One of the biggest components of a successful Win/Loss program is presenting your findings to the team. There are three big questions when it comes to presenting your findings which are “who”, “how”, and “when”. Let’s address each of these individually. 

“Who” should you include in your Win/Loss findings presentation?

The quick answer to this question is “all of the stakeholders”. But in practice, what does that mean? Does it mean you should do one massive presentation to basically everyone? Does it mean you should do individual presentations to each team? Does it mean you should just do a video presentation to a small group, and let people forward the video to each other? Maybe it means centralizing all the raw data (videos, transcript, and notes) and giving people access to everything, including a slide deck. Here’s our recommendation: 

• Do one big presentation to the senior stakeholders. The senior stakeholders in this case are whoever gave you the budget or green-lighted the program in the first place. Present them with the findings so they can see what they’ve gotten in return for the investment, and you can put the program on stable footing moving forward. That may only be one or two people. But it may also be a team of executives, depending on the size of your organization and the number of people interested in Win/Loss. You’ll have to make a judgment call there.  
  
  
• Present to additional leaders to expand the influence of your Win/Loss program.  At a minimum you need to present your findings to the already existent stakeholders in your Win/Loss program. But there’s also an opportunity to get more leaders involved (or at least interested) in the Win/Loss program you’ve built. The insights that come from a well-run program have application to almost every department in the company. So all it takes is a little communication to various team leads that you’ve got insights related to their team. Once they know that, they’ll be interested in joining the presentation about the findings. Whether you want to have one big leadership presentation, or break that into multiple presentations to different groups depends on whatever your most comfortable doing, and your own view on which approach will be most effective.
  
  
• Carefully distinguish between leadership and non-leadership.  Your presentations to leadership are about three things. It’s about giving them a glimpse into the insights themselves, so they’re acquainted with what the big trends are. It’s about building relationships between you and the various team-leads. And most importantly, it’s about getting buy-in for your program from everyone at the leadership level. Once you’ve got leadership buy-in, you can move freely throughout the company and share your data from a Win/Loss program that everyone is excited about. That event will elevate not just the Win/Loss data, but it will also elevate your personal status within the company.
  
  Win/Loss presentations composed of teammates who are not in leadership tend to be more focused on the nuts and bolts of the insights and data itself. You’ll still cover all of the high-level trends, but these conversations usually have a more “lets-get-into-the-details” feel to them because they people your presenting to are living the day-to-day issues you’re revealing in your presentation. These conversations also tend to be clarifying for actionability because people have good intuitions about what’s possible and what’s not, since they’re living this stuff day-to-day. 
  
  
• Consider doing individual team presentations. The sales team is a very different team from the product team. And the CS team is a very different team from the Growth team. If you’ve done enough analysis you’ll eventually have insights and findings for each of these teams. So it often makes sense to do individual presentations that focus on the insights for their individual team. It’s also important to remember that each team will see the company level insight through the lens of their department. The top reasons you’re losing deals will be understood by each team through the context in which they’re living. So different presentations with each team tend to be valuable opportunities.
  
  

“How” should you present your findings? 

Put all of the findings into a slide deck that fits how your company typically creates slide decks. No big surprises here. Most companies have their own culture and templates when it comes to presentations, follow those guidelines and drop all of the relevant insights into that format. And when you do your presentation, just go through the slides

• Start the presentation with information about the data-set. In order to frame things correctly you need to explain key details about your Win/Loss data-set. On the first slide or two identify the following: How many interviews were conducted, how many of those were wins vs losses, the timeframe over which they were conducted, the incentive that was provided to each participant for participating, and then any key segment information that’s relevant to the participants. For example, if your primary customer segmentation is something like customer size, you’ll want to use this section to show that 10 customers are large customers, 15 customers are mid-sized, and 12 are small (however you define these groups). Or perhaps your primary segment is based on geography, so you would use this section to say 10 customers are from Europe, 15 from North America, and 12 from Asia. 
  
  
• Use lots of quotes and show video clips if you can. When you’re pulling your report together there’s a natural tension between the trend itself, and the power of the individual quote. Of course you want at least a handful of people to have said the same thing to identify it as a trend, but in a presentation, it’s the individual quote that packs the punch for your audience. For every insight you deliver, include at least 2 or 3 quotes demonstrating the point you’re trying to make and ideally, have videos queued up so instead of reading the quote, you can play a real video of a real customer. The video will animate the presentation and inject a special energy into the conversation. There’s a certain kind of magic that occurs when your team sees real people talking about real issues they’re experiencing with your product. It moves things from the abstract to the concrete and it has a galvanizing effect on the people who see it. It sticks in the brain. And people will remember those clips for a really long time. So use the meeting as an opportunity to drive home certain points with video clips. 
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• Be prepared for questions you don’t have the answer to: These presentations can evoke a lot of questions during the presentation itself. And you should be prepared for getting asked questions you simply won’t know the answer to. That’s okay! And it’s actually expected. What you don’t want to do is get caught in the trap of thinking you’re supposed to have answers to all of the questions. If you fall into that way of thinking it can send the presentation in a strange direction, and you risk losing credibility in front of your audience.
  
  Because your teammates don’t have a full understanding of the limits of your WIn/Loss data-set, they’ll ask you questions about things that are outside of what the data can tell us. The head of product will say something like “what have we learned about X new feature we deployed last month”. And in your head you’ll remember that actually one person did say something about that feature, but the truth of the matter is you only have feedback from one person, so you don’t actually know. You need to think on your feet and be comfortable with whatever the data itself says, and with the limits of your knowledge. The team will appreciate your candor and by admitting there are certain things you don’t know, it will build credibility in their eyes.    
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Another classic question is you’ll have apparently conflicting data in your presentation. For example, sometimes “price” is one of the top reasons you’re losing deals, but it’s also one of the top reasons you're winning deals. How can that be? Well, in your presentation, your audience will have a knee-jerk judgment and sense that there’s a contradiction and will ask about it in front of everyone. What’s probably going on here is the data is correct, but the reason pricing works in both directions is because larger customers may think the price is high, and smaller customers may think the price is low. So it is driving wins and losses, it just depends on who the customer is. There are nuanced distinctions like this throughout the data, and when your audience senses a contradiction in your presentation, take a step back, think about what they’re saying, and simply move into the nuanced explanation of why it appears contradictory, but actually isn’t. (if you’ve done all the interviews yourself, you understand this data much better than you think you do!). Once you provide that type of explanation, the contradiction shifts from being a contradiction to being an insight, and tends to generate interesting conversation amongst the team (it also tends to build your credibility as an expert on the data)   

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“When” should you present your findings?

This depends a little on how many interviews you're conducting, but on average our clients tend to present their findings quarterly, and on average the data-set consists of 30-40 interviews. If we’re thinking about just the size of the data-set alone, we’d recommend getting at least 20 interviews before presenting, and if you’re really able to generate a high-volume of interviews, the sweet-spot for total interviews is closer to 60.  A lot of teams have a hard time generating that many interviews, so as long as you’re north of 20, you’ll have a big enough data-set to start identifying patterns so long as one key thing is true: The 20 interviews are all fairly similar in profile. For example, if you have 3 different products, you don’t want 7 interviews from each product, that’s a mess. You want 20 interviews from 1 product. And then within that product you want to segment as much as possible. So it would look more like 20 interviews from 1 product, all of around the same size (mid-market) and all based in North America, or something along those lines. If your customer profile is well defined, 20 interviews will suffice. And if you’ve got a lot of interviews booked, aim for 60 if you can!

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