Why Investors Invest in Win-Loss for Their Portcos

Chris Fountain is an Operating Partner at Frontier Growth and a multiple time executive in the software space. He joined Ryan to talk about why he believes in the value of win-loss analysis to make better decisions and fuel growth. Here are two quick takeaways from the conversation.

Win-loss insights informs all points of your strategy

Informing your product strategy and roadmap

Win-loss insights can reveal your lost deals are being attributed to a product gap
Use those data points to make short, medium and long term adjustments to your product roadmap

Informing your investing strategy

Market intelligence plays a huge role in diligence: is there a gap in the market a potential investment could address?
Buyer insights can reveal these gaps and help you make a data-backed decision

“Win-loss has been a resource to many of our companies because it helps us close a gap around market intelligence — that’s really important to us.”

Informing the sales process

Are your reps positioning the right value wedges at the right time?
Are they moving to demo too quickly, or too slowly?
How’s the handoff between SDR and AE

Segmenting your analysis into cohorts is crucial

Some of Chris’s portcos have hundreds of clients — others in the thousands.

You won’t be able to glean meaningful insights from looking at all of them all at once. Instead, you have to segment your audience.

“If we say of that thousand, we’ve got 90 or 100 that are of this particular size, this shape, then ten interviews become relevant.”

Identify a segment or cohort you’re most interested to learn from and start there. You can always analyze more cohorts later on.

With proper segmentation, you can learn a lot from a relatively small amount of interviews.

Watch Ryan’s chat with Former Demandware CEO Tom Ebling on this season of Blindspots