In this month's edition of our 'Ask Your Team for This' series, we're telling you our secret sauce to making closed/won analyses more insightful, accurate, and actionable.
Do you fully understand why your customers are choosing you? If you’re making decisions without diving into the specifics of your past wins, what are you optimizing towards?
The analysis to improve your targeting: Closed/Won Analysis
Do you ever feel like you're missing out on valuable opportunities because you don’t fully understand why your customers are choosing you? If you’re making decisions without diving into the specifics of your past wins, you might be flying blind. Imagine uncovering hidden trends and high-converting personas that can guide your future strategies with precision. Enter: The Closed/Won Analysis.
A Closed/Won Analysis is a strategic review of your successful deals, dissecting the data to understand which markets and personas are converting better than expected. It provides valuable insights into the "why" behind your wins, helping to refine your targeting strategy and optimize your revenue operations.
Asking your team for a Closed/Won Analysis will enable you to:
Uncover New High-Converting Markets and Personas Your closed/won data is a treasure trove of information. By analyzing it, you can identify which market segments and personas are driving the most success. For instance, you might discover that mid-market companies in the tech sector or marketing directors in the healthcare industry are converting at higher rates than expected.
Drive Strategic Alignment and Clarity A detailed analysis of your closed/won deals will drive alignment on priorities and strategies. By understanding which personas and markets are converting, you can focus your resources on high-potential areas. This ensures that your team isn’t chasing low-conversion segments and is aligned on the overall strategy.
Uncover Data Capture Gaps The analysis will also reveal gaps in your current data capture processes. Are you missing crucial details that could inform future strategies? Identifying these gaps allows you to set up proper data capture mechanisms going forward, ensuring you don’t miss out on valuable insights.
Do you understand the exact moment or trigger that led someone to purchase your product? It's unlikely it was just because your marketing and sales teams were convincing—it’s because they had a problem you could solve. Identifying these triggers is key to replicating success.
Some common triggers include:
Hiring for a Role: If a company is hiring for a role that your solution supports, it indicates they are investing in that area and likely looking to improve it. This is a prime opportunity to offer your solution.
Past User Joining a New Company: When someone who already knows and loves your product joins a new company, they are more likely to advocate for bringing your solution on board again.
Decision Maker Recently Promoted: A newly promoted decision-maker often has new budgets and the mandate to drive change. They are likely looking for solutions to support their new responsibilities.
Regulatory Changes: New regulations or compliance requirements in an industry can create a pressing need for solutions that help meet these new standards.
Competitor Moves: When a competitor launches a new product or service, it can pressure other companies to innovate and improve their own offerings to stay competitive.
News of Funding: When a company secures new funding, it often looks to invest in solutions that can help accelerate growth and achieve its business goals.
The best way to leverage a Closed/Won Analysis is to turn it into an account scoring model based on the different attributes relevant to conversion rates and sales cycles. By doing so, you can prioritize leads and accounts that are more likely to convert, ensuring that your sales efforts are focused on the highest potential opportunities.
Key Components of an Account Scoring Model:
A comprehensive Closed/Won Analysis should encompass several key elements. When you ask your team for this, ensure the analysis includes:
Enrich Data for Meaningful Insights Before diving into the analysis, ensure your data is enriched and complete. Missing or inaccurate data can lead to misleading conclusions. Enrich your data by filling in the blanks—whether it’s firmographic details or job titles—to get a comprehensive view. This step is crucial for uncovering meaningful insights that can guide your strategy.
Ensure you revisit and refine your industry and persona categories at least every 12 months. Market dynamics change, and what worked last year might not be relevant today. Regularly updating your categories ensures you’re not missing out on new opportunities or misclassifying valuable data.
A Closed/Won Analysis should be visualized in a way that makes it easy to understand and follow. This can be structured as a report with visual aids like charts and graphs, or integrated into a dashboard tool like PowerBI or Looker. Strategic objectives should be at the top, cascading down into initiatives and tasks, each associated with timelines and ownership. This visualization ensures that everyone involved has a clear understanding of the analysis, ownership, due dates, and how their work contributes to the larger goals.
2. Collect & Clean Data
Sales Data: Gather data on all closed-won deals, including deal size, product/service sold, sales cycle length, sales representative involved, and customer information.
Customer Data: Collect demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data about the customers who made purchases.
3. Organize Data
CRM Systems: Ensure your data is accurately entered into a CRM system or a similar database.
Segmentation: Segment your data based on relevant criteria such as industry, company size, region, etc.
4. Analyze Data
Sales Cycle Analysis: Review the average time taken to close deals and identify stages that have longer durations.
Win Rate: Calculate your win rate by dividing the number of closed-won deals by the total number of opportunities.
Deal Size and Value: Analyze the average deal size and total revenue generated.
Customer Profile: Identify common characteristics among customers who closed deals.
Sales Rep Performance: Evaluate the performance of individual sales reps to understand who closes the most deals and why.
5. Identify Patterns and Insights
Common Traits: Look for common traits among successful deals, such as industry, company size, pain points addressed, and decision-making process.
Effective Tactics: Identify sales tactics and strategies that have been particularly effective.
Conversion Rates: Analyze conversion rates at each stage of the sales funnel.
6. Visualize Data
Charts and Graphs: Use charts and graphs to visualize key metrics such as win rates, average deal size, sales cycle length, etc.
Dashboards: Create dashboards in your CRM or BI tool to display key metrics in real-time.
7. Report Findings
Summary Report: Create a report summarizing your findings, including key metrics, patterns, and actionable insights to share with leadership.
Recommendations: Provide recommendations based on your analysis to improve sales strategies and processes.
8. Implement Changes
Strategy Adjustments: Adjust your sales & marketing targeting and strategies based on the insights gained from the analysis.
Training: Provide training to sales reps on effective tactics and strategies identified.
Process Optimization: Optimize your sales process to reduce the length of the sales cycle and increase win rates.
9. Monitor and Review
Regular Analysis: Conduct regular closed-won analyses to continuously improve and refine your sales strategies.
Feedback Loop: Establish a feedback loop with the sales team to ensure that insights are acted upon and results are tracked.
A Closed/Won Analysis is more than just a review of your wins; it's a blueprint for discovering new opportunities and refining your targeting strategy. By clearly defining objectives, key results, and the steps required to achieve them, and by visualizing this analysis in an accessible format, you empower your team to execute with precision and purpose. As a revenue leader, asking your team to develop and adhere to a strategic Closed/Won Analysis is a critical step toward achieving your company’s ambitious goals.
Questions? Don't have a RevOps team to run a closed/won analysis for you? RevOps team too busy with the day to day? Let's chat!
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