Building a win/loss program for a developer-focused company

I’m Farhan Manjiyani, Manager of Competitive & Market Intelligence (CI) at Grafana Labs, and I’m here to talk about win/loss.

To give you a little background about me, I started my career in the sales world before going into product marketing. I've been a full stack product marketer, if you will, doing everything from launches to enablement to competitive.

Recently, I took over as full-time competitive for a company called Grafana Labs.

This is my second time scaling out a win/loss program, so I’ve tried to compile all the main lessons I've learned from running this program myself, but also from talking to some other CI practitioners out there to give you the blueprint.

If you're just starting out or if you already have a win/loss program in place, I think you'll find this pretty useful.

Let's dive in.

Balancing value creation vs. value capture

First and foremost, especially if you’re a developer-focused company, one of the main challenges is the balance of value creation versus value capture.

Let's use Google as an example. They created a ton of value through search, connecting you to information quickly, and making awesome value for consumers like myself who use it all the time.

And the value capture of that is the introduction of AdWords, which really annoyed people from a consumer aspect, but created additional value for businesses for an entire new buyer. And they're now able to monetize at the same time.

Uber is another great example. It did something very similar by creating a marketplace for drivers as well as consumers who are riders and looking to get from A to B, versus the creator economy and that marketplace. And Uber's monetization or value capture of that came on top.

If you're a developer-focused company or a product-led motion, this should be fairly similar to your organization where you're thinking about how to create the value. For us at Grafana, it’s our Free Forever plan. But then what's the right way to think about capturing that value?

We also follow an open-source motion. So fundamentally, every time we create a new product, it's a question of, Is this something that makes more sense for the community? Versus, Is this a commercial-only kind of feature or segment, or an entire product? You want to have a healthy balance on both sides for obvious reasons.

How to start your win/loss program

When you're trying to get your win/loss program off the ground, there are a couple of key questions that you want to answer.

First and foremost is, who's doing this today? You may be responsible in your remit for this, but chances are that within organizations, people are already trying to better understand this information.

For example, product may be looking at some of the main feature gaps within deals as part of their roadmap planning. Or your solutions engineering team is trying to think about efficiency and how to gauge tactical fit, proof of values, and concepts within cycles to inform hiring practices.

Or maybe your finance team is trying to understand how to better allocate and inform headcount planning for your reps.

Understanding what's already being done potentially in silos of the organization is super helpful as a starting point because then you're starting to see what the underlying data is that's driving this. Chances are they're totally different data sets.

This brings me to my second point, which is that you're going to need a data partner in this. Who in your organization owns the CRM? The actual creation and mandating of the fields from the quote to close process; who understands the definitions of these things?

For example, if there are multiple fields for the amount, what's the difference between the amount versus something that says ACV? Is that average contract value or annual contract value?

And for field history, how does the input of a field change over time within an opportunity?

These are fundamental questions that whoever's been implementing your CRM has answered at one point.

And if it's not well documented in your organization, you want to make sure you have a good partner within the ops world to go with you in this journey, as you're probably going to be making some suggestions or recommendations on how your data inputs need to change to really bolster your reporting efforts.

And then finally, what’s top of mind for the organization? What product cares about is probably very different from what revenue cares about, and it's probably also different from what your leadership cares about.

For us, it was very clear that the voice of the customer, or in this case, this prospect primarily for loss opportunities, was missing across the organization, especially at the senior leadership level. Get to really qualitatively understand what the reason is that people are choosing us, and why people tend to gravitate toward a competitor.

What exactly is easier to use? What particular workflows are easier to use and why? In what context? In what situation? Really just provide some more color around this so we can start to inform the strategic direction that the company’s going in.

Key focus areas for a win/loss program

This brings me to my next point of where to focus. My recommendation is to bias very heavily towards losses. The rationale here is that most organizations have a decent understanding of why they're winning. The real nuggets are typically in why they're losing.

Especially if you don't have a win/loss program in place today, and this is primarily driven through sales, it's at the point of most emotion that you're asking for information, which is after something’s closed. Especially if it's lost, your incentive and your mindset is to immediately start moving towards the next opportunity that's winnable and forget everything about the lost opportunity.

There's a lot of really critical information that's sometimes lost. And, more importantly, the context there is important. So, whether you're talking about what your new logo acquisition loss is versus what your churn analysis of current customers looks like, what you're missing from a renewals perspective is very different.

As an open-source motion, our company’s number one competitor is ourselves. Where someone’s choosing to go back to open source, whether they came from our open source solution or another, they’re ultimately not choosing our commercial products, which is really more of a disqualification versus an actual loss.

So, differentiating all of this is important from a reporting perspective.

At a minimum, there are four key questions that you should be able to answer.

How long does it take you to go from quote to a close on average?
What’s the main alternative that your prospects are choosing you by specific deal?
What’s the dollar value attributed to this deal?
What contributed to loss? This is likely a number of things, but was it losing to a competitor? And if so, why? Was it a pricing thing? Was it a specific feature that drove them to the competition?

