Customer Feedback
|
Sales Leaders

4 B2B Sales Feedback Blindspots and Roadblocks

6 min read
|
Cameron England
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Summary

Summary

Key takeaways

We live in the age of feedback. But while businesses have recognized the benefits of tracking the post-sale customer experience, the pre-sale buyer experience remains a massive blindspot. While most organizations intuitively understand the value of analyzing closed deals, execution often seems daunting. By identifying and dismantling four common roadblocks—from budget constraints to organizational arrogance—revenue leaders can successfully launch a program that drives tangible growth.

Analysis paralysis kills programs: Stop worrying about the perfect methodology. Start small, use an expert, and let the data prove its own value.

Consolidate your efforts: When Product, Marketing, and Sales all run fragmented, DIY feedback initiatives, they waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee bandwidth.

Beware of cultural arrogance: Believing you "already know why you win and lose" is dangerous. Research shows sales reps are wrong about their deal outcomes 60% of the time.

We live in the age of feedback.

Customer experience—a market centered entirely around post-sale feedback—is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. Just as businesses have recognized the massive financial benefits of understanding the customer experience, there is an equally massive upside to understanding the buyer experience.

Formal win-loss analysis is tailored to do exactly that: helping organizations understand, in detail, the exact experience of the buyer during a competitive evaluation. The core of this practice is coming to understand why buyers make the decisions they make. It is a simple concept with huge potential returns.

But what is the absolute best strategy for capturing the buyer’s experience? Speaking with them directly.

While most organizations intuitively understand the value of interviewing their buyers, the actual execution of an effective program can seem incredibly daunting. Revenue leaders frequently fail to capitalize on buyer feedback due to a few common internal hurdles.

Let’s explore the four most common B2B sales feedback roadblocks and the best strategies for overcoming them.

Roadblock #1: "We don't know where to start."

The first roadblock is simply deciding where and how to begin. Organizations that are new to post-decision deal analysis face a paralyzing number of questions:

  • What is the right method of data collection? * How do we get our buyers to participate? * Should we reward them for participating? * How do we track themes and trends? * What technology should we use?

How to overcome it: Start by keeping it simple and utilizing an expert. Make a small investment in hiring an experienced third party and scale from there. An experienced partner already has the methodology, technology, and outreach cadences built. Let them do the heavy lifting of gathering candid feedback so your team can focus entirely on taking action.

Roadblock #2: "We don't have the budget or bandwidth."

It is remarkably easy to make the ROI case for buyer feedback. Knowing exactly why you win and lose enables you to take corrective action and immediately increase your win rates. According to Gartner, rigorous deal analysis can increase win rates by as much as 50%.

Unfortunately, the strongest internal advocates for buyer feedback are often middle-management leaders who lack the budget or bandwidth to actually implement an effective program.

How to overcome it:Secure executive sponsorship. Few C-suite executives will fail to see the value proposition of a formal feedback initiative once the financial impact is clear. (If you need help building this business case, check out our framework for Estimating the ROI of Buyer Intelligence). Kicking off a program doesn’t require a massive initial investment. Offload the work to a third party to focus on a highly targeted, specific segment of your pipeline. Use those initial quick wins to secure the budget to broaden the program over time.

Roadblock #3: Poor coordination and siloed resources

In many organizations, gathering sales feedback is a highly fragmented effort. The Product team might run a few ad-hoc interviews, while Sales Ops pulls CRM data, and Marketing sends out a blind survey.

The interest and resources to invest adequately in buyer intelligence are already present in the organization; they are just spread poorly across the company.

How to overcome it:Consolidate your efforts. Consider this real scenario from a Clozd client prior to working with us:

The client knew they needed direct buyer interviews. As a result, four highly paid product managers were spending 10–20% of their time attempting to execute an in-house program (pulling lists, scheduling, transcribing, and sharing feedback). Collectively, the company was dedicating upwards of $100,000 of their product team's bandwidth to administrative scheduling tasks.

Once leadership recognized this siloed resource drain, they partnered with a third party. Freeing up the product team’s bandwidth more than paid for the external services, and the resulting cross-functional data was vastly superior.

Roadblock #4: "We already know why we win and lose."

In some cases, executive teams believe they already have a perfect understanding of their pipeline. When presented with the concept of formal buyer feedback, they reply, “We already talk to our buyers. We know why we win and lose.”

Surprisingly, as we dig deeper, we often find that these particular companies are actually the worst at talking with their buyers. They rely entirely on drop-down CRM menus and base their strategic roadmap on anecdotes they hear from aggressive sales reps.

How to overcome it:Dismantle cultural arrogance with data. Internal assumptions are incredibly dangerous. Studies consistently show that sales reps are wrong about why their deals were won and lost approximately 60% of the time.

Basing major go-to-market decisions on biased, internal perspectives leaves your company highly vulnerable to hungry, up-and-coming disruptors. While buyer feedback can be hard to hear—especially when it highlights product flaws or an aggressive sales culture—it is your job to fix what is broken. You can only accomplish that by understanding the objective truth.

In Summary

  • Overcome Roadblock #1 by starting small and investing in third-party services to bypass analysis paralysis.
  • Overcome Roadblock #2 by calculating the ROI of your pipeline leaks to secure executive sponsorship.
  • Overcome Roadblock #3 by coordinating cross-functionally and eliminating wasted DIY bandwidth.
  • Overcome Roadblock #4 by checking cultural arrogance at the door and relying on objective market data.

Curious if a partnership with Clozd is right for your organization? We’d love to answer your questions. Talk with our team today.

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Clozd gave us insights into the 'why' we were winning deals."

Ike Nwabah | VP of Marketing

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Outstanding means of understanding why you win and lose."

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Depth of knowledge we could never achieve on our own."

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It's invaluable feedback that comes directly from our customers and helps support us in our product planning and when we go up against competitors."

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