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B2B Sales Best Practices

Blindspots (Book Summary)

Blindspots: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Better Win-Loss Program by Ryan Sorley

Part 1: Getting Started

Chapter 1. What Is Win-Loss Analysis?

  • Salespeople often don’t know why they won or lost a deal, or they aren’t self-critical enough to ask themselves some hard questions. It’s much easier to say you lost a deal based on price than it is to say, “I lost the deal due to my inability to sell.”
  • I would caution any leadership team against using sales-sourced reason-code data to make important decisions.
  • Buyers often curb their feedback and only provide the seller with a partial view of their reasons for working or not working with the seller’s company.
  • To gauge the reliability of your sales-generated CRM data, consider sending a short, anonymous survey to your sales team asking the following two questions:
    • When selecting a closed won/lost reason code in our CRM system, how often do you: Find what you’re looking for? Pick something because there is no choice that aligns with your situation? Pick something randomly because you have no idea why you won or lost?
    • What reason codes do you believe are missing from the current list of options?
  • No-decisions tend to be overlooked by many win-loss program owners, who are more focused on deals that resulted in a competitive win or loss. And yet, between 40 and 60 percent of all deals end in no-decisions.
  • No-decisions happen because your team didn’t demonstrate time-based, measurable value significant enough to compel the buyer into action.
  • Getting just one or two no-decisions back on track may mean hundreds, thousands, or even millions of dollars in additional revenue for your company.

Chapter 2. Stages of Maturity

  • Level 1: Sales-Led
    • In the sales-sourced approach, there is no formal win-loss program in place.
  • Level 2: Siloed
    • In a siloed win-loss program, certain teams within an organization have taken specific steps to answer specific questions and satisfy their specific needs.
    • Product teams are the most common repeat offenders here.
    • Siloed programs can be ongoing, but typically, they’re project-based with defined start and end dates.
  • Level 3: Integrated
    • At Level 3, the decision has been made to view win-loss at an organizational level — rather than a siloed level — to serve many masters with the win-loss program and corresponding data it generates.
    • At this point, there’s also some process, structure, and method in place for conducting interviews and capturing the resultant data.
  • Level 4: Action-Oriented
    • Here, program managers have truly operationalized their win-loss program and built an action-plan framework to manage it. In
  • To take your Level 3 program to a Level 4, the people with the most influence in your organization must have a sense of ownership and excitement about the program.
  • The two big differences between a Level 3 and a Level 4 program are leadership and action. Level 3 programs are still likely a bottom-up effort — even if leadership ultimately buys in. At Level 4, leadership will often initiate the program themselves.
  • Action-oriented win-loss programs begin with an outcome in mind then collect data toward satisfying that outcome.
  • The CEO wanted to answer, “Are we losing clients because of that [product] gap? Are we losing out to competitors because of it? How important is it?”
  • You need some key foundational elements:
    • The right program-management structure in place.
    • A bought-in leadership team that takes ownership of the program.
    • A plan for reviewing the findings and building an action plan then executing that plan and measuring the impact.

Chapter 3. Getting Your Stakeholders in the Game

  • Sharing a selection of win-loss reports is a great way to introduce new hires to your buyers, their needs, and your sales process.
  • Many win-loss programs include churn analysis as well.

Chapter 4. Laying the Foundation

  • if you’re not selling your win-loss program internally and engaging your stakeholder group from the start, it’s going to be difficult to get people engaged once you start to share results.
  • As you set up the foundation of your win-loss program, your goals are twofold: establish a key set of learning objectives, and get buy-in for your program from key stakeholders. These goals are intertwined.
  • I recommend sending a short, five-minute survey that asks each member of the leadership team three core questions:
    • What are you looking to learn through our win-loss program?
    • What three questions would you personally ask buyers if you were the interviewer?
    • What specific actions will you take with the findings to support your goals?
  • Plan to reassess your program learning objectives at least quarterly.

