Sports Teams Analyze Their Wins And Losses To Reach Optimal Performance, Why Don't You?
By: Christina Tatourian
Lance Armstrong says, "Losing, on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among the things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze the failure, or just complain about bad luck?"
Sports do win-loss right
Sports teams at all levels measure their success by how many games they win. And, because their "product" is the game, they carefully analyze their games (wins and losses) to ensure that they are the most successful they can possibly be. Let's take football as an example. Many football teams practice twice a day, 5 days a week in preparation for one game on the weekend. Every summer, before the season starts, they have an 8-week training camp. And, they play 16 games during the season (19 if they make it to the Super Bowl). At the same time they will spend 120 days practicing and analyzing their games. Overall, this represents a ratio of 12% of their time spent competing to 88% of their time spent analyzing and preparing for the competition.
Football teams also maintain statistics on each athlete on their team and each player they expect to meet in a game. These are number of yards gained, third down efficiency, catches made and catches dropped, tackles made and tackles missed, blocks made and blocks missed, etc. You can look up the statistics for any player at any point in their career to see their strengths and weaknesses.
Business lags sports in leveraging win-loss data
How does business compare to a professional football team? Athletes play to win games; businesses play to win market share and revenue.
Businesses have the same goals as professional sports teams, but spend far less time analyzing wins and losses. Conservatively we could say that no business spends as much time as professional sports teams although about 40% might have some method for capturing the win and loss data which is typically a distributed word doc.
In your business you spend much more time competing (selling, marketing, creating new products) than analyzing your performance. All companies analyze the marketplace in which they compete, leveraging industry analysts, press articles and first hand intelligence. However, few companies systematically gather and analyze their win and loss data gathered by their own "athletes", their salespeople. This data already exists in all companies and is an important source of market intelligence and company feedback, but is rarely gathered and even less frequently disseminated widely among the sales team, the marketing team, and other areas of the company.
While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Force Automation (SFA) solutions capture some win and loss data, they are mainly systems designed to increase customer retention and improve the sales process instead of improving the win-loss ratio. Generally many of the enterprise CRM and SFA solutions are very difficult to report out of and provide only very generic information.
What companies need to do
Imagine knowing the business drivers behind the deals you win and then using that information to improve your sales effectiveness, and to create targeted campaigns based on factual data.
In the least you should be able to summarize the following categories from your win and loss data:
Analysis of this information should allow you to increase your win ratio. But the soft dollar impact comes from the motivation your sales reps will get to know their voice is being heard and that they are winning deals as well as not the only one losing them.
Becoming revenue focused and market driven in your company is a challenging task just like it is for professional football teams to execute on every play. There is some tendency to look at the sales force from an engineering position, for example, and separate yourself purely by the role of your job. The engineer may not feel that revenue is his or her responsibility but the reality is that if a sales rep loses a deal it is a direct reflection on all the roles unless the Representative is grossly irresponsible. Inspiring the entire company to take responsibility for revenue can become easier simply by sharing win and loss reports with departments outside of sales. When the quarterback calls a play each member on the field knows exactly what is expected of them even though each role is different and they are all there to win.
Gathering win and loss information that can be trended, analyzed and summarized easily from your world wide sales force can be captured in two ways, one through a service where a company will come in and take your last 10 to 20 deals, call them up as a third party and provide you with a report. The other way is to use an application such as Win and Loss Corporation's Win- Loss Analysis Tool. It provides you with one click reports and all the detail you need become revenue focused and to hone in on your winning strategies for sales, marketing, engineering and executives.
The benefits of using an online solution such as Win and Loss Corporation's Win-Loss Analysis Tool are obvious as it will last the lifetime of your company as opposed to a short snapshot and time. Either way I think you'll find there is no better motivator for the entire company than to see the win and loss reports.
