Last updated on August 7th, 2023
Is your closing rate not where you’d like it to be? This guide offers practical ways to use win-loss analysis to close more deals.
A win-loss analysis eliminates guesswork when analyzing your sales process.
Knowing why some opportunities are won while others are lost makes sales improvement easier.
By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to calculate your win-loss percentage and analyze it for higher and faster closing rates.
Table of Contents:
- What Is A Win-Loss Analysis?
- 3 Benefits Of A Win-Loss Analysis
- How Does Win-Loss Analysis Increase Closing Rates?
- How To Calculate A Win-Loss Ratio
- How Do I Track A Win-Loss Ratio?
- How Do You Analyze Win-Loss Data?
- 4 Do’s And Dont’s Of Win-Loss Analysis
- Insights To Look Out For After A Win-Loss Analysis
- Final Summary Of Win-Loss Analysis
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What Is A Win-Loss Analysis?
A win-loss analysis is when you examine your win and loss ratio to come up with an insight (that’s hopefully actionable).
It gives you clear insights into the state of your sales process, including what’s working, what’s not, and what to add or eliminate.
Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your sales process also helps your team make better sales decisions in the long term.
3 Benefits Of A Win-Loss Analysis
There are several benefits to conducting a win-loss analysis. These include:
Better Understanding Of Customer Needs
Win-loss analysis gives you a more detailed look at what your customers prefer during the buyer’s journey.
For example, say you notice higher closing rates when case studies are given to your leads. This can indicate that prospects want more education that they can look over.
Identifying customer goals, pain points, common objections, and preferences is also easier with an analysis.
Identify Areas For Improvement
Your analysis can tell you the areas of your sales process that need the most work.
Improving one area can be the small change you need to make the biggest impact on your win percentage.
Improves Sales Performance
Better sales performance becomes a by-product of a well-done win-loss analysis.
Sales performance can improve by:
- Focusing training on the weaknesses identified in your win-loss analysis
- Creating and implementing new sales enablement content
- Having reps understand their sales flaws so they can improve independently.
How Does Win-Loss Analysis Increase Closing Rates?
Win-loss analysis increases closing rates by first helping you find problems.
This is done by breaking down your quantitative and qualitative data.
Quantitative data are the numbers and conversion rates you’re tracking.
And qualitative data are nuanced descriptions or data that can’t be counted numerically (ex., customer notes).
This data analysis gives insight into what’s working well and what needs improvement.
What you find can lead you to upgrade your sales assets like your messaging or enablement content (with the result being more close deals).
How To Calculate A Win-Loss Ratio
You can calculate your win-loss ratio by dividing the total number of won deals by the total number of lost deals. (Ex., if last month’s won deals were 16 and you had 50 opportunities, then the win-loss ratio would be 0.32 (32%).
You can always calculate win-loss manually, but a more straightforward way of going about it is with your CRM.
Your CRM can automatically show your win-loss ratio and the specific time frame you want to analyze.
In other words, if you only care about your quarterly win-loss ratio rather than monthly, you can set your report settings to show that.
Aberdeen Research states that average sales teams have a 29% opportunity to win conversion rate, while the best-in-class teams have a 45% conversion rate.
Consider keeping your won deals to 30% or higher since this is an above-average benchmark.
(Remember that your industry, buyer persona, sales cycle length, and product-market fit are other factors that may affect how practical this benchmark is.)
How Do I Track A Win-loss Ratio?
Some companies may rely on spreadsheets to calculate win-loss, but it comes with much less efficiency than CRM (plus, spreadsheets can be inaccurate).
Not only does CRM automate your win-loss without the need for formulas, but it integrates with your sales reporting seamlessly.
You can have your reports and sales tools all in one place.
Need to track your sales team’s daily activities?
Just navigate to your sales reporting dashboard.
Need tools for better sales results?
Leverage contact scoring, pipelines, and automation to streamline sales qualification and stay organized.
Your CRM lets you store a wealth of information on your prospects, and it’s more than just their contact info.
You can:
- Track their buyer journey by the emails and texts they open or respond to
- Create and store custom fields for better personalization
- Rank prospects based on their buyer intent
How Do You Analyze Win-Loss Data?
1. Calculate Win-Loss Ratio
Start your analysis by determining your win-loss ratio. Also, consider if you’re calculating by:
- All the opportunities you’ve had
- A timeframe
- A specific buyer persona
- A specific product
2. Gather Contextual Notes
Each deal should have notes associated with them (this will give you context in your analysis).
Review each prospect’s notes and determine what it says about the deal. Sometimes there are patterns as to why a deal did or didn’t close.
For example, if you’re analyzing a win-loss timeframe around the holiday season, your notes may say that many decision-makers were away or traveling. You may have noticed your sales cycle times slowing down and, in some cases, deals falling through entirely.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean your sales process is at fault.
In this case, the time of year had much to do with deals taking a while to move forward.
This is an example of qualitative information.
Having qualitative information like this first will help you make sense of the numbers when you go over them (which is the next step).
3. Analyze Quantitative Data At Different Sales Stages
Quantitative data includes the number of opportunities, closing rate, sales velocity, and more.
Looking at this data shows how your sales efforts are contributing to deals either being won or lost.
