Scorpion’s sales team is buying into win-loss analysis—and it’s boosting cross-functional collaboration

Clozd: Today we’d love to introduce you to Hila Lauterbach. She’s the VP of product marketing at Scorpion. We'll be talking a little bit about how Scorpion is getting sales buy-in and participation with win-loss and ultimately boosting cross-functional collaboration.

Hila, I'd love to have you tell us a little bit about Scorpion and your role in the organization.

Hila: It's great to be here. I'm Hila, and I'm leading the product marketing team at Scorpion. Scorpion is a digital marketing company focused on solutions for combining AI products alongside services and expert support. We do this for local businesses in the home services, legal, and healthcare verticals. My team is growing significantly this year, which will enable us to focus on more impactful products in the company and touch more sides of the business.

Generally, in this role, I supervise and lead all product and solution go-to-market strategies and launches, working very closely with our partnership team to launch new solutions and obviously with our co-worker marketing team as well. I'm leading the win-loss and shared programs that we're going to speak about today, building new revenue streams, working alongside the PLG team, product and partnership teams, and many more. I’m also working on our pricing and packaging as we focus on the vertical solution, which is going to be a big shift this year as we go deeper into sub-verticals as well.

I know you've been doing win-loss analysis for a while—since before it was cool. Before you started working with Clozd, what were you doing as far as win-loss, and what made you decide to work with a third party?

In the past, at a few companies, I used to work with internal, quite small teams to drive the win-loss analysis. One part of that was to schedule the interview based on the Salesforce data, working internally with the team to integrate the sales workers' representative insights, and analyze the knowledge with our research teams. Usually, I used to limit this program to a once-a-year readout, mainly focused on the sales aspect of the business and less on the cross-org overall impact. I think that, as you can imagine, there are a few challenges that are common when you do it internally.

The number one challenge for me was really securing participation from lost clients. As you can imagine, this is really hard to incentivize a prospect that was lost and really maintain this high response rate. This was something that came along a lot. Another issue was the resource allocation and the element of collecting the data. When you do interviews like that and conduct the data and analysis, it really requires some type of specialized skills, rigorous analysis, and some other elements that you don't always have on your team and it's really strained them down.

We needed to be very sensitive with the information, ensuring that we collaborated in the right data storage we already had in our system and all these elements of data security collection. Obviously, what I did not mention is that the biases that might happen and some challenges with consistency in methodology made us understand that we needed to consider, I would say, all these elements: to work with a company, that third party in this case, that has the better solution, worked from this field for many years, has the best practices and knows how to lead to the success rates we wanted to see.

To be honest, after understanding that and doing a couple of programs, it was a no-brainer to make a decision to really elevate the program and work with Clozd.

That’s such a good point. If you spend so much time on the operational side just getting people to do the interviews, you don't have as much time for the strategy. You can't share the feedback, because there's not as much feedback to share. One of the other things that is really unique about Scorpion is that you are such a data-driven company. We very seldom see a company who is so focused on collecting data and actually actioning on it. Can you tell us a little bit about your current feedback collection process, in addition to what win-loss looks like for you?

For sure. I will say that this is across the company; it's bigger than product marketing. I have a great partnership with the research team under the brand team in our company. They’re great people. Specifically, Robert Rund leads that, so I want to mention him. Generally, the way we do it, the analysis process begins with qualitative insight. How we do it, we take knowledge and data from Salesforce, internal reports we have, [and] we run surveys in Qualtrics. The interesting stuff that we see, although surveys always have this question mark, is whether it’s valuable enough or not? We see about 10% response rates, and they’re quite robust surveys, so we get a lot of knowledge out of that.

Once all the quantitative data is collected, and we’ve concluded the data and analysis, we run this together and combine the data we have from the analysis with the qualitative insight that we get from you, in the interviewing club, our other internal resources and knowledge, and our sellers' interviews and focus groups we do internally. We also use recording analysis like Gong, which has the same functionality that’s used for these needs.

‍This really helps us as a company to synthesize everything we get and to start having better insight and themes to tell a more comprehensive story and narrative that we can run later along the readouts.

Given that you do surveys and you've got the recordings, what do you feel like the Clozd interviews really add or supplement to your current process? What additional insights are you getting from those?

