doing your win loss program is important so that you don't over-index or misinterpret.
[00:23:15] You need to get enough data, enough, uh, coverage of your pipeline so that you can feel confident and then you can move. That's awesome. Okay, now I want to take, get a little bit more tactical. Yeah, I wanna get it more practical. So Jonathan, you mentioned earlier that we are gonna get a little bit more specific.
[00:23:30] Yeah. I know there's gonna be some people who are watching who've never done this before, and they're like, okay, can you help me understand maybe some examples of key themes that I should be looking for? And then maybe we can also talk a little bit about decision drivers specifically after that. Yeah, totally.
[00:23:44] So I think what, what you need to think about in terms of your decision drivers. We've talked about this concept. What, what are some ideas of what decision drivers might be? And typically the way we think about it is there's categories of decision drivers and then there's sub drivers within those [00:24:00] categories.
[00:24:00] And so an example of some of the categories that you might see are product, sales, pricing, and packaging. Marketing support and service competitors. Those are pretty broad. If I just said, Hey, we're losing because of our product, because people have a bad perception of our product. That's basically what your CRM tells you already.
[00:24:20] That's what your CRM may tell you already. If the CRM data is reliable. Yeah, but that's not actionable. I can't just say, oh, well we need to make our, well, how do we need to make our product better? So, so, but it's important to, to think about those broader categories. Cause it helps you distill the information into things that are a little bit narrower and more actionable.
[00:24:38] But, but that's, that's the where I would start is thinking about for your business, how would you define those broader categories? Depending on the type of business that you're in, some of those might not be appropriate. Like we have a product section. What if you're a services business, you don't have a product.
[00:24:52] Yeah. So you have a, a service category. Right? Right. And there's elements of the service that you provide that you're gonna evaluate in your win loss program. So it's [00:25:00] gonna be different for every company. Yeah. Yeah. For the most part, like the, the way I would think about it this way, those alt, those high level categories are really just to help you anchor on what part of the evaluation or of your business the buyer's looking at.
[00:25:15] So, Clearly, obviously they're evaluating your service or your solution or your product. Clearly there's some influence from the sales experience. Clearly, there's some influence on how things are priced. There's usually some influence on, on your brand from your brand and their perception of your brand and or what they've heard from other people.
[00:25:34] All those things tend to be, you know, those big factors. But if a sales rep comes to me and tells me that they lost because of price. And that's all they can tell me. I don't, what, what do I do with that? Like, I actually can't do anything. Should I, does that mean I need to lower my price? Does that mean my pricing model's wrong?
[00:25:55] Does that mean we had too much, that we were trying to sell 'em too much? Target me the wrong customer? [00:26:00] Yeah. Like, does, does that mean that? Right. So, so those, those high level. Layers are only good to get your mind focused around the the topic, but they don't actually help you figure out what to do. It's the next layer down.
[00:26:13] So within pricing for example, there's lots of different drivers. So what the way I would think about this, if I was doing this internally at my company and pricing came up, I would be asking in the interviews, what was it about the pricing that didn't work? And the types of things that typically will come up is like, Was the packaging, right?
[00:26:35] Are you trying to sell me a minivan when I want a Honda Civic? Right? Mm-hmm. Like, are you, that is the packaging, right? Does this fit my needs? That's one example. Within pricing, is it clear? Nothing makes buyers more upset than when it's like, I don't understand how you came up with that price. And it makes me worry about what's gonna happen to my price next year and the year after and the year after.
[00:26:58] So is it clear, is it [00:27:00] transparent? Does it seem like you have good rationale for how you've come to the, to the number you gave me? Not the number in, in and of itself. Right, like the number you gave me and the way that might manifest itself to a client is this. You go and you give them a quote and you say, Hey, it's gonna be $75,000 to buy this.
[00:27:19] And then, um, the client comes back, the client comes back and says, well, your competitor offered me their thing is 50. And you, as the sales rep say, well, I can, we can do 52. Like, and, and what's what's obfuscated in there is you might be offering so much more, right? And, and the, and the buyer may not even know that, right.
[00:27:40] You, you might not have clearly explained, right, okay, four $75,000, you get all of these things and that's, that's where getting to the next level is so important. Both in your interview strategy. Yeah. And with the drivers. Because often going on this pricing example, the first thing people will say was, yeah, it was too expensive.
[00:27:59] Yeah. [00:28:00] Well, what does that really mean? Yeah. I'll tell you a number of things that could mean. One is Spencer gave the minivan versus Honda Civic example. I have a minivan. The nicest new minivans are actually really expensive, right? And maybe somebody needs that. But maybe they don't. So maybe it's not even the fact that it's expensive.
