If you ask the wrong questions, or you ask the right questions in the wrong order, or you spend too much time on one topic, or you accidentally introduce bias into your buyer’s mind—you could end up with inaccurate feedback from your buyers, and damage the value of your win-loss program.
When you want honest feedback from your buyers about what they like and don’t like about your company, the questions you ask matter a lot.
If you ask the wrong questions, or you ask the right questions in the wrong order, or you spend too much time on one topic, or you accidentally introduce bias into your buyer’s mind—you could end up with inaccurate feedback from your buyers, and damage the value of your win-loss program.
In today’s interview, some of the top win-loss program managers at Clozd will walk you through how they develop an interview guide to help them ask the right questions and deliver the highest-value interviews possible for our clients.
This is the most important part of the process at the practitioner level. If you you don’t plan out your questions, you’ll have bad interviews. And if you have bad interviews, you’ll end up with bad data. And if you have bad data, you can’t use it to make strategic changes to improve your win rate… which is the main purpose of your whole win-loss program.
What should I ask buyers in a win-loss interview?
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[00:00:00] Yeti Stereo Microphone: when you want to get honest =feedback from your buyers about what they like and don't like about you, the questions you ask matter a lot.
[00:00:08] If you ask the wrong questions or you ask the right questions, but in the wrong order, or you spend too much time on one topic or not enough time on another topic, or you accidentally introduce bias into your buyer's You can really damage the value of your win loss analysis program and you can get inaccurate data from your buyers.
[00:00:28] in today's episode, some of the top win loss program managers here at Closed are going to walk you through how they develop an interview guide to help them ask the right questions at the right time, and deliver the highest value interviews possible for our clients.
[00:00:43] At the practitioner level, this is the most important part of the process.
[00:00:47] If you don't plan out your questions, you'll have bad interviews, and if you have bad interviews, you'll end up with bad data. And if you have bad data, you can't use it to make strategic changes, to improve your win rate, which is the main purpose of the [00:01:00] whole win loss program in the first place. So all that being said, today's interview is a really valuable one. I hope you pay attention and I hope you find it to be really valuable.
[00:01:09]
Countdown
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[00:01:42] Nate Bagley: Welcome to Win Loss 1 0 1. This is the second week of this six week program. We're so excited to have you here today. I'm Nate Bagley. I'm the host of Win Loss 1 0 1. I'm gonna be the consistent. Person every single week introducing you to all of our special thought leaders and guests.
[00:01:58] And today we [00:02:00] have, Jonathan Stevens, who is the VP of Consulting here at Closed. And we have Lauren Beal, who is a senior consultant. And between the two of the, between the two of them, they have done thousands of buyer interviews. They have guided several win loss programs for companies in many different industries, and they are incredibly knowledgeable in the win loss space.
[00:02:18] And I'm so glad that you guys are here. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having us.
[00:02:21] Jonathan Stevens: Thanks,
Housekeeping
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[00:02:22] Nate Bagley: Nate. We're excited to learn, learn from you today. So before we kick off the actual, um, deep dive into our topic today, I wanted to cover a couple of just housekeeping items. First, if you go to win loss one oh one.com, we have some really awesome bonus resources that are available for you that are not available, just watching on the free livestream if you're watching on LinkedIn and YouTube.
[00:02:43] So head over to win loss one oh one.com. Um, either right now or uh, after this is all over and today specifically, we have a free. Um, what would we call it? Like a deliverable? A deliverable? Yeah. It's like a, a a, an interview guide template.
[00:02:58] Lauren Beall: Job aid, maybe. Yeah. [00:03:00] Or interview guide aid . So
[00:03:01] Nate Bagley: today we're, we're gonna be teaching you how to build your first, um, interview guide, and we put together a couple of really awesome questions to help you get started on that, uh, that homework assignment.
[00:03:10] So go to win loss 1 0 1 to pick that up. Um, and then just as a follow up from last week, if you were here with us for the very first session of Win Loss one Oh. The homework assignment was to pick a revenue problem that you want to investigate and research over the next, over the six week program, over the next five weeks.
[00:03:25] And we would love to hear from you, hear what revenue problem it is that you plan to tackle. So feel free to drop that in the comments as well. Um, we'd love to see what you've got going on.
[00:03:35] One thing, one more story that came up with this week,
Health Analogy
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[00:03:39] Nate Bagley: I thought of an analogy to describe why win loss analysis is so important. In the world of.
[00:03:45] Sales and marketing. There are a lot of amazing tools to help practitioners, to help professionals be more efficient, be more effective, to stay organized, to plan, to automate, and to, to overall just like be better at their jobs. Right? [00:04:00] Yeah. There's a lot of these softwares and a lot of these tools out there, and I liken that analogy.
[00:04:03] To having a fitness program. If you want to be in shape, if you wanna be really healthy, you have to do a couple of things and do them pretty consistently. To be, to be really in shape, you gotta go to the gym and exercise. Um, you gotta eat healthy, you gotta drink lots of water. You gotta get sleep.
[00:04:18] Take your vitamins and those are the things that help you be more efficient at life. Have more energy and o o operate at. Peak performance, right? Yeah. Um, and so I feel like a lot of these tools are what sales and, and marketing organizations use to, to get themselves there. But a couple years ago I was like, really into the gym.
[00:04:35] I'm not, You could probably tell by looking at me now, I'm not like, super. Oh, come on. It don't look that bad. It, it's, it's been a rough couple months . Um, but I, I, that was probably in the best shape of. I was eating really clean. I cut out sugar from my diet. I was exercising probably five or six times a week and I was just in really good shape.
[00:04:52] But I was still experiencing some, some health problems. And, um, despite doing all the best practices, I, I was like experiencing [00:05:00] fatigue and a bunch of other weird symptoms. So I went to the doctor and the doctor was like, um, let's do some tests. And he recommended I go get a colonoscopy and um, maybe this is an overshare, I apologize if it is , but they did a colonoscopy cuz I have a history of.
