Improve win rates with more effective customer feedback
By Jasper Lipton, Alchemer Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Vanessa Bagnato, Alchemer Director of Product Marketing
Sales leaders are being asked to deliver more revenue with fewer resources, and a strong win-loss analysis program can boost win rates by up to 50%. With powerful customizability and robust automation, Alchemer enables sales teams to collect strategic feedback that helps them understand why they win or lose deals—and drive more revenue as a result.
Why is win-loss analysis so painful today?
Problem 1: Your sales and marketing teams don’t have the customer data they need to improve win rates
Most win-loss analyses can’t actually tell you why you won or lost a deal.
That’s because you only have one source of data for your closed opportunity notes: your sales team. Even in the best of cases, your sales reps usually aren’t in the best position to collect—or synthesize—truly unbiased feedback about lost prospects, which means your entire team is missing out on invaluable context.
And all too often, win-loss analysis becomes a shot in the dark: you don’t have the data to know what messaging and which features resonate with which market segment. Even running closed-lost interviews can only cover so many customers, and as a result, you don’t really know why you’re winning or losing deals. Was it the rep? The demo? The product? The pricing? Without a streamlined way of collecting and analyzing the context of an opportunity, you’re stuck spending more time fumbling for answers instead of focusing on closing deals.
Problem 2: You can’t act on the sales data you do have—until it’s too late
Usually, when a sales rep adds closing notes to an opportunity, that’s the end of the story. Those notes are created ad-hoc, and live in your CRM until someone, someday, decides to read them. Usually, that falls on CRM administrators and—maybe—enterprising reps and marketers. But that takes time, and overloads already-lean teams with more frustrating, manual work.
As a result, you collect data that no one will ever see or act on. That’s because your CRM can’t automatically route closing notes to the right people in your org, based on details like customer segment, deal size, or sales rep. Instead, the data you do have grows stale in your CRM. Without putting it in front of the right people, you can’t take action. Which means that when you do dig into your data, you’re reacting to the past, instead of preparing for the future—and when you’re trying to understand why you’re losing deals, that’s time you can’t afford.
Problem 3: You can’t automatically continue the conversation with your customers
Customers are your best source of feedback on your sales process, and many will happily tell you why you won or lost their business. But it’s hard to know which ones to talk to without a lot of manual work. Usually, just finding customers to talk to means that your marketing team has to run in circles hunting down your sales reps or account managers and asking for willing customers—at which point you’re stuck emailing contacts, scheduling calls, transcribing interviews, and trying to glean insights from a very small sample set.
Most frequently, the conversation ends as soon as an opportunity is closed, win or lose. You expend a lot of effort for not much return—and your customers keep their insights to themselves.
How Alchemer helps you run a smarter win-loss analysis and close more deals
Collect valuable feedback straight from your customers
Alchemer automatically gathers valuable feedback from your customers across the entire sales process by sending surveys when sales stages change in your CRM—including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or Oracle Sales Cloud. And you can tailor your surveys to your exact needs. For example, when an opportunity is closed, you can create one survey that’s sent to Enterprise closed-lost prospects, one that’s sent to mid-market closed-won customers, and another that’s tailored to your SMB segment. You can even go further, and customize surveys by industry, deal size, or any other datapoint you care about.
As soon as customers respond to your survey, Alchemer updates their information in your CRM—no additional data entry required. That way, you can instantly collect customer feedback about your sales reps, the competitors they considered, your pricing, and any other piece of data, all at exactly the right moment. And instead of relying solely on your sales reps to provide comprehensive, unbiased notes, you can collect valuable feedback directly from the people who matter most.
Instantly act on sales data
With Alchemer, you can instantly route survey responses directly to the right stakeholders, based on the exact feedback your customers leave. That way, they can easily see and act on important sales data.
For example, when you close a deal with an IT department, you can send that information directly to your IT sales director and the right product manager, so that they can see exactly why you won that customer’s business. Or, if a lost prospect was unhappy with the demo process, you can immediately reach out to them, or send that feedback to your sales operations and enablement teams and take internal action to improve your sales motion—all without any additional manual work.
That way, you’re not stuck waiting for someone to find the time to go through all your sales notes. As soon as you receive relevant feedback, you can act on it without wasting any time.
Dive deeper with your most valuable customers
Alchemer makes it easy to continue the conversation with customers, even after an opportunity is won or lost. Let’s say your marketing team might be interested in talking to more closed-won enterprise customers. Instead of dealing with the endless internal back and forth that comes with trying to track down and schedule customer stories, you can easily send a survey as soon as that opportunity is won and ask the customer directly if they’re willing to talk to your marketing team. You can even give them the opportunity to schedule directly. And you can be as targeted as you like: for example, you might only want to talk to enterprise customers when the deal size is larger than USD 20,000. That way, you can find exactly the customers you’re interested in, scale your feedback collection to meet your exact needs, and get deeper insights about the customers you care most about, firsthand.
How it all comes together
Here’s an example of how Alchemer automatically helps you understand why you win or lose deals.
- First, Alchemer integrates with your CRM—at which point it listens for sales stage changes.
- As soon as a deal is closed, Alchemer automatically sends a targeted survey to the customer or prospect, requesting feedback on why they did or didn’t purchase.
- Based on the closed-lost reason the customer selects, Alchemer automatically routes the feedback to the relevant team—like sales, product, marketing, or anyone else.
- Alchemer instantly updates the account records in your CRM, so you can analyze your data in one place.
- From there, you can easily dig into feedback, identify the best customers to follow up with, and understand what’s working and what’s not.
With survey distribution and data collection on autopilot, you get an immediate, holistic view of closed-lost and closed-won feedback. That way, you can dive deeper into trends and patterns, and unlock actionable insights that can guide strategic sales decisions.
The result: higher win rates and a more effective sales team
Win-loss analysis is a constant process. That’s why Alchemer helps everyone involved in revenue growth do it better. Right out of the box, Alchemer provides every team with the real-time, actionable customer feedback they need to improve win rates, and gives you the customization and automation you need to create and scale a feedback program that will drive more revenue, fast.
Already an Alchemer customer? Here’s how to set up this workflow.
Not a customer yet? Request a demo here.