When you're pitching to the broader organization why it's worth investing in this, your success metrics typically fall into two buckets.

The first bucket is going to be revenue-focused. For example, what’s the average contract value or annual contract value that can be attributed to a loss being turned into a win? So, had we won this deal, we’d have this much additional revenue.

The second bucket is influencing something like your product strategy. As road mapping is critical in every organization, it’s understanding critical feature gaps that had they been solved, would again result in additional contract value. Or just an overall understanding of market share within the space versus your competition measured by a win rate.

These are just three specific data points, but broadly overarching and understanding pricing strategy, product strategy, and your sales approach. What type of motion is best? These can all be directly influenced by your win/loss program and through your qualitative and quantitative insights.

3 pitches to give your sales team

You might be thinking, This sounds awesome, but how do I just get in front of these customers? I consistently find that my salespeople are very territorial around their accounts. I find it hard to get access to them.

So, let's talk about some pitches that have worked for me in the past, and that I've seen work in other organizations as well.

The first is, can we design a win-win here?

For example, if you're working with very strategic reps that have few deals but very large sales prices, can you focus in on a particular competitor that they're seeing in a couple of their deals and then work together to tie back any research that you're actively doing to a cycle that they're working on?

Let's say they're going against a specific competitor. Can you target loss opportunities for that competitor specifically? So then you're asking targeted questions that they're trying to answer for their prospects currently in your loss interviews.

So, you're getting great data and they're getting helped out in the cycle. It’s a win-win.

The second is pitching yourself as extra hands. Especially for reps that are territorial about their accounts, they’re often trying to figure out the best way to prioritize and learn about those accounts.

So, pitch yourself as an extra hand here and go through accounts and research together. Author an interview guide together that’d make sense for their account specifically.

Ideally, you don't want to run interviews together because having a salesperson on the call can often arm prospects differently. They're more willing to talk to you when you start with a pitch like, “Hey, I'm not from sales, I'm just trying to learn some information.” But still make sure those calls are recorded and you have good notes to pass back to that salesperson.

And then finally, being able to up-level. This is particularly useful with early stage reps, being able to go to them and say, “Hey, I'm focusing on all the lessons learned on why we won the biggest deals in our organization.”

It’s also being able to go back to them and say, “I'm going to give you the CliffsNotes version of why we've won every major logo that we have, or why we've lost these big, juicy deals.” Maybe in a particular industry that you're focused on right now because you have a bunch in your territory.

For them, this pitch goes a really long way because those early stage reps are trying to understand how they can replicate what the most seasoned reps in the organization are doing.

The importance of a predictive win/loss program

The best loss programs out there start off as helping the whole organization become more reflective on why we're losing and winning. But the best programs actually go beyond that help in being predictive.

It's always helpful to know what happened after the fact. But the real value of this entire programming is to be able to use the information you're learning after the fact to identify the key indicators proactively before you're actually losing the deal, understand what could go wrong, and then reorient your conversation that managers and sales leaders are already having about how you can de-risk a deal.

You're focusing in on potentially new deal risks that haven't been part of the conversation based on your loss analysis.

For us, we have three key categories of subjective information that are captured throughout the cycle. Then we have objective information that we capture at the very end of the cycle. And then during the cycle, we have deal risk that we've identified as reasons that we've lost in the past. So, we want to make sure that we don’t lose for those reasons again.

Data points vs. trends

What you're really doing in your loss program is something you’re doing in three steps. You’re trying to validate where the data points and the specific trends are.

Step one is sitting down with your account team to really understand internally what our understanding is of why we won and why we lost. Once you have the full context of this, then go out to the prospect themselves. These prospects are ideally a mix of an end user, the champion that you're working with, and the person who made the decision at the end of the day, such as the executive buyer or economic buyer.

Pressure test. What did we learn internally or what did we think? Did the buyer or prospect say similar things on what their initial criteria was for validating or choosing a solution? Or did they say something different about what they really liked about a competitor?

You're reporting back to the business on that delta. And if you're doing your job well, ideally that delta’s getting smaller and smaller between what we know and what the prospect actually said.

And then finally, what really drives business decisions is that you're operating on trends, not data points. So once you have this delta, it’s being able to look quantitatively at all the information in your CRM to understand how often this is actually occurring.

We might be anchoring on this deal because it's a well-recognized brand or logo, or it has a high dollar value. But if it's a one-off and the majority of your deals don't face these situations, you don't want to over-index some of that.

You want to over-index on what's actually repeatable. Whether it's for a win or a loss, what are the repeatable motions that reps should be thinking about from day one? Starting with onboarding all the way to the most seasoned reps, what are the habits that they're doing that they don't know are actually indicative of losses based on your analysis of deals very similar to theirs?

That's win/loss in a nutshell.

This article is based on Farhan Manjiyani's talk at the virtual Developer Marketing Summit in 2022. You can enjoy the complete presentation – and hundreds of others – with Developer Marketing On Demand.

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