[00:05:13] Colon cancer in my family. Mm-hmm. and they found some, some big polyps that were precancerous. Mm-hmm. . And it made me realize like despite doing all the best practices, sometimes there are health issues that are going on that are invisible to the naked eye. There are things going on under the surface that you can't detect unless you have the right tools and, and the right systems in place.
[00:05:33] And I feel like win loss analysis is, It's like the CT scan. It's like the x-ray. It's the tool that you can use in your business despite doing all the best practices to find the invisible problems that are going on and take care of them so they don't kind of eat away at the efficiency and overall health of your organization.
[00:05:50] So last week we talked about, about mining for gold and how wind loss analysis is kind of like going, being a modern day prospector. And today I want you to think about win loss analysis as the [00:06:00] tool that you use to find and solve the hidden revenue problems that are posing a threat to the overall health of your business that you may not see on the surface.
[00:06:09] Totally. Does it feel like a fair analogy? Yeah. Yeah. Think so. You can validate me now. You can tell me how great that .
[00:06:14] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah, I mean, we, we often use the, the, the analogy that, you know, our, our goal is to diagnose, not necessarily to prescribe. Think of us as, as like the Mayo Clinic. You know, we're, we're expert diagno diagnostic people.
[00:06:27] Um, so that's, uh, you know, to, to bring the analogy further, I think there's a lot of situations where people, they. Believe that they're doing everything right, like Nate said, but there's something under the surface that's going on that's really causing some issues in, in your go-to-market plan. So that's, that's what we try to focus on and, and what we try to correct for.
[00:06:49] Fantastic.
[00:06:50] Lauren Beall: I'll take it. I'll, I'm gonna take the analogy and run with it as well. . Um, you know, sometimes people have an hypothesis of what's going on, and you could think of that as, you know, [00:07:00] you have fatigue. You go to WebMD, you say like, What possibly could be wrong with me? And you get all these different, um, You know, diagnoses back of like, what, what, what could it be?
[00:07:10] And, um, we'll tell you. So we'll be like the doctor. So I think just going along with that, um, your hypothesis is like web WebMD, let's validate it or, um, debunk it.
[00:07:19] Nate Bagley: Yes. So if you do go to your doctor cuz you're experiencing some pains or you go to WebMD, go to Google and start searching, which I don't always advise because it always ends up as worst case scenario.
[00:07:29] Yeah. Um, but the first thing your doctor's gonna do is start asking you questions. He's gonna try, try and understand your symptoms, where they started, how long you've had them, um, and probably start putting together a map in his mind of to, to help diagnose the problem. And that's kinda what we're gonna be talking about today, The sec after you've kind of, after you've picked a revenue problem to solve.
[00:07:47] The next thing is, is we want to figure out how to. How to go to our buyers and start asking them the right questions so that we can start putting together a plan to address the issue. And so today we're [00:08:00] gonna be talking about how to build an interview guide. Um, and I guess my first question is, why is an interview guide even important?
Why Should You Use An Interview Guide?
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[00:08:06] Nate Bagley: Why? Why should we be putting together like a plan or an outline for when we jump on a call with a buyer to start investigating these problems?
[00:08:15] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah, good. Good question. I think, I mean, it's you, you've gotta go in with a plan and it's, it's like, like the doctor, you know, that doctor's gone to medical school.
[00:08:25] They have, they might not have an actual checklist. I've actually been to the doctor where they have a checklist, like , I need to ask you all these questions. Uh, it, it just guides your, your discussion and makes it a lot more efficient. If you don't, then you're gonna waste a lot of time fumbling around and not really knowing what to do.
[00:08:42] So it's, it's helping you get at the root of the problem, but it's also just making sure that you are spending your time most effectively in, in the interview. So I would say that's, that's a key reason. It's important. Just, you know, if you're prepared, You're gonna, you're gonna do okay.
[00:08:58] Lauren Beall: Yeah, I would echo [00:09:00] that.
[00:09:00] It's a, it's a lot about preparation and being respectful. You know, the buyers that jump on the call with you, this is not their full-time job. They're taking time out of their day to spend 30 minutes to give you insight on your business and what it was that, how they made their decision. And so I think there's a component.
[00:09:17] You coming prepared is a way to show your respect to those buyers and that this is important to you and, and you do value them giving up their time. I also think there's a component of. As you're preparing the interview guide, you get the opportunity to really sit and think on the question that you're trying to solve, and that allows you to be more adaptive and dynamic in your conversations while having a structured way to go about that.
[00:09:42] So if you need to do deep dive questions and follow up questions, you can be more intentional about where you're driving, driving that deeper conversation.
[00:09:50] Nate Bagley: That's great advice. And just full disclosure, we're using a, uh, essentially an interview guide, right? Like we've pre-planned how we want this conversation to go, and I'm planning to [00:10:00] ask you guys specific questions that will lead us to the result that we're looking for, right?
[00:10:03] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah. So the listeners can judge the effectiveness of our interview guide by how this goes. It's how it goes, .
[00:10:08] Intro: Yeah,
[00:10:09] Nate Bagley: I know. Uh, part for me, part of having an interview guide just even for today, um, is just. Like not having nerves. Mm-hmm. . Totally. It can be really nerve-wracking to go in blind to a conversation like this and, um, not know exactly where you're starting or where you want to go.
[00:10:25] And so especially for if you're doing win loss analysis for the first time, if you're interviewing buyers in, in this way for the first time, I think it can also be a real help to like, Just calm your nerves a little bit and not make you feel so nervous on the call. Like, Oh, I have a plan. I'll just follow the plan.
[00:10:40] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah, totally. If, if you're talking about a topic that you know so well that you don't need a guide, then maybe you don't need it. Right. But, but you know, going back to the doctor, right. If it's a common set of symptoms, they don't need to look at some checklist. They know exactly what to ask, and then they can quickly prescribe what, what needs to be done.
[00:10:59] Awesome. [00:11:00] But in the case where, You're talking about something new or something pretty technical, like we have a lot of clients that we work with where I'm not just gonna try to wing it when I'm talking about cyber security. You know, like I need to know all of the different nuances of the things that I need to ask about, cuz I'm talking to really intelligent technical people and they're gonna, they're gonna want me to be using the jargon correctly.