Part 2: Nailing Your Interview Guide

Chapter 5. Setting the Foundation

  • An unprepared interviewer is an ineffective interviewer.
  • Sending the survey link as pre-work in preparation for the interview itself, not only will you get to the good stuff quicker during your interview, you will also arrive at the conversation better prepared.
  • Instead of looking only at the super exciting deals, look at deals that fit certain criteria, may serve to validate a hypothesis, or answer a specific question.
  • The basic aim is to collect data from a set of deals that share three core characteristics — such as deal size, location, industry, competitor, or product/service type.
  • The best win-loss programs don’t just lead to interesting insights. They lead to direct actions that can benefit your business in a number of ways. That’s why, during the discovery process, it’s important to ask stakeholders not only what questions they want answered but what actions they plan to take with the data.
  • When designing your interview guide, here are three helpful tips to remember:
    • Write twenty to thirty questions.
    • Keep the call to thirty minutes (but block out an hour).
    • Keep your questions clear, concise, and open-ended.
  • A well-designed survey should only take about seven minutes to complete,
  • Remember to record and transcribe all your interviews.
  • Don’t disguise an attempt to reel the buyer back into a sale as a win-loss interview.

Chapter 6. The Warm-Up and Persona

  • You’re going to bring your interviewee on a journey — one that starts when they realize they have a problem to solve and continues all the way through the decision they made to address it.
  • If you lead with the tough, awkward questions right out of the gate, they may shut down on you.
  • Don’t make the warm-up about you and your study.

Chapter 7. Business Drivers

  • When designing your interview guide to learn more about your buyer’s business drivers, here are some typical open-ended questions to consider:
    • What were the key business drivers that led to this evaluation?
    • What problems were you looking to solve?
    • What challenges was this problem causing?
    • What measurable impact were those challenges having on the business?

Chapter 8. Scope and Selection Criteria

  • There are three primary types of selection criteria: company level, core technology level, and product feature – function level.
    • Buyers’ selection criteria at the company level might be something like:
      • “We want to work with a company that has a strong reputation.”
      • “We want to work with a company that has other customers like us.”
      • “We want to work with a company that is financially viable.”
      • “We want to work with a company that has a really cool culture. “
    • On the core-technology level, criteria could be:
      • “We want to work with a company that has strong security.”
      • “We want to work with a company that has an easy-to-use solution.”
      • “We want to work with a company that can integrate with our core systems.”
      • “We want to work with a company that has global capabilities.“
    • Finally, there are product-or service-level criteria. As an example, for an e-commerce platform provider:
      • “We want to work with a company that has strong checkout speeds.”
      • “We want to work with a company that has strong mobile capabilities.”
      • “We want to work with a company that has smart shopping-cart capabilities.”
      • “We want to work with a company that has strong foreign language capabilities.”
  • The Interview Guide
    • Start with these important questions:
      • When looking for a new solution, what were your top three must-have selection criteria?
      • Which of those three was most important, and why?
      • How well did we align with your criteria?
    • To begin to build a picture of their scope, start with these four questions:
      • What was your vision for a solution? (If they need further prompting: What are you hoping for, and what does it look like? What will it do?)
      • What impact will the solution have within your organization?
      • What benefits are you hoping to gain through this solution?
      • If you had to put a number on it, what measurable gain or ROI are you hoping to see through those benefits?
    • From there, you can ask about selection criteria: “What were some must-haves within that solution?”
    • Finally, don’t forget to follow up with the catch-all: “What considerations were most important to you when evaluating different options?”
  • The Online Survey
    • In the online survey, the first question to ask is: “What were your top-three must-have selection criteria when you were looking for a new solution?”
    • From there, ask them to rate how well the company delivered in the three areas of selection criteria mentioned earlier: Please score the company’s attributes in these areas on a scale of 1 to 5 by how important they were during your evaluation process.
    • “On a scale of 1 to 5, how important are the following attributes when partnering with a company? Then, provide a list of options, such as: (a) Reputation (b) Financial viability (c) Culture (d) Years in business
    • Then, giving them the same set of options, ask: “How do you rank our company in each of these areas?”