I would say multiple. I'll try to theme them for a few areas. First of all, they can help us to really identify the patterns and trends in the industry. What are the recurring themes that we see? What are the main pain points coming along for the prospect and the customer at the end of the day? What are the desired outcomes? Secondly, and I think it's really interesting, we're trying to analyze the internal journey of the client or prospect in this case to really better understand the messaging and product focus that we need to highlight for each of the stages. When I break it down at a high level here, what are the client's needs?

Assessment. What happened in the first phase? What happened later when the client cared? What do they need to learn before they actually meet our sellers? During the sales pitch, what’s important to highlight for the sellers? What is considered and evaluated versus our solution? What are competitors saying, what do they care about? Trying to figure out all these aspects along the line, and also getting learnings about leader training and win-back opportunities.

The other side of that is really seeing and pinpointing the commonalities and differences between closed wins and closed losses. Trying to better understand the key decision drivers, what helped them to get to the decision, what was taken into consideration. We differentiated to specifically for us the verticals path. Specific insight: It's really important we go along the different lines of business trying to understand what happened in every sub-vertical in different industries and better understand the drivers there. You help us to also identify the competitors overall in the industry and the market perceptions of us versus them.

I would say that, at the end of the day, we get active learnings with better ideas of how we could implement them through the marketing product and other business units in the company. It’s a great opportunity for us to really review the marketing and sales efforts that we do through the year, how to impact the work, how the perception looks, and really learn better about the client perception and expectation, and how to both celebrate the wins and improve the places that really need to strengthen and learn more from.

You sound like a very classic product marketer, sitting at the intersection between sales and customer success—involved in a little bit of everything. I feel like you guys are the messengers. You're going from department to department and doing such a phenomenal job sharing these insights. Tell us a little bit about how you share from department to department.

Sure. I would say that buy-in is so crucial. Something that I learned through the years with this program is that you need to start by engaging cross-functional people who you think might be your champions. This is something I'll speak more on later, but this will be a nugget. Generally, we put together a semi-annual data and insight presentation based on all the findings that we have, and we schedule about a 90-minute readout twice a year. In this readout, we share this presentation and key findings. We also share it later across several different departments. We share with sales, corporate marketing, customer success, product delivery, and obviously leadership.

We also have a Slack channel, something along the line of heritage fields, where we share the findings from the interview—some knowledge that can be actionable—and also ask reps to share their knowledge with us and what they hear in their conversations. Generally, the win-loss and specifically the churn data—I didn't even mention that, but we do review the churn analysis—it's really spread across the organization. Specifically following the churn with a client retention plan, upsell plan with corporate marketing, and customer success.

We bring all this insight and knowledge to discussions on a routine basis. Every conversation has some mention of it, or a lot of them have some mention of it. Obviously sharing with leadership and, in the case of sharing, investors and private equity that support us to really ensure that we have the commitment and involvement across the entire work. I think that I said it earlier to my team—I think it's buzzing. It creates some interest and discussion across the company by itself at some point.

Looking at how things have evolved over the past few years of working with Clozd, your sales team has become much more involved. Can you please tell us how you’ve been able to do that, and how it’s going?

I would say that the number one win is really to involve sales early. I'll start with this and jump in. Generally, we engage and involve the sales leader early in the process. How we do it—I would say it's a challenge. In the past it was harder, and what we learned is just to work less in silos and ensure that we have this longer dialogue early in the process, ensuring that we speak with top sellers and bring them in very early to show them the system, the demo, and how everything works, and make them the champions of this program.

We use Clozd to demonstrate the relevancy of the data for them by teaching sellers our key findings today, ensuring that they're really familiar with the system and know where to find what they need. We actually ask them to edit and finalize the interview guide with us, involving them in a way that reflects what they care about, what they want to hear in this conversation, and what they want to make sure that we ask and aren't missing from what they care about.

We also share these findings via Slack channels. We talked about it before, but I would say that something important for me is consistency in really framing everything in a positive way. When we come to this readout with sellers and open the discussion, we always ensure that it's coming from a respectful place. We open with the main goals: Why are we doing that? How do we agree to support you in your future conversations with prospecting clients? We celebrate the seller's wins, and if we have a good quote and shout-out from clients, we use those to drive the conversation. Never ever pointing fingers or mentioning a seller's name in a negative way. Just being really very clear about using these insights for learning, improvement, and a way to support the seller for the long term in their future interactions.

