How to Consolidate Win-Loss Intel from Clozd, DoubleCheck and Other Win-Loss Providers Into Klue

Eric Holland

Every single day, you’re winning and losing business. 

But do you know why?

What about your executive team — do they know why? How about your Product team? Sales at least? I’m sure they have lots of ideas on why you’re losing deals (cough *product* cough)… but can you trust that intel?

There happens to be one — sometimes elusive — group of people that know exactly why your deals are won and lost: your buyers. 

Buyers make their decisions based on a variety of factors: product functionality, the sales experience, pricing, perception of your brand, customer service offering, and more.

Knowing which of these factors are driving your success or failure in deals is incredibly valuable.

That’s where win-loss comes in. 

And while a competitive enablement program tracks many different types of intel about your competitors and your broader market, what makes win-loss unique is that it’s specifically targeting insights about how buying decisions are made by your customers and prospects.

And for many companies, those decisions are what effectively competing all boils down to.

What is win loss? And why is win-loss an important component of your compete program?

Win-Loss analysis is the process of collecting and analyzing intelligence from your market on why you win and lose deals. What you obtain through this process is a very specific type of intel that provides a window into the buyer’s world.

But like all other forms of valuable intelligence, win-loss insights do not have an impact if they aren’t being used by the rest of the organization.

Incorporating Win-Loss analysis into your competitive enablement program ensures that those valuable insights are understood within the broader market context, and are actioned upon by the appropriate stakeholder groups across the organization. 

Three main reasons why Win-Loss is valuable for your compete program:

• Win-Loss analysis often focuses on interviewing and surveying buyers, which is one of the best sources of intel on why you are winning and losing businesses
• Despite buyer interviews being a big effort, these insights can be uniquely in-depth
• Win-Loss insights are indispensable for multiple stakeholders — execs, sales, product, and marketing — when curated and distributed effectively.

If you have an existing win-loss program, or are considering one, read on — this article is for you.

Effective win-loss Analysis Is More Than Just Buyer Interviews

Firstly, it is important to appreciate win-loss insights within the broader business context.

Win-Loss analysis is most effective when interview insights are combined with data from other sources, such as feedback from your sales and customer-facing teams, analysis of live call recordings, online customer reviews, and more.

Common sources of win-loss intel

• Interviews with your buyers
• Surveys with your buyers
• Feedback from your salespeople
• Feedback from your customer success and support teams
• Call Recordings with your salespeople and buyers (e.g. Gong or Chorus)
• Opportunity / Deal Notes from CRM

Each source of win-loss intel has benefits and drawbacks. For example, CRM data can be extremely valuable, but relies on having good CRM data hygiene and assumes that sales reps know the real reasons they won or lost.

Surveys can be a great way to start getting buyer feedback, and although the volume of responses can be high, the depth of the insights are generally lower.

Win-Loss interviews are a valuable source of intel because the interviewer can ask follow-up questions and dive deep into potential areas that you’d like to target. Because win-loss interviews often require a fair amount of effort, many organizations outsource their win-loss interview program to an external provider, like DoubleCheck Research, Primary Intelligence, Clozd, and so on. 

If you have a win-loss program where you are interviewing buyers — whether your interviews are managed internally or with a win-loss partner — what’s important is delivering those insights to the teams that matter, so that they can be actioned on.

That’s where Klue, your competitive enablement platform, comes into play.

How to Enable Your Organization With Win-Loss Insights Using Klue

Take the interactive tour below for a step-by-step walkthrough on how you can collect, centralize, and distribute Win-Loss insights using Klue.

Let’s break down the process in more detail.

Collect win-loss intel as alerts in Klue:

If you’re a product marketing or competitive intelligence team that is also responsible for win-loss, this one’s for you.

Using Klue, you can centralize all your Win-Loss insights into Klue Alerts, alongside all of your other competitive and market intelligence. 

The interactive tour above shows how you can forward a win-loss report via email into Klue, but there are other methods for accomplishing this:

• Use the Klue Browser Extension to collect win-loss insights from an external platform (e.g. DoubleCheck/Dovetail, Airtable, Clozd)
• Have your win-loss consultant input the insights directly into Klue
• Manually create Win-Loss intel via the Submit Intel button

Create a Klue Board to Centralize and Present Win-Loss Insights:

The first way to start incorporating win-loss insights into your competitive enablement program, is to create a Win-Loss Board in Klue.

Klue Boards give you a single source of truth to gather all of your win-loss insights and make them easily accessible to your various stakeholder teams. 

It’s not necessary to put all your raw interview data into your Win-Loss Board. You likely have those detailed notes in decks or docs, or in the platform that your win-loss provider uses (e.g. Dovetail, Airtable). 

Deliver Insights to Your Stakeholders Using a Klue Battlecard

Now that you have all of your win-Loss insights centralized in one place, you’ll want to create a simple view for your stakeholders to access the win-loss insights that are most relevant to them.

In Klue, a Battlecard is simply a selection of Cards that you want to show to a specific audience. By selecting the Cards you want to display, you can easily create a Win-Loss Dashboard for your stakeholders (or, multiple Dashboards for different stakeholder groups).

Take the interactive tour below for a walkthrough of a sample Win-Loss Dashboard using Klue Battlecards.

Best Practices for Getting the Most Out of Your Win-Loss Insights

When inputting insights into Klue, answer this question: What win-loss insights do you want to share with others? What actions can we take?

• What will help sales win more business?
• What will help marketing capture more attention in the market?
• What will help product define a differentiated product roadmap?
• What will help executives make strategic decisions to capture market share?

Some examples of this may include:

• How are buyers perceiving our sales process? What can we do to improve it?
• How is our pricing being perceived by the market? How can we influence that perception?
• What evaluation criteria are most important to our buyers? How do we address those needs more effectively?
• What do buyers like or dislike about our product or service? How might this impact our product and services offering?
• What do buyers like or dislike about our competitors’ offerings? How might this influence our product roadmap?
• How is our company’s brand being perceived in the broader market? What can we do to shift the perception of our brand?
• Why are buyers looking for our solution? What can we do to help buyers find us?

Last but not least, it’s critical that you communicate these takeaways and action items to the various stakeholder groups across your organization.
Like any other kind of intelligence, Win Loss intel does not have an impact if it’s not being used and actioned on. Hosting your Win Loss Dashboard in Klue and incorporating it into your overall Competitive Enablement program is the first step toward creating real tangible impact for the business.

PS – Got more questions about win-loss and competitive enablement? Join Paul Senatori, Tirrah Switzer, and myself at our next CE Live on Nov. 3

Blog > Competitive Enablement