How to Structure an Interview Guide
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[00:11:21] Nate Bagley: Yeah. Perfect. So, . As we're moving into building our, our interview guide, do you have any advice on how to structure this guide? What, what are some just basic things that we should keep
[00:11:33] Jonathan Stevens: in mind? Yeah, totally. I mean, the, I always think of the, when, when people talk about this, I always think about the movie Pirates of the Caribbean.
[00:11:42] Mm-hmm. , where he talks about the Pirates Code and he said the code is more like guidelines than actual rules. Oh, okay. I see. Where you're . Yeah. This is, Yeah, I know, I know. You were like, this is a stretch. Uh, but, but it really. These are guidelines, not actual rules. And I would think of your, your interview guide, some somewhat like [00:12:00] that, right?
[00:12:00] Like there's, there's some best practices, but it needs to be adapted to your main situation. I think one of the things is you want to really focus your guide around main topics that allows some flexibility, and we'll talk more about that in a minute, but there's some core topics that you wanna discuss.
[00:12:16] If you're talking to, you know, some sort of business to business. Like SAS or financial services or healthcare type type transaction situation. You want to talk about marketing, you wanna talk about sales, you wanna talk about the product offering, but maybe it's not a product business, so you'll focus more on the service.
[00:12:33] But anyway, there's some, there's some main topics that you wanna think about as your core bones, if you will, for, for how to structure. Cool.
[00:12:42] Lauren Beall: And just to carry that on, you know, structuring your interview, interview guide, excuse me, around, um, main topics also is a little bit of thinking ahead. So when you're going through and doing the transcripts and trying to get the insights out of these interviews that you're doing, it's a lot of qualitative content.
[00:12:58] So having those main topics, [00:13:00] Allows you to sort of break down the transcripts and allows people as you're going through, if you have a product section, they can sort of focus on the product section. It's not gonna be perfect cuz conversations sort of go where conversations will go. Um, but it does help you find, you know, the, the section that may be most
[00:13:16] Jonathan Stevens: relevant to you.
[00:13:17] Yeah, definitely. And then beyond that, I think there's, there's a couple of, of layers within each section. You wanna have what, what I refer to as headline questions. So these questions. These are the most important things that you want to ask pretty much every time, right? Because you, you believe that they're gonna extract the, the most information.
[00:13:37] So it, it kind of goes back to what we talked about last week with the revenue problem. If you have a revenue problem, well, what do you need to know? To really find out about that revenue problem. And I think within each section you wanna start fairly high level and fairly open-ended and then drill down into more specific, like you might ask in a product section, you, you might say something as open-ended and somewhat vague as.[00:14:00]
[00:14:00] tell me about what you thought about the product, right? And then you might get to questions like, tell me about the API functionality, right? When you're going a level deeper, or tell me about this specific aspect of the user experience. So that's, that's kind of the flow as you think open-ended. And then you go down to a little bit more closed ended and specific as you go along.
[00:14:21] But the open ended things allow you to see what are the types of things people are saying. Unaid. With, with, you know, not a lot of really specific feedback. I think some of the things that we hear a lot from our clients is they want really super specific feedback on particular product features. And when you ask people about that, they don't even know, right?
[00:14:41] Like it wasn't even part of what they evaluated. So it's good to start open-ended just to see what did make an impression. Like what were, what were the things that. Made a difference to people. And then underneath those headline questions is what we call optional drilldowns. So the optional drilldowns are basically things like, [00:15:00] Okay, so you thought these were particular weaknesses.
[00:15:03] Why did that affect your decision? Was it material to your use case? Other things that you might wanna know to really identify, Are these things that really mattered in the decision that was made or not? One of the things that , I think is so frustrating to see, and sometimes like when people are new to doing this, they, they often will skip the optional drill downs.
[00:15:26] Some people will, will ask a question like, So tell me about, you know, pricing concerns? And they'll say, Oh, yeah, I thought was the, I thought the price was too high. And then the next question they ask will be, Oh, so what did you think about the sales rep? It's like, well, Price is too high. What does that mean?
[00:15:44] Like, was it like, did you have a particular budget in mind? Did you have something else that you really needed to know about that wasn't, wasn't surfacing there? Like, there's so many drill down questions that you can ask as a result of that. So it really helps to have that in your guide so you [00:16:00] have the arrows in your quiver per se, to ask those type of questions when an really interesting answer comes up from, from a headline question.
[00:16:07] Cool.
[00:16:08] Lauren Beall: Agreed. And just one more thing on that is I would always bring it back to what's the objective, like what revenue problem are we trying to address here and have a focus under each of those. Um, Like main topics or categories so that as you're headlining questions, you're not divers like trying to answer too much.
[00:16:27] Um, you wanna keep it focused. So if you're asking about, just to go off Jonathan's example, pricing, um, and there's a specific piece of the pricing that's important to, um, what you're exploring, that that's where you focus and that's where you dig all the insight out because you can get into a situation where a buyer has a lot to say about pricing, but maybe there's only one piece that is really important to what you're trying to.
[00:16:49] Nate Bagley: That is some. Yeah. Good point. Great general advice. Um, so just to kind of encapsulate that or summarize, we wanna make sure that we're staying focused on our objective. Mm-hmm. , we want to have some general themes that we want to hit, and then you [00:17:00] want to have drill down questions to get more specific around the general items that relate to the overall theme of your interview.
[00:17:06] Totally cool. Absolutely. Yeah. So be specific, Great summary. Be specific and then get more specific and then get most specific. Mm-hmm. . Yep.
[00:17:13] Jonathan Stevens: And that level of specificity should be adapted to the type of conversation you're having, right? So you, you wanna make sure that those are, the guide is designed to be flexible cuz you don't wanna get specific on something that somebody doesn't know about.
[00:17:27] Right. Then you're just gonna feel like you're interrogating them and they're gonna say, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Right. So, so that's, that's an important aspect of it. Keep in mind that you should have levels of specificity that are adapted to the conversation at hand.