[00:28:17] It's just way more, what happens a lot of times is the sales rep just didn't do a great job explaining the value, explaining what they could get in terms of benefits from this product. So when they see the price, they think, whoa. Yeah, that's way too expensive. There's so many layers deeper than this.
[00:28:32] Right? And that's where you need to have. A clear framework for how you identify these themes and determine, okay, what was it about the pricing that didn't make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Like other stuff that will pop up under pricing all the time is, like we talked about like the, the, is the packaging, right? Is it clear?
[00:28:51] Like how, what's the model based on? So let's say it is clear, but let's say it's user based, but I, that doesn't work for me. Right. Like I [00:29:00] have tons of employees that are part-time that are coming in and out of the business, and if you do this user base, like that's gonna drive my cost way up. And your competitors don't do it that way.
[00:29:10] And that's easier for me to, to digest and, and, and work with. Right. So like the model of by which you price, even if it is clear, might not fit well for that business. The terms like, wait, you want me to sign a three year term or, or actually. I don't want to be month to month. I'd rather sign a long-term contract, lock this in and get some type of discount.
[00:29:32] Right? So all of that can play in the, one of the interesting thing, and this is more of like a price value thing, is how do they justify the spend, right People. Will spend money if they believe they will get a return on their money. It's really simple. Yeah. Right. So oftentimes when a buyer says it was price, what they're doing in their head is they're saying, I can't get the value out of this [00:30:00] solution for what it costs.
[00:30:01] And that is as much a value prop and how well you communicated the value that they will get so that they, that they believe. In it as it is the dollar amount that is on the ticket. I love it. We actually have a listener, Lisa, who just commented and she said if they're lost on price, you didn't do a very good job at selling the value.
[00:30:19] A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent Lisa. Or maybe your pricing model just doesn't make any sense. Right? Yeah. Like that. But, but what you, what you need to make sure you un undetermined is that you can't just say they lost on price. You have to go a level deeper. Yeah. And it's the same with some of these other categories that we talked about, like.
[00:30:37] If, if the sales process was an issue, well what about it was an issue? Yeah. Because cuz there's so many levels deeper than that, that really influenced the outcome of the deal. And, and Lisa, if you have sales reps in your organization that are telling you they're losing because of price, this is a great way that win loss can train them to be better sellers is ask them the question, what was it about our price?[00:31:00]
[00:31:00] Like, because they should be asking the buyer. If the buyer's saying, I'm not sure about the price. Well, what is it about the price? Because immediately people go to this dollar amount. Mm-hmm. Instead of actually peeling apart the concern about the price. Yeah. And, and if you train your sales team, like this is where win loss can be super powerful.
[00:31:21] If you train your sales team to have professional conversations about how to discuss price with customers in a professional objective way, you will a, uncover these, the real concerns and be able to actually win those deals. Hmm. Right. Because most companies, especially in the environment we're dealing with right now, that's like a lot of economic pressure, you know?
[00:31:46] Dirty secret, everybody. Price is just something that's made up everywhere, right? So you can make up your prices and you can change your prices if you need to. So if, if you have a customer that matters enough [00:32:00] to you, that needs a a little bit unique or different model. That's why deal desks exists. That's why companies have flexibility to go win the business, but you don't earn the right as a seller.
[00:32:12] To go bring that conversation and ask for that decision to be made unless you have actually peeled apart the real reasons why price is a concern. Mm-hmm. And then taking a step back too, that's, that's one of the huge value adds of asking the buyers directly. It's really a fascinating thought exercise.
[00:32:28] When you go through and you collect feedback from buyers and you collect feedback from sellers and you see. How self-aware are our sellers in reality, because sometimes they know, most of the time they don't. Most of the time what the buyers are telling you and what the sellers are telling you is gonna be really different.
[00:32:44] Yeah. That's so interesting to me. I, I feel like so much of the sales process is about building trust with the buyer. I. And if they do come to you with the excuse, oh, we just don't have budget, like we, the price is just too much. And then you just immediately try and solve that problem. By dropping the price, it actually loses you [00:33:00] lose trust, lose tons of growth money.
[00:33:01] It's, it's like, oh, you gave me a quote that was ac like you over quoted me. Mm-hmm. You know, you're trying to, you're trying to milk me for every dollar that you can. Yeah. Whereas if you can engage in those intellectual, non-biased, like adult. Conversations about, oh, talk to me more about it. Like, help me understand what it is about our pricing that isn't right for you, that allows you to make adjustments based on from a place of trust.
[00:33:22] Like you retain that trust and you retain your integrity and you maintain the relationship as opposed to just like setting fire to all the work that you've done over the last several months. Totally, totally. Yeah, totally. I love that. But if I. I wanna make sure I put a bow around this for everybody to make sure that they understand like the way to cascade this down.