Chapter 9. Product Feedback

  • Common Product Feedback
    • How did our product align with your vision for a solution?
    • What did you like most/least about our product?
    • How did the product compare to other products evaluated?
  • Specific Product Feedback
    • How did you feel about the mobile check-out capabilities?
    • How did you feel about the customer navigation experience?
    • How did you feel about the platform’s page-design templates?
  • When asking specific questions, you’re not just trying to learn about the buyer’s perception of the current product features, you’re also exploring what features your buyers might want in the future.
  • The Online Survey
    • In the survey, ask, “Please score the following areas by importance and your perception of our product capabilities in that area.”
    • If you’re able, design a side-by-side survey question that includes two columns for feedback: one for importance, and the other for the buyer’s perception of your capabilities.
    • Just ask a handful of smartly designed questions that are aligned closely to what you care most about.
    • You don’t want to have somebody answer a question you’re 100 percent sure about because that data is not going to add any incremental value.

Chapter 10. Pricing and Packaging Feedback

  • When it comes to pricing, your goal isn’t always to learn whether a customer thought your solution was priced fairly (though that’s valuable information too). It’s to learn about the experience they had when they arrived at the pricing and packaging stage of their evaluation.
    • Does the pricing and packaging model make sense?
    • Did the price equal or exceed the perceived value the buyer would receive?
    • The Interview Guide
      • The answers to these questions may be used to reassess your pricing model.
        • How well did our pricing align with your budget?
        • How would you describe our price as compared to perceived value?
        • How did our pricing compare with other vendors you evaluated?
      • Answers to these questions help determine whether pricing-related sales-enablement activities need to take place.
        • How would you describe the salesperson’s ability to articulate our pricing model?
        • What could the salesperson have done better or differently during the pricing process?
        • If the price did not align with your budget, was the salesperson willing to find creative solutions tailored to your needs? Please describe.
    • The Online Survey
      • Here are some questions you can ask:
        • Please rank our price as compared with perceived value.
        • Please rank us on perceived ROI.
        • Please rank us on ease of understanding our pricing model.
      • Don’t be tempted to ask comparison-based questions in terms of percentages: “How much more or less was our solution compared to Competitor X or Competitor Y — 10 percent, 20 percent, or 30 percent?” The challenge with that question is that everybody’s offerings are a little bit different, so it’s rarely an apples-to-apples comparison.

Chapter 11. The Research Stage

  • Your buyers are the perfect source of intel on where people are going for information and what’s being said about your company.
  • The Interview Guide
    • To find out about the resources your buyers consulted, ask:
      • What resources did you leverage during your evaluation?
      • At which stage did you leverage each resource?
      • Which resource had the greatest impact on your ultimate decision?
    • Here’s what you’ll want to know:
      • Which internal stakeholders have previous experience with the vendors you evaluated?
      • What was their experience with each vendor? What influence do those stakeholders have on vendor selection?
  • The Online Survey
    • “Did you leverage any of the following resources? And if you did, at what stage in your evaluation process did you leverage the resource?” Then, list out a range of different resources with toggles for (a) “Did not leverage” (b) “Prior to engaging with vendors” (c) “During vendor evaluation” (d) “During final vendor selection’
    • Follow up this question with an impact question: “Please share the impact of each resource on your evaluation process.” Then, list the resources again with toggles ranging from “No impact “to “Significant impact.”
  • To make sure you don’t sabotage your own deals, do what one of my clients did: assign someone internally to be the client-reference program lead. It’s that person’s job to be the intermediary between the prospect and the reference client. A key part of their responsibility is to understand the prospect’s client reference preferences and find the best match. In addition, prior to any introductions being made, the program lead contacts the reference client to ensure they’re still referenceable. If they find the client is happy and everything is going smoothly, they make the introduction.

Chapter 12. Sales Experience

  • The Interview Guide
    • Some questions to ask may include:
      • How would you describe your sales experience?
      • How did our sales team compare with those of the other companies you evaluated?
      • If you could offer one piece of advice to the salesperson in an effort to help them improve, what would that piece of advice be?
      • What could they have done differently that would have changed the outcome of the deal?
    • After all, the purpose of a win-loss interview is not to make a seller look bad to their peer group or senior management. Consider sharing the negative feedback with the seller and their manager in private, but redact that portion when sharing the interview summary more broadly.
  • The Online Survey
    • In an online survey, you can ask buyers to rate the salesperson in the following areas:
      • Overall sales experience
      • Listening skills
      • Professionalism
      • Responsiveness
      • Presentation skills
      • Communication skills
      • Trustworthiness
    • Additionally, you can look at their knowledge areas, or things they’ve learned on the job:
      • Knowledge of the offering
      • Ability to articulate solution benefits
      • Ability to differentiate
      • Ability to address your concerns