Do's and Don'ts of Building An Interview Guide
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[00:17:41] Nate Bagley: Cool. Um, now Lauren, I want to get into some common dos and don'ts.
[00:17:44] Okay. I think there are a lot of really simple mistakes that people make, especially if you've never done a win loss program before. You might be new to it. So can we start talking a little bit about some common dues and some common don'ts when it, when it comes to building out your interview guide? [00:18:00] Yeah.
[00:18:00] Lauren Beall: And let's just take it from sort of the beginning of an interview, if you will. So we mentioned that we're using an interview guide today, and as you notice, Nate did a great introduction. There were some things he wanted to cover off right at the beginning to sort of set the context, set the tone for what we're gonna be talking about today.
[00:18:17] That is one of the things that people forget the most , is to tell people why we're here. So, You know, in your interview guide, you maybe don't need to script it, but just make a note to yourself If this is something newer to you or you haven't done a lot of these, make a note to sort of set up, set up the purpose of the call.
[00:18:33] What are you trying to achieve? What is it gonna look like? Give the buyer opportunity to ask any questions or if you can help clarify how the interview is gonna be used. Um, oftentimes there's concerns about, I'm providing you quotes. Are you gonna be using these externally? The answer's always no. For us.
[00:18:49] Um, if you're running these internally, maybe that's a different answer, but you'll need to solve that on your own . Um, but it, it always just gives the buyer a good level setting and [00:19:00] understanding of like, how open can I be, um, with my responses. Yeah. And it makes the conversation more honest.
[00:19:05] Jonathan Stevens: Totally. And, and I think on top of that too, there's, if you want to make the interview effective, there is.
[00:19:12] Very base level of trust that has to be established between the interviewee and the, and. The person conducting the interview, If you just go straight to the questions, it feels it's gonna start the whole thing a little bit uncomfortable. If they start to get comfortable with you, then maybe they're gonna be able to divulge a little bit more information that's gonna affect your competitive intelligence objective or whatever you're trying to do.
[00:19:35] Like one question that I, I try to use, it's not rocket science, but I just say, Hey, where are you calling from? Yeah. And they might. Oh, I'm calling from this place. And some places I get so often that I have like my usual thing that I say, if they say Atlanta, I say, Oh, that's great. I'd love to go to Atlanta.
[00:19:52] I've just never been outside the airport. It almost always falls flat. . But um, but you know, it's a conversation starter. Lauren thought it was kind
[00:19:59] Nate Bagley: [00:20:00] of friends over in the corner listening to There's the Atlanta Joking.
[00:20:02] Intro: Yeah, there's
[00:20:02] Lauren Beall: the Atlanta joke. I only heard it about a thousand times.
[00:20:05] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:05] Must slide Delta . Yep. So. Uh, I think, I think, you know, just building a, a little bit level, a little bit of rapport at the beginning can go a long way. It doesn't have to take a long time. Right. It can take one or two minutes, but, but it can go a
[00:20:20] Lauren Beall: long way. Yeah. And there's, you get a feel for it. I mean, some buyers, depending on what the persona is.
[00:20:27] You know, maybe if they're more technical, they don't really wanna talk a whole lot about where they're from. Yeah. They just do wanna dive in. They want you to tell 'em why they're there, dive in, get the conversation done. Cool. Or if they're a more senior level executive, um, their time is precious and valuable.
[00:20:40] But sometimes you get the senior executives and they're like, Oh my goodness. Thank goodness. A break from my everyday. I'd like to just chat for a few minutes Yeah. And get to know you so you get a feel for sort of what your buyer's personality is right. When you get on the phone and you just try and talk to them within.
[00:20:55] How they wanna be talked to. Cool.
[00:20:57] Nate Bagley: Uh, any other tips?
[00:20:59] Jonathan Stevens: [00:21:00] Yeah, I think that's good. . Yeah. Let's look at our guide. Yeah. Yeah. Do make it conditional. Don't make it too rigid. I think we've kind of already talked about it. Uhhuh, you know, talked about this already. Everybody has, Well, at least I have, you know, they get those political opinion polls.
[00:21:15] To this date, I've never actually finished one. Yeah, because they're way too rigid and I'm just like, I don't have time for this. I'm bored. Because they get, they get you on the phone and they ask the same question every time in the same order, and they ask you multiple choice questions, which. over the phone are painful.
[00:21:31] It's like a strongly agree. Mm-hmm. b Agree. I'm just like, I don't have time for this. Right. Yeah. It's a snoozer. So, So I think if you
[00:21:40] Nate Bagley: don't, don't make your interview a survey. Exactly.
[00:21:42] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah. Yeah. It should be a conversation. Right. And, and some people take that too far and they think, Oh, it doesn't have any structure.
[00:21:48] Like that's the whole point of the interview guide is to create that level of structure. But you should, you should finesse it such that the person on the other end of the line doesn't. realize That you have a ton of [00:22:00] rigidity to, to the conversation.
[00:22:02] Lauren Beall: Yeah,
[00:22:03] and I, I think this is where like an interview guide becomes so important and a secondary softer skill is active listening.
[00:22:10] You need to be engaged in these conversations and you need to be really familiar with the interview guide, because if your plan is to go from sort of the overview and origination, then talk about, um, the evaluation, then the competitors, and then the product and the buyer. Throws your loop and starts talking about marketing and how they engage on the website.
[00:22:29] You need to be able to hear that, adapt to it, go to the marketing section, start covering off on that, and then bring it back to the flow of the conversation that you wanna go through. Yeah. To make sure that you're hitting all the points that are important.
[00:22:41] Jonathan Stevens: It's way easier. To do a rigid phone survey type type interview than an adapted really consultative interview and what Lauren was describing.
[00:22:50] Like that's a skill that you think at first, Oh, this is easy, but it actually is, is honed over time. You've gotta really build that skill set to be to able to be able to [00:23:00] have an adaptive interview. That still accomplishes the objectives that. you want So, so
[00:23:04] Nate Bagley: if these like really rigid survey type pick a, B, C, D questions are not the type of questions you should be asking, what type of questions are, are the ideal questions to ask in an interview?
