Focused on Win-Loss or Win Rates?

Baseball has always loved its data.

Fans have long argued the value of players over the years, spouting home runs, walks, hits, and any other stats they can find in the box scores.

Sabermetrics—the advanced analytics highlighted in the “Moneyball” movie—took baseball data to the next level by digging deep into on-field play and predicting player performance. Owners then used data insights to pick players, build lineups, and otherwise craft the ideal team for success.

But it wasn’t until Billy Beane started coaching to the data that the 2002 Oakland A’s were able to make a playoff run.

The same inflection point is happening right now in sales with your win-loss data. You’re calling buyers after deals to conduct interviews to learn why they bought (or didn’t), and you’re likely using those findings from your buyer to adjust your product roadmap, address product pricing/discounting policies, and rethink your product positioning in the market.

But if that’s all you’re doing with the sales insights, you’re only getting half the story from your win-loss programs.

Here’s the problem. At the close of a deal, your sellers update their CRM records with buying decision data. If they lost the deal, they’ll usually say there wasn’t budget or buyer politics derailed the deal. In fact, our data shows that 70 percent of the time, sellers and buyers give different answers for why a sale went askew.

Win-loss data from your buyers tells a very different story.

how the win-loss data can turn sellers into MVPs

In our analysis of customer feedback in more than 100,000 B2B transactions with more than 500 companies in over 50 industries, 53 percent of buyers said a losing vendor could have won the deal if the seller had done something different during the sales process.

The most common feedback from buyers was that a seller:

• Presented little or no competitive differentiation from other products in the market
• Failed to conduct effective needs discovery and align solutions
• Demonstrated a lack of timely response and interest in fulfilling buyer requests

So, over half of deals are lost because of seller missteps, which are immediately addressable and fully coachable. If you’re only using your win-loss data for marketing or operational purposes, you’re missing out on coaching your sellers to fix those missteps.

coaching to the win-loss data

Just like Billy Beane and the 2002 A’s coached their players to take advantage of the data insights, you can coach your sales team to fix the missteps your customers are telling you they made. But you need accurate win-loss data to do this with your sales teams.

Imagine helping your sales leaders and enablement teams provide meaningful coaching and training because you have the data from your buyers on which sellers need to improve which skills. They’d know exactly where opportunities are breaking down in the sales process, and exactly what skills are needed to resolve those issues.

Plus, if you give them a dashboard across all their sellers and teams, they can monitor each rep’s progress as they try to improve, and tie those results into bookings and pipeline in your CRM system.

get your sellers from striking out to hitting home runs

When you examine seller performance through the lens of actual data on how each seller performs in each sales call, you’ll be able to give them actionable feedback that ultimately helps them win more revenue.

With a purpose-built platform for sales experience, win-loss, and customer experience analysis, you can empower each sales rep with personalized, buyer-based sales intelligence from every opportunity.

You’ll better understand your buyer needs, improve sales positioning, and understand deal outcomes—overall and for each of your reps. You’ll also identify opportunities for personalized coaching for each of your reps backed by examples, insights, and buyer feedback directly from their deals.

And you’ll discover which of your deals were actually winnable and exactly how they could have been won.

Learn more about how to get buyer feedback with TruVoice and contact us to learn more.