Chapter 13. Competitors

  • Win-loss research offers you the opportunity to not only understand how you’re perceived in the marketplace, but also how your key competitors are perceived.
  • You’ll want to ask your buyers questions like:
    • How are we perceived relative to our competitors?
    • What do our competitors offer of value that we do not?
    • What strategic moves may our competitors be making that we need to be aware of, such as new partnerships, products, and GTM motions?
    • What are our competitors saying about us?
  • Battle cards help equip the sales team with essential information on where their competitors may be strong and weak, how they may be trying to differentiate, and how they’re packing and pricing their offerings — and what an appropriate response is to each point.
  • Competitive pricing information helps you determine the most effective approach to generating your initial offer, tuning your discounting strategy, or supporting any price-to-value-related conversations you may have.
  • Other questions you could ask include:
    • Besides us, what other companies did you evaluate, and why did you include those companies?
    • What did you like or dislike about each?
    • What do you perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of each?
    • What led you to eliminate (competitor) from consideration?
    • What led you to select (competitor)?
    • What stood out?
    • How close was it? What could have swayed you in our direction?
  • The Online Survey
    • Which vendor was the incumbent, if any?
    • Which vendors did you evaluate?
    • Which vendors did you shortlist?
    • What company did you ultimately select?

Chapter 14. Buying Process

  • What was the buying process like?
  • What was the buyer’s experience talking to you and other potential vendors?
  • Who else did they consult as they narrowed down their decision?
  • The key learning objective during the buying-process section of your win-loss program is to gain a deeper understanding of the key stages and milestones associated with the buyer’s journey.
  • Let’s focus on a set of smart buying-process-related questions. To begin, ask:
    • When did you first realize you had a problem to solve?
    • How did you go about identifying which providers to evaluate?
    • Once you settled on a vendor list, how did you go about shortlisting them?
    • What were the key proof-point moments?
    • What internal or external resources did you tap into along the way?
  • The key here is to gain an understanding of the most significant moments that influence the outcome. To do that, ask questions such as:
    • Once you got down to the short list, what were the final decision criteria that made you go with one company over another?
    • Tell us about that internal process. Who was involved? Was there pushback? Was there a debate? Were there key components that made you choose Company A over Company B in the eleventh hour? If so, what were those factors?

Chapter 15. Product Demo

  • Buyers often point to the product demo as a crucial turning point in the buying process — especially if things didn’t go particularly well for one vendor or another.
  • The Interview Guide
    • Please describe your overall demo experience.
    • Ultimately, did the demo help or hurt us?
    • How well did the demo align with your expectations and the expectations of others who participated?
    • What do you think the demo team did well? What advice would you give to the demonstrator in regard to things they could have done better?
    • How did our demo compare with those of other providers?
  • The Online Survey
    • Did you participate in a product demo? (Yes or no.)
    • Rate your demonstrator in the following areas on a scale of 1 to 5: (a) Overall demo experience (b) Alignment with your use case (c) Alignment with your audience (d) Clarity (e)Demonstrator preparedness (f) Ability to answer your questions
    • Which best describes your feeling about the vendor following the demo? (a) We felt quite confident that this solution could address our needs (b) We were unsure whether this solution could address our needs (c) We felt the solution could not address our needs
    • Did the demonstration help or hurt your business case in selecting the vendor? (a) Helped the business case (b) Was neutral (c) Hurt the business case

Chapter 16. The Hail Mary Question

  • “What final piece of advice would you provide to our client, in the spirit of continuous improvement?”
  • There are plenty of different ways to phrase the Hail Mary question:
    • What did I not ask you that I should have?
    • What else do I need to know?
    • What did we not talk about that you think is important?
    • What single piece of advice would you provide to the organization that you think would be most meaningful?
    • Where could they improve the most?
    • If you became CEO of that company tomorrow, where would you invest in the business? What changes would you make?