[00:23:14] Lauren Beall: Yeah. Yeah. I think Jonathan talked about this a bit at the beginning, but, um, or, or just earlier, uh, open ended questions. Really good. Um, you want to try and not bias them, so you don't wanna say like, what did the sales team, um, do poorly, like you, When you start the sales section, you would want to say like, what was your interaction with the sales team like, or something like that.
[00:23:36] What was your impression of the people that you worked with over at X, Y, and Z? You wanna start really open ended so that you're not putting any assumptions in their mind about good or bad. If they give you poor feedback, say, you know, say they said, ah, you know, sales rep B was just awful. I hated working with them, but then I got trans, like moved over to sales rep A like, Great, tell me what happened with sales rep B that didn't work for you.
[00:23:58] You don't need to make it really [00:24:00] negative. Um, you just wanna find out a little bit more about what that situation and what didn't work for that
[00:24:04] Jonathan Stevens: particular buyer. Great example. Yeah. To that point, like you're, you're. Goal is not to judge people's answers if they feel like you're judging them. Like in Lauren's example, if they say something negative about sales rep B, you don't wanna say, Oh, I know sales rep B.
[00:24:20] He's such a good guy. . No, you don't. You don't say anything like that. You just say, Hey, thanks for the feedback, that's helpful. Tell me about this. Right? So you can't, or it can be positive, right? If somebody says something that they liked about the product, don't, don't like agree with them and try to upsell them in the interview.
[00:24:35] That's not the whole point of this. It's to be a neutral. Information collector that's just extracting information outta somebody. Yeah. Awesome.
Favorite open-ended questions
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[00:24:43] Nate Bagley: Are there, are there any open-ended questions that are like favorites of yours that you might, that you might, uh, tease to our audience? So many. Yeah. Gimme like, gimme one or two.
[00:24:54] That would just, that just gives an example. Another example cuz I think. Uh, talking about the principles is really great that when [00:25:00] people see examples that it, it kind of clicks like, Okay, that's what they mean by by that. Yeah,
[00:25:04] Lauren Beall: my favorite question is not a winner a hundred percent of the time. However, when you do get information from it, it is very valuable.
[00:25:11] So, my favorite question is when you're in talking about pricing and talking about sort of the sales pitch and what was the value you wanna ask about if the buyer. either had to sell the value internally or had to like wrap their head around the value of the product. What were the points that they pulled into that value case that they presented to internal stakeholders or that they made for themself to justify the cost?
[00:25:35] It works about 50% of the time. Sometimes people don't have an answer or really thought out answer to that because it's either something they just needed. It's a you. Table stakes for the business. Um, but when you do get an answer, it's a really, really powerful answer. Yeah,
[00:25:50] Jonathan Stevens: I like that one. I like that one a lot.
Marker
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[00:25:52] Jonathan Stevens: One that I like a lot, and this is, you know, for, for specific situations, so often, especially when you're dealing with a smaller, medium size [00:26:00] business, like a, a more price sensitive type type buyer. Some, some of the time, what they'll say often is, Okay, so why didn't you buy product X, Y, Z? And they'll say, Oh, price.
[00:26:11] It was too expensive. And then sometimes, like you keep asking 'em different questions, you try to get more nuance out of that, and they just keep going to price. And so one of the, one of the strategies that I've used is to ask hypothetical type questions where I say, Look, you were evaluating product A and product B.
[00:26:29] Obviously product A was less expensive. You chose product A and you're saying the reason we chose it was because it was less expensive. But let's just take a step back for a second and let's imagine that the prices were exactly the same. The packaging situation was exactly the same. Would you have made the same decision?
[00:26:47] And then it, it causes them to really reflect, and I will tell you, in the majority of cases, they will reveal. Things that you didn't know before, and you'll realize it wasn't just about price. Yeah, it [00:27:00] was really about other things. Price is such a perception based thing. There's, It's not black and white. I mean, so often a good salesperson, if they've built the value enough, they can make the buyer think that the price is totally reasonable, whereas a bad salesperson would not.
[00:27:17] So I think asking some of those type of hypothetical questions, like if you. Done this, or if these conditions were present. You know, if they say something like, Yeah, our company got bought, and the acquiring company just said, you have to use this product. Well, okay, let's say your company didn't get bought and you needed to evaluate this product anyway.
[00:27:40] How would you have made that decision? And so sometimes it, it really requires people to pressure test their own thought process as to how they made the decision when you asked those type of hypotheticals.
[00:27:50] Lauren Beall: Awesome. Yeah, and we've used price a lot as an example that works for anywhere in the interview guide.
[00:27:55] So, you know, sales process feedback, product feedback, um, those hypotheticals [00:28:00] are, are a great way to uncover additional information, um, that maybe the buyer isn't even thinking about or wasn't going to share. You know, the business said that they made the decision on
[00:28:09] Jonathan Stevens: price. Yeah,
[00:28:09] Nate Bagley: totally. Great. So we had a, a question come in from, I believe it was Lisa, and she said, I love that question.
[00:28:16] Can you please say it again? I don't know which question she was referring to. So could you both repeat your favorite open ended questions for Lisa just so we
[00:28:22] Jonathan Stevens: have it on record? Yeah, we, we kind of did a little preamble to these questions, so it might have been, it might have gotten lost . So, yeah, Lauren, you can go first.
[00:28:30] Yeah.
[00:28:31] Lauren Beall: Yeah. So my question was around the value. Um, and I would ask it, I would have first a, a probably a warmup question just to make sure I'm asking something that's relevant. So I'd ask something like, um, did you have to sell the value of your, this product or this vendor internally to other stakeholders?
[00:28:47] If yes, then I would follow up and say, tell me a little bit about the value case that you built, um, and what components did you use to sell that internally to
[00:28:54] Jonathan Stevens: stakeholders? It's such a great question because. B2B situations, there's never [00:29:00] one decision maker. Right. Yeah. They, Somebody's gotta convince somebody else.