For example, maybe you’re seeing a large conversion drop-off after your sales calls. This could be an indicator to update your sales script or work on your rep’s sales confidence.
In other cases, you could lack follow-up on different channels (email, text, social media, etc.).
If you haven’t already, adopting a sales playbook could be a solution.
A sales playbook gives your team a step-by-step approach to every sale for more sales consistency.
Companies with sales enablement (a key part of your sales playbook) achieve a 49% win rate on forecasted deals, compared to 42.5% for those without.
4. Look Into Your Lead Source
Lead quality can be a big factor in a win-loss ratio.
Evaluate where your leads come from and how closely they resemble your ICP (ideal client profile).
- With cold audiences, which marketing channel gets you the most qualified leads?
- Which marketing channel gets you the most easy-to-win deals? (You can look at the sales cycle time for this one.)
- What marketing channel is giving you the most unqualified leads?
Be sure to have a clear ICP before changing your marketing source. An ICP helps with establishing a clearer message that attracts better leads.
5. Consider The Season
Some markets buy more during some seasons than others.
Be sure to factor this into your win-loss analysis, especially if your product or service is designed for a certain time of year.
Researching market trends during various seasons can help you better predict how deal flow will be affected by each season.
6. Speak To Your Prospects And Customers
Hearing why some didn’t decide to buy your product or service and why others did gives you valuable information.
You get a chance to add even more context to your analysis.
It’s not easy to know why a prospect didn’t buy, but surveys and interviews are an excellent way to learn more.
You can ask prospects from your lost opportunities:
- Why they went with a competitor
- What they didn’t like about your product or service
- If the timing wasn’t right
- How your product or service could be better
For customers, you can ask:
- Why they bought your product or service
- Why they felt your product or service was the best solution
- What made their buyer journey different with your company than with competitors
- what competitors they considered
The insights you get for your won and lost deals will give you conclusions you can act on.
You can avoid the hard work of “figuring” your customers out.
Instead, you can ask them what influenced their decision directly, which cuts your learning curve time in half.
6. Note Takeaways From Data
Be sure to write down actionable takeaways based on your analysis.
These will be the actions you take to better your closing rate.
Your takeaways will be from analyzing both quantitative (metrics) and qualitative (descriptive) data.
7. Execute On The Information
Now take action based on the data you’ve analyzed.
This could mean:
- Changing how you sell to a persona
- Upgrading your product
- Focusing on a particular industry more
- Recording more notes on your deals
- Increasing your follow-up cadence
- Upgrading sales software to be more efficient
4 Quick Do’s And Dont’s Of Win-Loss Analysis
- Do record marketing & sales data – Keep as much marketing and sales information as possible to give you more data to draw from in a future win-loss analysis.
- Don’t assume there’s one catalyst – Often, there’s more than one answer to why a win-loss ratio is low. Aim to come up with 3-5 factors that are affecting your ratio. Then come up with solutions to those factors. In most cases, this will increase the odds of fixing the problem rather than one solution.
- Don’t let the same actions repeat themselves – Your analysis and sales execution should prevent the same problem from happening in the future. If the same roadblocks happen again, revisit your action plan or form a new conclusion.
- Do revisit your win-loss takeaways quarterly – Looking back at your previous takeaways helps you see how accurate they were. This can give you confidence that your analysis is accurate, and you can repeat the steps you took in the future.
Insights To Look Out For After A Win-Loss Analysis
1. Keep Your Team On The Same Page
Be sure to have stakeholders and your entire team on the same page.
It’s critical for them to understand the problem areas, the analysis, and the solutions that’ll lead to improvement.
Having a roadmap for everyone to follow will increase the likelihood of success with your new sales approach.
2. Invest In Training And Education
Invest in ongoing training and education for your sales team. Your training should include the solutions that’ll lead to better win-loss ratios.
This should affect your:
- Sales playbook
- Sales role-play training
- Sale meetings
- CRM tasks
- New hire onboarding
- LMS
- Other sales enablement content
Training will improve your sales team’s skills, knowledge, and confidence.
3. Improve Your Marketing
Sometimes sales can be tricky because marketing isn’t generating the right lead volume or quality.
Analyze your ratios for MQL to SQL. If the ratio is low, it’s a sign that your targeting could be improved.
4. Optimize processes With New Technology
Sometimes technology, or the lack thereof, is the bottleneck to a sales process.
New technology can mean more sales effectiveness and reporting. Excellent reporting means accurate data to conclude from in a future analysis.
I recommend implementing a well-rounded marketing and sales CRM like VipeCloud. It gives you all the features you need for more sales leverage and quality reporting without being too costly.
Improve Your Win-Loss Analysis With CRM
A win-loss analysis gives you an action plan to improve your sales process continuously.
You can implement a well-rounded solution by taking an inventory of your sales or marketing bottlenecks. From there, you need your team on board for year-round sales consistency.
Another thing you can’t forget is the type of CRM you’re using.
Without the right CRM — you could be analyzing inaccurate or hard-to-understand data.
Consider VipeCloud, a CRM helping small businesses accurately report sales numbers for better analysis.
You can get a walkthrough of VipeCloud from an expert when you request a demo.
But first, claim your 15-day free trial when you sign-up for VipeCloud today.
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