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Win/Loss Analysis - CloseRate Accelerator Program

When ATG wanted to find out how they could improve their sales and marketing efforts, they turned to The Bridge Group and hired them to conduct a CloseRate Accelerator Program, a comprehensive study that is designed to analyze a company’s sales wins and losses.

Here Cliff Conneighton, Senior Vice President of Marketing, and Erin Moxley, Director of Target Marketing, describe how the results of this program provided them with a greater awareness of what was working – and what was not – in their sales and marketing organizations.

Discovering the “Why” Behind Wins & Losses

When ATG wanted to improve their sales and marketing efforts, they decided to investigate the circumstances surrounding the company’s recent sales wins and losses. “We compete in a reasonable volume of deals,” says Erin, “and we wanted to know – from our initial contact of prospects via a marketing program through to the interactions with our inside and field sales teams – how we could improve and thereby increase our win ratio.”

Their first initiative was a small “deep dive” win-loss analysis of four companies that involved in-depth interviews. Both Cliff and Erin found this information valuable but quickly realized it was difficult to make any assumptions with such a small sampling. “We wanted to have a larger volume of win-loss analyses in order to better identify patterns from a higher level, broader stroke point of view,” says Erin.

Validate, Explore, Learn

ATG then decided to engage The Bridge Group to conduct a CloseRate Accelerator Program for a more expansive study. “The Accelerator Program provided us with an opportunity to validate things we thought to be true, explore whether certain occurrences were isolated incidences or repeating trends,” says Cliff, “and learn new things about sales and marketing that we weren’t aware of.”

During the Accelerator Program, The Bridge Group collected comprehensive data on ATG’s marketing and sales cycles through a combination of a web survey (with close ended questions) and telephone interviews (with open ended questions) with 26 current customers and former prospects of ATG. The Bridge Group then analyzed the data for quantitative and qualitative trends in four key categories: people, process, product, and pricing.

Surprises…and Confirmations

For ATG, some of the most surprising data was found in the people and process categories. “After reviewing the results of the Accelerator Program, we realized that we could have developed closer, more partner-like relationships with our prospects,” Erin says, “and perhaps could have engaged in a more consultative selling process.”

According to Cliff, they also learned a few other things that they hadn’t expected. “We found areas in marketing we could work on,” says Cliff, “such as being more articulate about our offerings, whether it’s through a different piece of collateral or a different type of sales training.” In addition, ATG found out more about whom in the industry they compete with and discovered it’s actually a shorter list of companies than they had assumed.

The Accelerator study also validated certain assumptions ATG had made, in areas such as its leadership position and its value proposition. “We learned through this study that we are absolutely perceived as the market leader,” says Erin, “and that people realize we are offering some of the best products out there.” Cliff adds, “Our basic positioning is getting through. Even if these companies chose not to buy from us, they understood our core positioning and know what we’re good at.”

Putting the Information to Work

ATG is in the process of incorporating what they learned through the Accelerator Program with other information, including raw data from Salesforce.com, for an executive assessment of the previous year’s wins and losses. “We now have hard data we can use to present within the organization to make future improvements,” says Erin.

ATG has already begun to make changes in marketing by creating new collateral and white papers that represent their offerings more comprehensively. They are also fine-tuning their market targeting to better define what type of prospects they go after. “We learned there are some areas where we are just not a fit,” says Cliff, “so we might as well spend our time in areas where we are.”

The Value of Asking the Right Questions

Both Cliff and Erin felt that The Bridge Group’s expertise was a key factor in the success of this project. “Because they are sales people themselves and know inside sales processes, they understood the objectives of a program like this,” says Erin, “and their ability to execute on it was tremendous.”

“They did what we asked them to in a timely, efficient, and cost-effective way,” says Cliff, “and they were very professional.” He adds, “We didn’t hire them because they’re experts in e-commerce – that’s our job. We hired them because they are experts in structuring questions, getting the calls done, and presenting the results in an absorbable way that makes sense. And that’s what they did.”

“We have been able to utilize the information we learned from our initial Accelerator Program in such a way,” says Erin, “that we now want to explore the same issues with another one of our service offerings.”