[00:29:03] Yeah. Mm-hmm. . So my question was basically, if the price of two offerings was exactly the same, would your have been? Where would your decision have been? The same. Yeah. And that's usually followed when somebody is saying price is a, is a main, main issue. So, Great. There you go. Lisa, I have
[00:29:23] Lauren Beall: one more comment on the hypothetical.
[00:29:24] Yeah. Because I feel like sometimes this is something that doesn't always happen, but prior, prior bias coming into the buying decision process. Mm-hmm. , this is another great place where hypotheticals can help you uncover how much impact a prior bias had. So say, um, our buyer had experience with vendor.
[00:29:44] They come into this evaluation and vendor A is in that evaluation again, and their prior experience was really negative. You can ask hypotheticals to uncover, like, how much did they do to try and prevent that bias from impacting the indecision? Sometimes buyers will do a lot and bring in other [00:30:00] stakeholders that are not biased, and sometimes they don't even try and they just say, you know, that was a terrible experience.
[00:30:04] I needed three vendors. They were in there, but they were never in the running. Yeah,
[00:30:07] Jonathan Stevens: totally. Or, or the other end of the spectrum. Right, Right. Like they'll bring, they'll bring a vendor in. They're, it's their best friend is one of the sales reps or something like that. Yeah. And, and they always intended to buy, but they might have this facade of a competitive evaluation by bringing another vendor.
[00:30:23] So, Trying to ask those hypotheticals, say, Well, if your best friend wasn't the sales rep at this other company, would you have made that same decision? Yeah. Yeah.
Keep Your Guide Efficient
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[00:30:33] Nate Bagley: That's great. Great feedback. Um, so one of the thoughts that I had, we haven't really talked about this, but I, I, when we're doing a, a win loss interview, um, We're asking essentially for, for time and, and resources from the, the buyers that we're talking to.
[00:30:50] And so we don't wanna ask for too big of a commitment, like sitting down with us for 90 minutes to do a, an interview that's like way, way too long. Yeah. So I think here at closed, we try to keep it to about 30 [00:31:00] minutes, right? Mm-hmm. , and you can uncover a lot of information in a 30, 30 minute conversation.
[00:31:04] Um, what, what are some of the risks that people run if they build the interview guide to be too big? Like, have you ever seen a case where, You just want to ask too many questions, man,
[00:31:15] Jonathan Stevens: or, Oh man. Yeah. Boiling the ocean. Okay. That's good analogy. I've, I've seen this, I've seen this before. Basically people, people that are really into this, especially people that have like a traditional market research type background, they want to just get as much information as they possibly can.
[00:31:33] There's, there's a delicate balance though, because the reason that we have landed on 30 minutes as the, as the ideal time is. When you ask for more time, the amount of people that are gonna be willing to give you that time drops dramatically. So part of part of this is just, it's not just the content of the interviews, it's also the volume of interviews that you're getting.
[00:31:54] The responsiveness and the responsiveness. Like you're gonna get a lower response rate if you ask more for more time. And you're gonna [00:32:00] probably have to ask for, I don't know, you're probably gonna have to remunerate people somehow, right? So, So 30 minutes is good. The other thing. Keeping the time limit in mind, you wanna make sure that your guide is designed for that time limit.
[00:32:16] I was working with a client once and basically we, we gave them a template. We, we made some customizations to it. We said, Hey, solicit this with some stakeholders. See what they come back with. They came back with something that was 20 pages long for a 30 minute interview. It's a little much, and I was like, A little much, geez.
[00:32:33] And so I was like, This isn't gonna, this isn't gonna work. And basically what they did is, you know, it was, it was a little bit conditional, Like some sections were just for certain products, so I wouldn't be going over the whole thing, but it was so unwieldy, just tactically I couldn't get to all the, all the answers.
[00:32:50] And the other thing was, a lot of this, they were asking questions that were so specific that most of the people I asked, they just said, uh, we didn't really evaluate that particular product [00:33:00] feature. So it's, it's, it's a good level of self-awareness to think. What do we think is important as creators of these products or as creators of this company?
[00:33:10] And what do our buyers actually perceive? Because sometimes the things that we think are so important and we wanna stuff into this interview guide, were not even a consideration in the evaluation. So, so, I guess that all, all that said, you know, make sure that your questions are suited to the amount of time that you have.
[00:33:28] You probably want to have a little bit longer than the time you have, so you have options of questions to ask in, in certain scenarios, but 20 pages, that's, that's a little rich . It's too much.
[00:33:39] Intro: Yeah. Yeah. Good to know. .
[00:33:41] Lauren Beall: And to go along with that, you also, we talked about open ended questions, but just be intentional.
[00:33:47] Try not to keep too many demographic questions in your interview guide. Um, if it's something that can be like data collection or go into a data field and isn't really very qualitative or a waste your time on it. Yeah. Unless it's really [00:34:00] material or you're not able to get that, that information any other way, um, we advise to leave those out.
[00:34:05] Yeah. Um, and then, you know, just one more time about asking questions. This is. Like, I'm gonna read question one, question two, question three, question four. Like through the interview guide, there is a tend tendency to want to do that, to make qualitative feedback more digestible. Um, but if you're taking the interviews and able to like pull the themes out of 'em, then they will be
[00:34:25] Nate Bagley: digestible.
Not All Buyers Are The Same
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[00:34:26] Nate Bagley: Fantastic. Okay. I want to jump on to, actually, I want to hit this last point right here. Um, about not all buyers are the same. Oh, yeah. So when you're, when you're interviewing people, you might be interviewing an executive one, one moment, and then the next you might be interviewing like the, the ch the internal champion.
[00:34:47] Um, you might be interviewing, uh, people in a bunch of different roles and it. Bunch of different capacities. Yeah. How would you adapt the guide based off of role? Is that an important thing to do? And if so, why? Yeah,
[00:34:59] Lauren Beall: [00:35:00] so, you know, maybe less about role and more about just recognizing that every buyer is different.
[00:35:06] Um, even if you have, you know, good correction. Yeah. Yeah. . So, because I mean, even within roles, people are different, right? You're not, you're not personality type A and you get role like C Totally. Right. So, um, I think. There's a tendency for, from a marketing perspective, to think about your personas and think like, Okay, we have this persona, this person fits in that persona.
