Cambridge Business Association
Win/Loss Reviews
Book

Win/Loss Reviews

A New Knowledge Model for Competitive Intelligence

Rick Marcet
Wiley, 2011
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

This exceptionally focused book concentrates on the value of generating win/loss reports to improve sales by making full use of the knowledge your salespeople learn in the course of their work. For some readers, the book’s focus may seem a little insistent, since author and sales productivity expert Rick Marcet explains and argues for every step of the process. For others, his continued clarity, emphasis and focus will be reassuring. Either way, Marcet gives readers a professional tool for improving their sales results by collating better “business intelligence” from the front lines and learning from its lessons. getAbstract finds that this manual could make several kinds of readers feel like winners, including salespeople, sales managers, product line managers and anyone interested in applied knowledge management.

Summary

Do You Know Why You Made That Sale?

You trust your sales team to sell your product, but you often don’t know exactly why your team succeeded in making a sale or failed. This gap between what your company needs to know and what it does know is dangerous. If you eliminate that gap, you will get better at selling and at predicting how well your salespeople will perform in different situations. That alone is a good reason to look more closely at why you win and why you lose.

Successful selling rests on many factors beside salespeople’s skills or character traits. Yes, their personal relationships with clients matter, but do they matter more than price – or less? Are those good relationships more important than service? Do a salesperson’s connections have more impact in one customer’s environment than in another’s? Analyzing your sales performance becomes even more intriguing when you move from studying it in isolation to examining it in context. For instance, is a competitor beating you because of something your sales staff is doing or because of the quality of your product? Most companies don’t know, but you can – and should – find out by adding a new tool to your existing...

About the Author

Rick Marcet, Senior Director, Sales Productivity at Citrix, is the former director of Microsoft's World Class Selling Initiative.

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