Posted from: http://onproductmanagement.net/2009/01/08/winloss-anyone
Win/Loss? Anyone?
The results of the 2008 Product Management and Marketing survey by Pragmatic Marketing (whew that’s a mouthful), are now out.
Lots of good data to mull over, but like previous years, one very interesting data point stands out (to me).
Very few people are doing Win/Loss analysis.
On average, only 20% of Product Managers and Product Marketers stated they perform this activity. And this says nothing about the frequency or time spent on this. Check out the results from the last 2 years. Click on each image to enlarge.
2007 | 2008 |
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So what’s going on folks?
Ask anyone and they’ll say that Win/Loss analysis is very important.
But no one is doing it?
Here’s a quick poll. Tell me why.
I’ll publish the results in a future post.
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January 9, 2009 at 4:51 pm
This is a pervasive problem in all organizations and it causes the creation of misaligned products, market messages and sales positioning. One of the symptoms is that marketers rely on “clever” marketing slogans for their campaigns (internally incubated based upon personal beliefs) rather than going through the trouble of validating, verifying or quantifying buyer-based beliefs. You know: Inside-out thinking. Another contributer to this mentality is that sales management really doesn’t want emperical evidence of its performance known. Now, to respond to your question, “What’s going on folks?” The foundation of this epidemic is that market-based research is being ignored by product and marketing management because it causes internal conflict and IT ISN’T EASY! It is easier to use your imagination than it is to understand a buyer’s needs, problems and perception. Also, management is not serious about market-based initiatives, so they rarely fund the necessary research or reward those that spend time validating real actionable data. Moreover, I believe that it is all systemically related. Marketing will rely on other internally built documents to construct their market messaging. As a result, misunderstood market requirements may be a by-product of the lowering quality of the MRD (Market Requirement Documents) built by the Product Managers. The MRD is usually not based upon anything other than a few qualitative discussions with clients (not prospects) to validate the internal beliefs of what is needed in the market. No trends, no metrics, no perception, no measurement, no ratings, and no performance. As such, this complacent epidemic has really become a corporate-wide culture.
Of course, this corporate-wide dysfunction can be fixed by convincing management (not an easy task to raise its internal priority) to instill a discipline and commitment to buyer alignment. This is most successful when affixing an ROI (e.g., 15% increase in sales in 1-3 months, 12% improvement in quota attainment) and emphasizing solution-based selling. This is further clarified in my November 2008 Newsletter. The buyer alignment engine begins with Product Management driving the market-based research in order to understand market requirements and vendor sales cycle performance (latter topic always draws debate). Likewise, PM must understand the competitive differentiation of its products and train sales how to articulate and position that story. Through documentation of this training and new internal understanding, Product Marketing begins to use the common articulation regarding how its solution uniquely resolves buyer needs and problems. This process is non-discretionary for any market-driven initiative. Furthermore, it can only be accomplished by regularly scheduled client and non-client interviews that are structured to gather “actionable” results. (Also embedded and monitored into PM annual performance objectives) That means using weighted relevance, ratings and prioritization of prospect perception of a vendor’s attributes, positioning, sales cycle activities and solutions. This way, post-decision interview (win/loss analysis) data can be used as a performance barometer, differentiation validation and message verification. Not all organizations have the resources to commit to post-decision interviews and buyer understanding, so this function must be funded and outsourced to organizations who can extract, diagnose and align the organization with actionable buy-side results.
Until executives commit to fulfiling the promise of buyer alignment by adopting cross-organizational market-driven initiatives (like win/loss analysis) Product Managers and Product Marketers will continue to gravitate to the point of least resistance or the easiest means to complete MRDs or marketing messages.
Sorry for the long diatribe or thesis-sized response. However, I have been pushing the win/loss analysis banner up a hill for eight years. The good news is that more attention is being paid by executives open to any means to better align their sales cycle and products to prospective buyers and to improve sales and marketing performance. Tough times need tough measures.