[00:35:29] Um, so they have these qualities, X, Y, and Z. This is how they think. And while that's great from like a general marketing way and gives you like great guidance and direction, when you're having these one-to-one interactions, you might end up asking questions that really are not relevant for that particular buyer.
[00:35:44] For example, say you have, you know, three stakeholders, we get an interview with one of 'em, and that one was really the person who was closer to the budget and who was helping to, Gosh, we've used pricing a lot, sorry, , we're just gonna
[00:35:56] Nate Bagley: use this. It's, it's a common objective that people want to learn more about.
[00:35:59] So that makes [00:36:00] sense.
[00:36:00] Lauren Beall: Yeah, it is. Yeah. So, um, and that person happens to be really close to the pricing. , we could have gotten one of the other two stakeholders and say one of the other stakeholders was more technical and was helping to evaluate against, um, technical requirements or business requirements that the company had and made a re like really great evaluation framework and ran all the scoring and helped like, bring all the scores together from the different stakeholders.
[00:36:24] That person's not gonna be able to answer the pricing questions as robustly as the person who is handling the pricing section. The
[00:36:30] Jonathan Stevens: evaluation. Totally. And I mean, there's a question of use case too, like mm-hmm. , the, the way people use different products is, is totally different. If, if somebody is a decision maker, often they are not the main user of whatever they're buying.
[00:36:43] Maybe people that. Report to them are so, so it's interesting to get the perspectives of those different type of people. And I mean, there's a to, there's a bunch of different dimensions that will affect people's answers. It might be geography or cultural background or whatever. So it's important to be sensitive to [00:37:00] the nuances of how different people might, might perceive.
[00:37:03] Different questions. Yeah.
[00:37:04] Lauren Beall: Which goes back to the active listening and being really familiar with your interview guide. This is why we make them so that we can be prepared for these situations.
Your Guide Is A
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[00:37:12] Nate Bagley: I think one of the, the obstacles that if you've never built an interview guide before that you might face today or this next week as you go out to build your interview guide, is the pressure to make it perfect.
[00:37:22] Mm. Like I need to build out the perfect interview guide and before I can go in into an interview, I need to make sure it's super polished and that there's not gonna be any mistakes. That it's not too long, that it's not too short, that the questions are perfect. And, uh, I think that's a, that's a big mistake that people can make.
[00:37:36] Um, that's why the, the homework today is not to create the perfect interview guide. It's to create. Draft. Yeah. And I think, um, why, why do you think that's important to just focus on a first draft right now as opposed to like, getting everything perfect?
[00:37:51] Lauren Beall: Well, the intention of the interviews are to uncover stuff you don't know.
[00:37:54] So how can you ask questions about something you don't know? Yeah. Um, and so as you're going through these interviews, you're gonna learn. [00:38:00] And as you learn, you wanna put those learnings back into the interview guide. So say the hypothesis, you know, somebody was really concerned about APIs and integrations as part of their product offering.
[00:38:10] They felt like they were losing to a lot of competitors based on their limited integrations. And we get in there and we find out that's not the case at all. Like it's actually this other feature or product functionality or maybe like the sales team is too aggressive or something like that. Um, we wanna be able to dig into those areas and uncover.
[00:38:27] wh what is that? And so, you know, if APIs and integrations aren't the focus, maybe we pull those back a little bit. We reduce the number of questions around that and dig into those other areas.
[00:38:36] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah. Yeah. Being dynamic about it is really important because you, like Lauren said, you don't know what you don't know, so you'll learn things as you go along, and you'll realize that certain questions aren't giving you the answers that you expected.
[00:38:51] So change the questions. Make sure you know if things aren't working. Stop asking that. Or if you need to dig in on something else, have two or three more questions on that [00:39:00] particular topic.
[00:39:00] Nate Bagley: Good points. Yeah. Now there might be a little bit of anxiety once we get our first draft put together of like, Oh, is this good enough?
[00:39:07] Like, is this presentable? Can I take this to a buyer and really use these questions? Uh, what advice do you have to maybe reassure a first time interviewer that their buyer guide is, is kind of sufficient? It's in a good place. Dive into a buyer interview for the first time.
[00:39:23] Jonathan Stevens: Yeah. So something that, that you definitely need to do, and not just for the sake of the interview guide, but for other reasons as well.
[00:39:31] You need to solicit the guide with other key stakeholders. So when you're doing this, if you, if you just keep it to yourself and you just create this yourself. There won't be, Well, couple, couple things. You won't get the questions in there that other departments and other people in the organization really want asked.
[00:39:51] So that's a key thing. I mean, typically you wanna talk to somebody in product, somebody in sales, somebody in marketing, somebody in competitive intelligence. Those are other people that [00:40:00] you could talk to as well, but, You'll get better questions. I would advise to make sure you don't end up in the trap that I just talked about with the 20 page guide.
[00:40:09] Let them know, like provide a framework for the type of feedback they give. Say, if you want to add a question, Maybe give a suggestion on a question to take away to this. Right. I'm, I'm
[00:40:19] Nate Bagley: gonna be interviewing buyers about, specifically about our pricing or specifically about integrations. Do you have any questions about that, that you want me to ask?
[00:40:26] Jonathan Stevens: Totally, Yeah. Yeah. And, and questions that are relevant to them. The other ancillary benefit that you'll get from doing this is a. The more input people have into the preparation for your win loss program, the more buy-in they will have in terms of the outcomes of your win loss program. Mm-hmm. , I've seen this done in silos, and then when people show the results, they're like, Well, the questions you asked were stupid.
[00:40:46] Why should I care about that? Mm-hmm. , but. If they crafted the questions initially, they're gonna be like, Oh, this is what I really wanted to know. And now I have 20 people that told me what they thought about it. This is really useful, and I've [00:41:00] seen that. I've seen that work well and poorly, and it really depends on.
[00:41:04] Who you get on your side when you're doing the win loss program because this is not just a one person show.