‍This is something that, for us, was very, very meaningful. I would say that another element is communication. How do we really use the insights? Because data can be overwhelming. Really share high-level insights with them during the post-sales kickoff and later, following up with a good newsletter, meetings, their drumbeat, and all these elements. We schedule this readout that they mentioned and follow them up with actionable insight slides that we send—how to really use it tomorrow morning. It's really important for us not just to give them the data but to be able to translate it in a way that they can use in their calls.

Also, focusing on providing these tailored recommendations that started with sales but are growing to other teams, working with marketing sales, enabling the audit to really improve messaging processes, training some specific slides in things that can really be useful for them.

One of the things you said that I love is that you had the sales team help from the very beginning with the interview guide. I think it makes people more bought-in and interested because they specifically want to know XYZ, you've discussed that, and now when the interviews come out, they want to see, 'What was the result? What did people actually say?'

I think that is such a phenomenal idea. How do you feel working with sales has really helped the relationship between product marketing and the sales team?

‍I think the number one thing that we've gotten by working with the sales team through the win-loss process is a strengthened relationship and much more trust between product marketing and sales overall. For me, just showing the sellers that their success and their focus area is our top priority, that we support them with in-depth, dedicated work throughout the year and are really committed to their sales success, was the number one thing we could do to build this trust and relationship.

It's really opened up new channels of communication directly with many sellers, not just with sales leaders, allowing them to be more involved in our work on the interview guide, share their learnings, come to us with ideas, and tell us what they think we should focus on, which fosters more requests and collaboration. I would say that it's exceeded our expectations and opened up this kind of relationship and collaboration across the board—from events that we do together to how to improve sales velocity in specific areas and how to think about vertical solutions. It was a great foundation to open up much deeper discussion.

In general, one of the struggles that I've seen is things being siloed, but you seem to have truly mastered that cross-department involvement—getting people involved, getting them to know, to talk, to buzz around the data. Would you like to share any final thoughts on how to work cross-functionally around your win-loss program to actually drive outcomes.

‍It's interesting; we had that conversation internally. Once in a while, we do a debriefing. One of the key findings is going top-down, but also bottom-up. In this case, what I mean by top-down is that in the chain analysis we do, we get this discussion that came from our private equity, our board, and our CEO. It was a great conversation to have: How do we look at this? How do we actually build a great program together to have better retention? It came from them. In other places, when the win-loss is coming from the ground up, it's really great to get this kind of involvement from sellers and create—as I mentioned earlier—championship.

Really thinking about all these aspects, for me, it's also to create a clear program and really define the objective and set expectations across the organization: What are the goals? What are we trying to achieve? Ensure that we have really good exposure for the insights and key deliverables across the entire organization, as I mentioned with leadership, but also get this buy-in from other layers of the organization.

‍Consistency is also interesting. We take this readout, being consistent through the year at regular times that they can expect, and also understanding that different departments have different needs. What sellers need is not exactly what corporate marketing or product teams need. When you think about sellers, I just want to ensure that I'm giving them clear recommendations for demos, new slides, and how to use better talk tracks. When it comes to corporate marketing, you think about ideas for better positioning and messaging, some of the product and solution, clear ICP needs, and really speak about the idea-to-win campaign and how we think about this opportunity.

With product, we would mainly love to hear more feedback about the product and the roadmap ideas for the future and what they can do based on client conversations: what works, what's not working, and what is missing. These are table discussions. Customer success, mostly on the churn side, want to have more insight about the hypothesis, which churn, and recommended improvement for them on a retention basis. Leadership, generally, as you can imagine, wants to hear more of the trends and insights and also areas of focus that we can recommend to improve.

I think that overall, keeping and bringing these themes and findings across the organization and learning them in each of our meetings on a regular basis is really helpful. It's like, as I said, a buzz coming along in the conversation. I think that overall, the tailored approach really gives each of the teams benefits and really focuses on what they care about, helping us to drive this conversation through the year.

It's so important to have role-specific and department-specific conversations and areas of focus. You bring the data and you talk about, ‘Okay, well what can we do? What can we do now? What can we do later on in the future based off of the data.’ You’re doing great things over there.

We have a good partner.

Hey, we’re happy to be partners! We feel so lucky to work with you and the team. You have this amazing vision right from the start to the end, and that makes it so much easier to get the most out of your win-loss program.

I do want to mention the great people that work with me. Molly Reynolds from my team leads all the conversations and readouts, and Kelly Parisson, they're doing amazing work to drive this program. Rob Tran, as I mentioned earlier, amazing research that without him we didn't have a program. All of them together, really great.