The Power Of A Post-Win Analysis.
I watched as a light bulb went on over a VP of Sales.
“We’ve been winning a lot of deals lately and I never asked ‘Why?’”
We were talking about how benefits apply to different prospects in different ways. It’s common for managers to conduct postmortems to determine why a particular deal was lost. However, it’s far less common for them to call for a post-win analysis.
In fact, my brother, Will Brooks, just posted a great list of questions to ask when a deal is lost.
Just as important as determining why a deal was lost is figuring out why it was won. Why? Because then you can work to replicate it over and over and over.
Below are some questions to ask you to aid in the process. I’d say questions 5 and 6 are the most important.
- What are the characteristics of the buyer? Creating a buyer persona allows your team to quickly identify a prospect who matches previous buyers. Getting detailed with this description helps. Noting things like Job Title(s), Corporate Structure, Go-to-Market Strategy, etc. will help a lot, too. Check out this blog post on persona development for info on this topic.
- How would the buyer describe my company? We know how we describe ourselves, but a brand is really defined in the minds of your customers. Asking for this kind of definition will help salespeople describe your organization to prospects in the way they want to hear it.
- How would the buyer describe the salesperson? This allows you, as a manager, to begin to formulate a profile for an “ideal” salesperson. It gives you a sense of how winners behave in a sales interaction.
- How did we come into contact with one another? Obviously, knowing where the connection was made allows your sales team to go back to the well and find more prospects like them.
- What benefits were most important to this buyer? This is the most important question so far. Paul Bilodeau, our VP of Sales, puts it this way: Your product or service probably has a lot of benefits. However, some of those benefits are more important to particular prospects than to others. Find out which ones matter to this buyer, and you know what your team should focus on.
- What made these benefits appealing to this buyer? If question 5 was the most important, this one is even more critical. Because benefits do different things for different buyers, it’s important to find out why a particular benefit appealed to this buyer.
- Where can we find more buyers just like this one? Ask, and get your team to go there!
It’s important to capture this information so that it’s not lost. Use sales meetings to share win stories among the team to ensure these experiences can be leveraged by your entire team.