Chapter 17. The Sales Interview

  • it’s important not only to interview your buyers but your sales reps as well.
  • It’s dangerous to assume your salespeople actually know why they won or lost a deal since they generally respond based on their own perspectives, which, I’m sorry to say, are not a reliable source of intelligence.
  • Ask the buyer, “Hey, buyer, why did or didn’t you select us?” (This is the essential question of any win-loss program, which we’ve been discussing throughout the book.) Then you ask the sales rep the same question, “Hey, seller, why do you think you won or lost that deal?”(This is what we’re talking about now.) Compare the data to see what gap exists. (This is where the learning happens.)
  • The Interview Guide
    • Why do you feel like you won or lost this deal?
    • If you lost, who did you lose to, and what are your assumptions as to why you lost to them?
    • If you won, who did you beat, and why do you think you won the deal?
    • What were the biggest challenges you faced in the sales process, and how did you overcome those challenges?
    • If you could go back in time and do something differently in this opportunity, what would you change about it?
    • What resources did you leverage or what resources would have been helpful if they were available to you?
  • The Online Survey
    • ideally, your reps will complete this survey at the close of each win or loss.
    • The survey should be simple and straightforward and include a combination of essay-style and multiple-choice questions.
    • Here are some sample essay-style questions to consider:
      • Why was the buyer looking for a solution?
      • What were their must-haves?
      • What were the primary win-loss reasons?
      • Which vendors were being evaluated?
      • What resources did you leverage during the sales process?
      • What challenges did you encounter?
      • Please share a few key lessons learned.
  • The key here is to think about how to get the story behind the data.

Part 3: Conducting Your Interviews

Chapter 18. Selecting and Recruiting Ideal Interview Candidates

  • Setting a quantity-based target may feel like the right move, but it’s better to focus on quality.
  • At the end of the day, you need to feel confident that the feedback you’ve collected is so reliable you’re willing to use it to make recommendations to leadership and put your reputation on the line.
  • You should be extremely thoughtful about whom you interview.
  • Align Targeted Buyers with Learning Objectives: As an example, say one of your primary learning objectives is to understand why you keep losing to Competitor A. Naturally, you can qualify in those opportunities where you lost to Competitor A and eliminate the others.
  • The key here is not to cast a wide net but to take a more targeted approach by identifying your cohorts up front, determining how many interviews you need within those cohorts to end up with a statistically relevant sample size, and focusing your interview recruitment efforts accordingly.
  • How many interviews should you conduct? At least ten from each cohort aligned with deals that closed, won or lost, within the last ninety days. This is the bare minimum number of apples-to-apples interviews you can expect to conduct to get enough useful data to begin identifying commonalities, running trend analyses, etc.
  • I recommend targeting the late-stage deals for interviews and leaving the early-stage deals for your online questionnaire.
  • No-decision interviews are not only a great opportunity to learn, they also often put you in a position to unstick a no-decision outcome, get it back on track, and add another W to the column!
  • If your lost prospective buyer hasn’t actually signed with a competitor yet, they’re unlikely to give you time or straight answers if you come knocking on their door for feedback too soon, so it’s generally best not to reach out until you know they have definitely made a decision.
  • Involve the sales team when compiling your list of candidates.
  • The account rep initially reaches out to the buyer with the interview request. For instance: “Hi (buyer), I hope you’re well. I was wondering if you would be open to sharing feedback on your recent evaluation experience with my colleague, [interviewer], who is our [role]. We thrive on feedback and would truly value anything you’d be willing to share.”
  • It’s also just wise to involve the sales team. You want them to feel like this work is being done for them and that they’re an important driver of program success.
  • The only legitimate reason for an account rep to keep you away from a buyer should be the possibility that the deal is still alive.
  • While it varies, we offer $50 for win interviews and $100 for loss interviews, typically in the form of a gift card or a charitable donation.