[00:33:39] So think the way I think about this, when I think about a company, and having done this with lots of companies, now there's big picture categories, right? Product price, sales process, company reputation. Within each of those, there are sub drivers. So within, within price, we just mentioned some of these.
[00:33:59] Pricing and [00:34:00] impact like your packaging, your clarity, transparency, your pricing model, your value and ROI ca business case, those are all examples of sub drivers that can come up within sales. There's really common ones, like we have clients in all different industries like. Process and follow up. Like, how well of process do they run?
[00:34:21] Do they listen and communicate well? Do they know what they're talking about? Are they professional and is they're reliable know, and, and, and, and trustworthy? So those things come up where their biggest nuance tends to be across our clients is when it comes to the drivers of how somebody actually evaluates the solution itself.
[00:34:38] Hmm. Right. So like the product people evaluate a software security technology product very different than they evaluate an E r P system. Very different from how they evaluate marketing tech stack tools. Yeah. And so just know that, that, that will be very unique and different to your business. But ultimately the way you know that you [00:35:00] have your decision drivers well set out is you have the right overarching categories that are coming up.
[00:35:06] And the underlying drivers that you're hitting are, I'm gonna use a nerdy management consultant term for you. They're mey, they're mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, meaning you don't say, Hey, our sales reps have a part-time. Uh, you don't have, you don't have a category that would say listening and communication and empathy.
[00:35:28] Right, because like those could be the same thing. Mm-hmm. So you have to make sure this, this is actually the hardest intellectual part of doing win loss as someone who's conducting these, these interviews or running these programs, is you have to really peel apart in a, and use a lot of critical thinking to get to the right categories and the right drivers.
[00:35:50] Yeah. And on top of that, You wanna make them mey, but you also wanna make them well defined. So I've seen, I've seen, when I've seen this done poorly, people create [00:36:00] decision drivers and I ask, okay, what does this decision driver mean? And if you can't concisely tell me, okay. When this decision driver is selected, this is what it means.
[00:36:10] Then that's not a good decision driver, right? Mm-hmm. Either it's too vague or you don't really understand what you're trying to articulate, so you should have a clear definition of what that decision driver is. So when I see the types of feedback that you've categorized under that decision driver, there's com some cohesion there.
[00:36:27] Yeah. And, and it makes sense, right? So having a strong definition to each of these things. Kinda like Spencer was talking about, like those things overlap, but really the way you would define 'em is basically the same. And that's, that's how you know if you're, if you're mey and if your decision drivers are good.
[00:36:42] Awesome. The ultimate test for it is, can you put a quote behind that decision driver and or a series of quotes behind that decision driver that clearly are basically would like, defines really fall under that, [00:37:00] right? You're. My rule is you can't say something mattered and was a decision driver or a factor in a deal if you don't have a quote from the buyer that says it was a factor.
[00:37:12] Hmm. Right. Because then there's real power in that, especially talking to the folks that are doing this internally. Let the buyer talk, not you. You will get all this is how you get action is you say, look. I'm a messenger just sharing with you what the buyers are saying, and this is what they're saying.
[00:37:33] They're saying, our pricing model doesn't work. Here's a quote of how the pricing model didn't work. Here's a quote of how the pricing model didn't work. Here's a quote of how the pricing model didn't work. I'm not the bad guy. I'm just helping share this. Win loss is powerful and it's all, it also can be used in a very toxic.
[00:37:51] Way in organizations. And if you're, and if you, you as the ambassador of it in the organization, have to be the person who's the [00:38:00] ultimate truth seeker, who is using the data to speak and is letting the buyer be the voice. Be careful that you don't make it about you and all the pretty charts that you've made and all the bars that you've put on, and graphs that you've put together.
[00:38:17] The most powerful thing you can do is say these three things are the main reasons why we're winning. These three things are the main reasons why we're losing, and here's all of the quotes from our buyers that demonstrate that that is more powerful than anything else. You will do. Yeah. That makes it defensible, right?
[00:38:31] It's really hard to argue with somebody that says, look, here's what our buyer said about this particular thing. So just to give an example of what this might look like. If you have a decision driver, that's something like user interface and user experience. One person might say, yeah, I just didn't really like the look and feel.
[00:38:48] It was really hard to navigate. Somebody else might say, yeah, the buttons that take you through this particular part of the product are laid out in a confusing way. And somebody else might say, look, I was trying to find this [00:39:00] thing, but it took me five minutes to get to it cause there were too many clicks.
[00:39:02] Those are all different comments, but it's really clear that it's the same driver. It's really about the user interface and how easy it is to use the product. So when you do this, Don't make the mistake of trying to make too much of a stretch of fitting something in a product if it doesn't or in a category, right?
