Win/Loss Surveys - What to Ask

OK...so you've decide to perform some win/loss analysis...you've either lined up some customers for interviews or you've decide to run an online survey (see my earlier post about this). Now you must decide what questions you are going to ask. This will determine whether your win/loss analysis provides a unique insight into the buyer's selection criteria and how your product's features and positioning match up to these criteria...or whether the responses you get from the customers will be the usual 'politically correct' platitudes.

The Challenges of Win/Loss Analysis

Every company should perform win/loss analysis. It is an effective tool for determining how well your products and sales/marketing pitch are targeted to the buyer's needs. It can also highlight areas of weakness when compared to your competitors products and pitch. However, one of the greatest challenges facing a product manager when performing win/loss analysis is how to get meaningful feedback that is not biased.

Using Social Software to Gather Requirements

One of the challenges facing product managers is how to gather feedback and new requirements from customers so that they are representative of the customer base and not just one-off features for a given customer. This problem has exacerbated with the current economic downturn as travel and conference budgets have been slashed, making it even harder for the product managers to get in front of customers and hear their opinions. However, within the past couple of years, new 'social software' products have emerged onto the market which allow product managers to gather feedback and requirements from all of their customers. The first popular use of this 'crowd sourcing' software was Dell's Idea Storm.

Product Strategy Tools - Ansoff's Product-Market Matrix

Overview

Igor Ansoff created a simple 2x2 matrix to illustrate the different potential strategies that a business can utilize in order to grow. The grid consists of products - existing and new - and markets - also existing and new i.e.

Ansoff Matrix

	Existing Products	New Products
Existing Markets	Market Penetration	Product Development
New Markets	Market Development	Diversification