This Win-Loss discussion is a fun one: Should we script our Win-Loss calls or should we attempt to avoid “leading the witness” and just work with general outlines? We have thoughts. Oh! Do we have thoughts.
The Win-Loss Garden Path Interview
The classical way of conducting the Win-Loss Garden Path interview is to simply start a conversation. You may have a few things thematically planned, for instance problems your buyer was trying to solve or competitive options and the like, but you avoid planning specific questions. The thinking here is that we don’t want to ‘lead the witness’ by being too specific. Rather the goal is to let them lead the discussion and gather their thoughts organically.
The issue with the Garden Path method is that it becomes quite difficult down the road to compare apples to apples with interviews with others. Some conversations will have focused on some concepts while others will have focused on others. Outliers abound and it becomes challenging to know if a particular point was n=1 or n=many. Essentially, you’ll end up learning more about one particular buyer but less about trends among your buyers.
The Win-Loss Guided Tour Interview
Our preferred method of interviewing here at The Win-Loss Agency is what we like to call the Win-Loss Guided Tour Interview. Here, we have decided before conducting a single conversation what the topics of all interviews will be, as well as what every question will be. The goal here is to gather information with strategic purpose. Doing so allows us to learn that which is most important to us when it is important to us. Also, it allows for trend identification parsed by specific issue. That can be really powerful.
In a sense, with the Guided Tour method of Win-Loss interviewing we are ‘leading the witness’ per se, but not in a way that pollutes the data produced. Participants speak truthfully and room is provided for more free-form answering, but they key is that we are directing the conversation with strategic purpose so we can learn what we need to know.
Win-Loss Analysis Made Easy
Once pages of transcripts have been gathered, it’s time to analyse what we have. This is the time where both the Garden Path interview style breaks down and the Guided Tour interview method shines. Sorting through 300 pages of Garden path conversation in the hopes of accidentally finding trends or keyword search attempts is extremely inefficient. We end up back at the n=1 analysis. The Guided Tour interview method on the other hand, has pre-parsed concepts across all transcripts. We cannot overstate the value of this. Analysis of reams of text is very straightforward when everything you want to know is always in the same place across all transcripts.
Want To Know More?
Hit us up on our contact page. We love chatting Win-Loss and would be happy to discuss.
