Riley Martin:
Welcome to this session of WinLossWeek, the world's largest online event dedicated to win-loss analysis. This event is hosted by Clozd. We'd like to thank all of our partners for their contribution to making this event a success. The title of this session is How Win-Loss Analysis Helps To Guide Our Customer Messaging. Today, we are joined by Amanda Timmons, who is an experienced marketing leader and customer advocate with a passion for inspiring change and driving growth. She has led teams in go-to-market strategies at Forrester Research, Aria Software, and currently at Logmein. She now leads the customer marketing team for the unified communications and collaboration portfolio, where she focuses on leading customer engagement programs. Amanda, so great to have you here today.
Amanda Timmons:
Thanks for having me. Yeah.
Riley Martin:
So just to start off, tell me a little bit about your role at Logmein.
Amanda Timmons:
Sure. So in my current role, I lead a team of marketing specialists who are building and delivering customer engagement programs across our customer life cycle. So communicating and interacting with our current customer base from the minute, or I guess the day a customer closes a business with us, all the way through their entire life cycle, through renewal and hopefully advocacy and retention.
Riley Martin:
Awesome. That's really cool. So tell me more about your story with Logmein in terms of win-loss analysis. What got you into win-loss analysis? What problems were you trying to solve by starting a program?
Amanda Timmons:
Yeah, good question. So it's interesting. My journey with Logmein started with product marketing. So when I came to Logmein I came into the portfolio as a product marketer. So I was doing a lot of go-to-market strategy, which is what my previous roles at other companies also entailed. With that at other companies, I had always been part of a win-loss program. I'd never stood one up by myself. I'd always been part of that analysis, part of interviewing customers. And that was always a part of my role, but also I was always doing the interviewing and sort of pulling the analysis together, which was a big list for us. When it came to Logmein, we did win-loss in pockets, but we didn't have a formal program set up per se. So it was something I was passionate about. It always delivered really good customer insights for me in previous roles. So I set out to stand up a program.
When we were starting to map it out I was talking to some counterparts across Logmein and they were actually already using Clozd. And when I learned a little bit more about how Clozd worked, I thought this was brilliant because this was the piece that we were missing from a formal win-loss program. So that's how we started working with Clozd.
Riley Martin:
So when you say that with your last program, like was it kind of being informal? What exactly did you feel like was missing that you did need to have like a formal program?
Amanda Timmons:
I felt like we needed a more objective perspective on our customer's point of view on how we were doing. So we have, of course, a lot of listening posts across the spectrum of different parts of our customer journey. Where I felt like we really needed to build out more structure was understanding how are we doing in the sales process? How are we communicating to customers? And what was it from their perspective that was winning business? And what was it that was allowing our customers to go to other competitors, let's say? So I really wanted to pinpoint, especially from, at the time when I was still in product marketing, I really wanted to understand where were we falling down from a go-to-market perspective. Where was it that we had gaps from our customer's perspective in product experience? Where in our messaging and our packaging, let's say, were we being perceived as not fitting the needs of our customers?
Riley Martin:
That's great. Just kind of going off of that. How did it become clear to you and to your team that messaging did needed to be changed from the results of these win-loss interviews?
Amanda Timmons:
So that's something we're still kind of sifting through. So our journey with Clozd, let's say, and our win-loss program as it is today is we're going through the analysis. All of the interviews have been conducted and we're really digging into some early results from that analysis. What I'm keying into and sort of where that ties into my new role in customer marketing and messaging is, I'm looking for areas where customers have gaps in their understanding in what we provide to them from a service perspective and from a capabilities' perspective across the portfolio. So they might be aware of one area that we deliver an experience on, let's say with meetings, virtual meetings, but they don't know the breadth of the portfolio that we offer. And that was what was really interesting to me and where we had an opportunity to communicate more and maybe differently to customers to really be able to meet their needs. So, first and foremost, I wanted to understand what needs weren't being met from our customer's perspective. And where did we have an opportunity from a messaging standpoint to deliver that?
Riley Martin:
That's great. So, as you're analyzing the data and the interviews that you've done, what changes are you planning on making to implement the feedback that you've received?
Amanda Timmons:
Good question. We're in the processes of understanding what we don't know yet and where the gaps are. So from what changes are we planning to make, it's a little early for us to be able to share that. There are certainly areas that I want to be able to hit on more in our messaging and our communications to customers, especially as it pertains to our current customer base. We had some interviews and some things come up in our customer interviews where it was really just an awareness challenge, right? So for me and my team, we're trying to think through what are the different parts of the portfolios? What are the different capabilities that we should be communicating more? We have a lot to say. And sometimes for us understanding where our customers need us to be better, where they need us to be more upfront with knowledge is something that we're taking as an input.
Riley Martin:
That's great. So I know that you're still talking about these results, but what improvements do you hope to see, or have you seen any already? Do you hope to get out of these changes that you're making because of win-loss analysis?
Amanda Timmons:
So improvements, I think from an internal perspective with this information allows us to do is to have a construct or an organizing point to go to our cross functional counterparts, into different teams and say, "Hey, this is what we're hearing from our customers from an objective standpoint." It's not our team doing the interviews. It's not a product team conducting interviews in a biased way let's say. It allows us to take objective information, share it across different teams within our organization and say, "Hey, let's come together around these top three gaps that we're seeing based on these interviews and what can we do about it, or what's already being done to address these?"
Riley Martin:
That's awesome. I hope that you're able to get some really good feedback and improvements from the interviews that you're doing. Do you have any final thoughts or feedback that you'd like to share or advice for people who are starting or just ramping up a win-loss program?
Amanda Timmons:
I think, go into the program without a... Try and be as unbiased as you approach the program as possible. I think when I started down this path, I had specific ideas in mind in where I thought our gaps were, around experience, around maybe communicating different commercial packages to our customers. And I think it was simpler than that. I think resoundingly the gaps that were sort of illuminated from this research allowed us to rethink some fundamental go-to-market motions and some fundamental messaging components as well. So I think that was my biggest takeaway. It's not as complicated as I thought it would be starting out. It really what bubbled up are some really back, not back to basics, but some general challenges that we need to address as far as allowing our customers to understand how we can be helping them better. And I think that was my biggest takeaway was through the research with Clozd we really understood the gaps, where we were falling down as a company in our customers' eyes. So being able to highlight those gaps and really understand how we can be helping our customers better, I think was my biggest takeaway.
Riley Martin:
That's awesome. I think that's really good advice not to come in with certain expectations about what the feedback will be, but to be open to what the buyers actually say, because I think that's a lot of the value of win-loss analysis is highlighting things that you might not even know about are issues or challenges that you have in selling your product. So thank you so much for sharing that feedback. And I really appreciate everything that you shared with us today and everyone. Thank you so much for attending this session of WinLossWeek. Hope you have a great day.
Amanda Timmons:
Thank you.
