Win-Loss is a unique opportunity to hear directly from your buyers. Why do they buy? How are their decisions made? Why do they choose you over someone else? Win-Loss gets those answers. Let’s see if you’re covering all the bases with this post on Win-Loss Interview questions every program needs.
Organizing Your Win-Loss Interview Questions with Defined Categories
It helps to keep questions of like mind together by sorting them into defined categories. This will keep your interview focused and make sure that the broad categories important to your Win-Loss Program Overview are covered. Here are the basic categories that you should cover in your interviews.
- Project or Buying Drivers
- The Buying Journey
- Marketing Alignment with Messaging and Content
- Price and Value
- New Potential Business Opportunities
- Additional Feedback
- The Most Important Win-Loss Interview Question
Let’s unpack those a bit and get into specific questions.
Project or Buying Drivers
Win-Loss Interview questions in this category will speak to the reasons your Buyer wants your product or service in the first place. Quite specifically, what business problem are they trying to solve with your solution today? Luckily, this one is pretty straightforward and you can get the conversation going with just this one question.
- What business or team problem were you attempting to solve when you decided look at vendors to solve this issue?
Not so bad, hey? Onwards!
The Buying Journey
Now we want to get to know all about how your Buyer selected potential vendors, budgeted for a solution to their problem and who was involved in the decision-making process. This is also a great time to go fishing about your Buyer’s opinion of the competition.
- How did your team go about prioritizing this project?
- What did the budgeting process look like?
- Who participated in the decision team? What were their roles?
- How many vendors did you work with to make this decision?
- Why, in the end, did you select your vendor? What really appealed to you? Where did they come up short?
- How would you describe the overall buying experience?
Marketing Alignment with Messaging and Content
These Win-Loss interview questions are your chance to find out if the channels you use promote your product or service are effective and whether your inbound marketing activities are working the way you had planned. Gaps can be clearly identified here which you can feed back to your Marketing Communications team.
- How did you find potential vendors? Did you use search? Speak with your peer network?
- How did you learn about us as a potential Solution to your Problem?
- Which of our materials did you review during your purchase-decision process?
- Were there any materials or information that you felt you needed from us or other vendors that would have helped to inform your decision?
Price and Value
Now we get to the meat of the thing. You probably already have a pretty good idea of where your pricing and value sit in the competitive mix. But here now is your chance to validate those ideas and get to know just how important those factors are to your Buyer’s decision-making process.
- Do you feel that you obtained the value that you expected from your purchase?
- What did you like or not like about the pricing methods and models you were presented?
- How would characterize our pricing relative to the others you evaluated in your search?
New Potential Business Opportunities
This is the time to find out what else your market wants. It’s a chance to go fishing and learn something new. Remember that Win-Loss Interviews should never be used for pitching or sales. Instead, this category gives you a chance to learn what else might be out there.
- What additional needs or capabilities would you like to see in our product or service?
- Are you currently supplementing our product or services with another offering?
Additional Feedback
This is the category where you can put ideas that were not previously covered in the other categories. Everyone needs a slush category, right? Don’t let that fool you. Check out these gems.
- If you had the opportunity to say anything, on any topic to the leadership would you say?
- If there was one question you were expecting to be asked which wasn’t, what would that be?
The Most Important Win-Loss Interview Question
The most important Win-Loss interview question is and always has been:
- Why?
That’s the point of your Win-Loss program in one word, isn’t it? Use Why liberally in your calls. You can use it to go deeper, top find out more, and you can use it to keep a closed person talking and save a call that might end up yielding little information. If you ever want to go a bit deeper on a subject, Why is your best friend.
Refine Your Questions As Your Win-Loss Program Opens New Areas for Discovery
Finally, you will find that you learn more and better understand Win-Loss Interview question gaps as your program matures. Use these opportunities to update your questions and question categories as needed. No sense moving forward with lines of questioning that aren’t working for you. Keep it fresh.