[00:39:20] If it doesn't fit, then don't put it in that category and the way you can know. The way you can know if a decision driver truly is a trend, if you can identify quotes where people are saying a string of things that are similar enough to where, you know, okay. This actually is a trend. Mm-hmm. So that's where the quotes really bring, bring this all home.
[00:39:37] Well, this has been a masterclass, I feel like, in identifying decision drivers and making sense of all of this amazing data that we're getting. I have one last question before we wrap up. Um, just for the sake of our viewers who might be brand new to this, logistically speaking, if you were doing this for your first time, you're maybe doing 10 or 15 interviews, how would you keep track of all of this?[00:40:00]
[00:40:00] That's a good question. I mean, I can speak from personal experience, right? Closed now has a huge platform that will do this at scale, across thousands of deals in your company if you need us to do that. Right. Um, when we first started closed, I did this in a spreadsheet, right? Um, it was cumbersome, it took time.
[00:40:19] I had to take time to set up the structure of it, and then every time I would do an interview, I would actually put like, Column, here's the interview, here's the theme and driver. And then I would reference that back to a quote somewhere so that I could go look at it. It was super cumbersome. It took a lot of time.
[00:40:36] But if you're gonna do it manually and do it yourself, that's one way of doing it. That's what you're up against. Mm-hmm. Like that, that's kind of, that's kind of what you're up against. There's other tools you can buy. There's, there's, um, some companies will, will get, Softwares that allow them to kind of throw it all into, uh, a Word doc and, and skim it.
[00:40:57] That's great. The problem is how do you, how do you [00:41:00] tag themes and aggregate it across deals? It's, and that can be hard to find the right solution. Mm-hmm. And at a certain point, you might as well just. Use a, a platform like closed, you know, so. Yep. Well, that's a perfect segue into a shameless plug really quick.
[00:41:14] So one of the things that you may not know if you haven't been watching over the last couple of weeks is that we're offering three free win loss interviews conducted by our closed consultants, and that data will be imported into our system. So you can see what it's like to have. Everything like tagged and, and all of the transcripts in there, and you can like run reports and put 'em side by side so you can get those three free interviews.
[00:41:36] All you have to do is go through the first three classes of Winos 1 0 1. You just go to winos one oh one.com. We've also got some really awesome bonus resources to support you along this journey. So some of you have already taken advantage of that. Some of you have started on week one with us. You went through week 1, 2, 3, you've done your homework.
[00:41:52] You submitted it in the form on Winos 1 0 1, and now you're working on claiming your three. Free interviews for those of you who haven't done that. Like I don't [00:42:00] this, we've never done this before. It's super valuable. It's a great way to get a jumpstart. It's a great way to see how a professional win loss interviewer does it.
[00:42:08] It's a great way to get a look at the tech that we've developed and see how much time you can save. Yeah. And energy and resources and that learning curve, um, by going with a third party. Yeah. So whether you guys use this or not, It's a great way to see what good looks like. Exactly. And, and, and that's the way I would frame this up is like Mo most companies are, win loss is a new nascent category.
[00:42:31] A lot of companies are still doing this for the first time. Mm-hmm. They're trying to figure out should I, they're, it's at the stage where they're trying to figure out who internally we know we need to do this, who internally should own it, and how should we do it. And there's a lot of starting and. Tell me if you, this is happening to you.
[00:42:47] Starting and stopping. Starting and stopping, starting and stopping until they actually figure it out. And then it becomes an ongoing, operationalized feedback loop in the business. That's what you wanna get to an operationalized feedback loop. So one of the reasons why we're happy to do [00:43:00] this is it helps people see what good looks like so they know how, what to go shoot for internally.
[00:43:05] Yeah. If, if, if you do decide to do it internally, awesome. Great, awesome. Like we know that's part of your maturity curve so that when you decide to operationalize it and you need technology, we'll be here to help you. Yeah. Awesome. Well thank you all for joining us. Next week is our last week of Win Loss 1 0 1, and we're gonna be talk this, it might be the most exciting week, we're gonna be talking about how to take all these decision drivers and actually go make change.
[00:43:27] Go report that, that information to the stakeholders in your business and show them, Hey, here's the quotes, here's the evidence, here's the data. Now let's make some changes and start winning more deals. And that's when the magic happens. Like that's when you get to see those negatives become positives.
[00:43:41] That's when you get to see. Uh, people become the whole organization, become champions of win loss, and it's when you start to see revenue start to increase, retention, start to improve, and amazing magical things happen.
[00:43:52] Thanks for tuning into today's episode of the win-loss show. If you want instant access to the full wind loss, 1 0 1 [00:44:00] course where you can get access to all six lessons right now, a bunch of bonus materials, and you can find out how to get closed to conduct three free win-loss interviews on your behalf. So you can get a better understanding of why you might've lost some of your more recent deals just head over to win-loss one oh one.com and sign up for free We'll see you next week