Chapter 19. Getting the Most Out of Your Win-Loss Interviews

  • The sales manager joining the call can only mean one thing. “This isn’t an authentic feedback interview at all,” the interviewee thinks to themselves. “It’s a win-back call … please don’t!”
  • Interviewer: First off, I want to assure you this is not a sales call. We’re not trying to change your mind. We simply want to get better. Rest assured, any information you share with me will be kept confidential and shared only with a limited group at the leadership level to help support our ongoing improvement efforts.
  • Product marketers tend to make great interviewers. They’re often very curious, and they understand the product, value proposition, sales process, and competitive landscape without being emotionally tied to the outcome of one deal over another.
  • Avoid using someone who’s biased (sales) or too narrowly focused (product).
  • The interviewer should have a level of seniority that comes close to matching that of the interviewee. If you select a low-level product marketing associate to interview the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company, you’re sending the wrong message and may irritate that CEO.
  • An interviewer needs to be calm, cool, collected, and unflappable.
  • As you work to train up your interviewer, it’s useful to divide the process into three core focus areas: planning and preparation, warmup, and the heart of the interview.
  • Here are some basic steps I recommend:
    • Learn as much as you can about your interviewee.
    • Read their company website.
    • Talk with the sales rep aligned with the opportunity.
  • The interviewer’s job is to walk the subject down this path, stopping along the way to dig deeper into areas of importance.
  • When training interviewers, stress the importance of asking open-ended questions and being curious. After listening to an answer, an interviewer should have a sixth sense that tells them when to probe for additional information. Is there more to the story here? Will my stakeholders be satisfied with their answer, or should I probe deeper?
  • I refer to the practice as the 90/10 rule — the interviewer should speak only 10 percent of the time (asking concise questions), with the interviewee taking the other 90 percent.
  • Logistics
    • Keep your environment in mind.
    • Always ask for a “video on” interview.
    • All interviews should be recorded and transcribed.
    • Send the incentive immediately after the interview.

Chapter 20. Unpacking the Value of Your Win-Loss Data

  • Look for any direct quotes that will provide clarity to your learning objectives.
  • Each report should include sections for all the areas we covered in Part 2, including:
    • business drivers
    • scope and selection criteria
    • product feedback
    • pricing and packaging
    • influencers (research stage)
    • sales experience
    • competition
    • buying process
    • and others…
  • Make sure to begin each new deal report with a very strong “Win or Loss Reasons” section.
  • These presentations may look like the following:
  • However you present your data, make sure you’re focused on the biggest question any executive is going to ask: “What do we do now?”
  • Always seek, and receive, permission to use a quote from a win-loss interview. Tempting though it may be, you cannot simply cut and paste a glowing review into marketing materials.

Chapter 21. How Do You Drive Action?

  • in one company I recently worked with, the person who built the program took the time to create and nurture a strong win-loss committee. He may have run the show, but others knew how he operated. More importantly, the committee helped the program owner turn his work into results.
  • One, if you want your win-loss program to last, don’t be a one-person show. Two, if you want your win-loss program to drive action and impact your business, you’re going to have to work with others to operationalize your program and its insights.
  • Members should be drawn from across the organization, including those from:
    • Sales and marketing leadership
    • Customer success
    • Product marketing
    • Product management and engineering
    • Competitive intelligence
    • The C-suite (sponsorship at least, and ideally participation)
  • Designate a Program Chair: the chair is the person whose department owns the program and who’s spearheading it — often from product marketing.
  • Generally, after two review sessions — typically once a month — the next meeting involves the senior leadership team, and perhaps even the board. In this meeting, the committee presents an aggregate view of a quarter’s worth of win-loss data to senior management along with recommendations for acting on that data.
  • Once the program gets rolling, another agenda item is added to the quarterly meetings: an update on the results of actions taken at the prior quarter’s meeting.

Chapter 22. Keeping Your Program Fresh and Relevant

  • How does pricing in general affect their buying decision? What models work? What models don’t? Do they prefer user-based or consumption-based pricing? Is there a particular competitor whose pricing structure they prefer?
  • You will always have a core set of questions that remain consistent, but the only way to continue delivering value in the eyes of your stakeholders is to switch things up from quarter to quarter.
  • As soon as you start getting that “same old, same old” vibe from your stakeholders, that’s a red flag.

Conclusion

  • All the data in the world won’t help you if you can’t package and present it in a way that’s useful to your stakeholders.

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