[00:41:09] Nate Bagley: Yeah. Cool. Lauren? Um, when you're soliciting feedback Yeah. From some of these internal stakeholders, are there, Jonathan mentioned a couple of mistakes to avoid, like don't, don't let them just submit any question that they want.
[00:41:21] Let's keep it focused. Are there any other. Issues that maybe you should be aware of when you're taking feedback from other internal stakeholders?
[00:41:28] Lauren Beall: Oh yeah, . Um, I always give the guidelines when we're circulating our interview guides internally at a client. Um, I give some guidelines for review, and I sort of have, I think there's three of them.
[00:41:39] So let's see if I can hit them all. Um, me, It has them nicely outlined for me behind the screen. So, . Um, the first one would be, um, you want to keep it focused on the objective. So Jonathan was talking about that. But what that can also do, apart from just getting like ownership from these different stakeholders and really getting buy-in from it, it can set you [00:42:00] up for your next objective.
[00:42:01] So if right now we're focused on pricing and you bring in some of these other, other stakeholders and say competitive intelligence, it's like, yeah, but we really wanna know about product. You say like, Great for these first 20 interviews, like we're gonna do pricing maybe for the next set of interviews.
[00:42:14] We do product questions, right? And we really dig in there. So it gives you sort of a roadmap of how to do win loss and. Bundle your insights so that you're not trying to go after too much with this first set of interviews. You also want to be careful that you don't spend a ton of time wordsmithing. Um, if you ask people to review the interview guide and they spend, you know, an hour and a half going through questions, picking them apart, saying, you know, you said, How do we do this?
[00:42:39] Maybe we said what instead? And they sit there and they wordsmith and they spend a lot of time doing that. And then those questions aren't asked exactly that way. It's gonna feel like a waste of time. So wordsmithing not advised.
[00:42:52] Jonathan Stevens: And the other thing that wordsmithing has a tendency to do is you tend to, if, if they're over doctored, the questions end up sounding really not, [00:43:00] Not like natural speech, not , very robotic.
[00:43:02] Yeah. It's like the type of thing that might be in a survey, but you would never use in a real conversation. So when you're doing the interview, you're not gonna word a question that way anyway. Yeah.
[00:43:10] Lauren Beall: Exactly. So as we said, these are guidelines, like we ask the questions in the interview guide. We rarely use them word for word.
[00:43:17] What's more helpful is for stakeholders to put a comment maybe in the margin of why that question is interesting to them and what they're hoping to learn from it. That also helps guide our follow up and deep dive questions after we do the headliner question. Um, and then the third bullet point for review that I would say is that you want to make sure that the language is what your buyers are expecting.
[00:43:38] So if we are in, you know, industry A and they talk about they, instead of, Gosh, I'm blanking on an example. Cybersecurity.
[00:43:47] Jonathan Stevens: Cybersecurity. That's my go-to for something really obscure. In technical, Yeah. .
[00:43:51] Lauren Beall: Yeah. Do you wanna make sure that you're using jargon that you would hear in that industry? So you.
[00:43:57] Nate Bagley: If it's, it's like in, in education, Sorry, I wanna jump over.
[00:43:59] I just had [00:44:00] this conversation with somebody. Okay. It's like if you're, if you're talking to somebody about a business case in the business world and then you go over to education, you're not gonna use the word business case, Right. To describe what they're doing. And there's, you know, there's a whole different lingo for the education market or maybe the FinTech market or than there is for like the B2B SaaS companies.
[00:44:17] Yeah. That's a great example. So you wanna make sure that you're speaking the language of the person that you're interviewing. Yeah. And not. Overwhelming them with techno B or terms that aren't
[00:44:26] Jonathan Stevens: relevant to them or terms that are company specific. Right. Everybody has, every company has their own internal jargon.
[00:44:31] Yeah. Like,
[00:44:32] Nate Bagley: like, like we use the term decision drivers and I don't like it's, It's understandable what that is, but you might wanna break it down and say, Hey, these are the things they influence buyer decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
[00:44:43] Lauren Beall: Yeah.
[00:44:44] Intro: Yeah. Cool.
Q&A
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[00:44:46] Nate Bagley: Those are great. Thanks, Lauren. Thanks. You're welcome. So we have spent about 45 minutes here talking your ears off.
[00:44:53] Lauren and, and Jonathan, between the two of them have conducted thousands of buyer interviews. The, there are a [00:45:00] few people on the planet who have done more inter, more interviews than, than these two people here. And so they have. A lot of experience, understanding how to approach buyers, how to engage with them, how to, um, conduct a really successful, not only win loss interview, but a win loss program to lead them.
[00:45:17] And so you've really gotten some amazing advice, maybe fire hose with a lot of advice. I hope you took a lot of notes today. And I want to just dial it back just a little bit, bring, bring it back and remind you what today's assignment is. You, you got a lot of best practices, a lot of tips, but all we want you to do in the next seven days before you come back again for part three of Win Loss 1 0 1, is build out your very first draft.
[00:45:39] Of a buyer interview guide. It doesn't need to be perfect. Um, it doesn't need to be a home run. It just needs to be, uh, something that will get you through a 30 minute conversation that that's focused around the problem that you have chosen to solve throughout the, the six week program that we're doing here, and that has some drill down questions underneath.
[00:45:55] Each main question to help you get the solutions.
[00:45:58] Thank you Lauren and Jonathan [00:46:00] for joining us today and sharing so much of your amazing knowledge about how to build an interview guide and, and talk to buyers. It was really awesome learning for you. I learned a lot. Thanks, Nate. This
[00:46:08] Jonathan Stevens: is, Thank you, Nate.
[00:46:09] Yeah, Yeah.
[00:46:09] Lauren Beall: Appreciate it. Thanks for joining.
[00:46:10] Yeti Stereo Microphone-2: Thanks for tuning into today's episode of the win-Loss Show. If you want instant access to the full win loss 1 0 1 course, where you can get all six lessons, a bunch of awesome bonus materials, including a win-loss interview guide template, and find out how to get closed to conduct three free expert win loss interviews on your behalf so you can jumpstart your win-loss analysis program and start winning more deals. Just head over to win-loss one oh one.com and sign up for.