Don’t skip analyzing competitive losses
I truly hate losing. I always have. As the youngest of four siblings who all are pretty driven individuals, it naturally fostered a pretty competitive household. Basketball, running, Monopoly, Risk, Mario Kart. It didn’t really matter what the activity was. It was always competitive and it always stung when I lost.
There is a silver lining to losing: it is an immensely motivating catalyst to improve. And that desire to get better in the face of challenges has led me to spend significantly more time thinking about my weaknesses than my strengths.
I know what my strengths are. I’ve spent years honing aspects of my work persona to ensure I know exactly what I can bring to the table in conversations with teams across the organization. So I want to spend time analyzing where I fall short to bring those skills up to par. It’s why (much to the chagrin of my manager) I want to jump straight to critical feedback during performance reviews or 1:1's. Or when I present at an important meeting, I later ask, “what is the one thing I could do next time that would make this better?”
Spending more time to understand your weaknesses is crucial to delivering outsized returns on any aspect of your life. And that’s why in my role at Sprout I spend so much time analyzing competitive losses every quarter.
Losses are the cornerstone of ongoing competitive analysis
This probably makes me sound like a Debbie Downer*. But if you have already done the upfront work of developing your competitive differentiators, this focus on why you continue to lose deals will help you tweak those differentiators and make your market position as strong as possible.
This means that every quarter you need to look at the number of deals you lost to individual competitors, how much revenue was lost and what the reasons were for losing. That’s the bare minimum.
I’d expand the number of reasons you lost deals in your analysis beyond what is just in your CRM. That list is typically too limited and often won’t capture the nuances of individual deals. That means you need to read the closed lost notes and talk to the AE who ran the deal. If you don’t have a set list of questions to have them answer after a strategic loss, you need to get those ASAP. And if you aren’t listening to the call recordings after the deal, you’re missing the rich voice of the customer intel in each call**.
Once you’ve done an in-depth analysis, you need to take it to your stakeholders across the organization. Frankly, not everyone wants to hear about losses. There’s often a temptation to put the loss into the rearview mirror and forget about it.
Your job is to make the takeaways clear and actionable so it doesn’t feel like finger-pointing. If we closed certain product gaps, how much more revenue could we bring in? How can we adjust our go-to-market approach to better suit our prospects’ needs and lead to a more positive experience? What competitive positioning do we need to change on our battle cards? All of this data can be used to help your CI team improve and raise the performance of other teams across the organization.
The key is that you are doing this consistently each quarter. Ad-hoc competitive analysis leads to overcorrections and potentially misunderstanding the signals in the market. It will take time, but the rewards are worth it and it builds a culture where it is okay to critically examine where you and your teams need to improve.
* Today I learned that the term “Debbie Downer” originated from an SNL Skit. That led me to this YouTube video, which is absolutely hilarious. That cast is absolutely STACKED.
** I can’t even imagine my life before having Gong to record these calls. It is amazing how much better our CI program has become with Gong capturing this for us.
