Analyze closed deals for expansion insights

Introduction

Understanding the factors that contribute to the success or failure of your expansion efforts is crucial for refining your strategies and driving continuous growth. Analyzing closed deals, both won and lost, provides valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t, helping you make informed decisions and improve future initiatives. This article will guide you through the process of conducting post-mortem analyses on closed deals to identify key success factors and barriers. Building on the collaboration between customer success and account teams, this final step ensures that your expansion strategies are data-driven and continuously optimized.

Why does this matter?

Analyzing closed deals is essential for several reasons:

• Identify success factors: Understand what contributed to successful deals to replicate these factors in future efforts.

• Recognize barriers: Identify the obstacles that led to lost deals to address and mitigate them moving forward.

• Inform strategy: Use insights from closed deals to refine your expansion strategies and improve overall effectiveness.

• Drive continuous improvement: Ensure that your approach to expansion is always evolving based on real-world outcomes.

How to get started

To effectively analyze closed deals for expansion insights, follow these steps:

Step 1: Collect and categorize closed deal data

1. Gather comprehensive data

   • Deal outcomes: Collect data on both won and lost deals, including detailed records of each deal’s progression and outcome.

   • Customer feedback: Gather feedback from customers involved in the deals to understand their perspectives and experiences.

2. Categorize deals

   • By outcome: Separate deals into categories based on whether they were won or lost.

   • By customer segment: Analyze deals within different customer segments to identify trends and patterns.

Step 2: Conduct post-mortem analysis

1. Analyze success factors

   • Key contributors: Identify the key factors that contributed to successful deals, such as specific strategies, customer needs addressed, or unique value propositions.

   • Best practices: Document best practices that can be replicated in future expansion efforts.

2. Identify barriers

   • Common obstacles: Determine the common obstacles that led to lost deals, such as pricing issues, product gaps, or competition.

   • Mitigation strategies: Develop strategies to address and overcome these barriers in future deals.

Step 3: Share insights and refine strategies

1. Communicate findings

   • Internal teams: Share insights from the post-mortem analysis with customer success, sales, and marketing teams to ensure alignment and inform future strategies.

   • Leadership: Provide detailed reports to leadership to support strategic decision-making and resource allocation.

2. Implement changes

   • Refine strategies: Use the insights gained to refine your expansion strategies, making necessary adjustments to improve effectiveness.

   • Track impact: Monitor the impact of changes on future deals to ensure continuous improvement.

Gainsight features you'll need

• Reports: To generate detailed insights from closed deal data and share findings with internal teams.

• Dashboards: To visualize deal outcomes and track the impact of strategy adjustments.

• Timeline: To document customer feedback and deal progression for thorough analysis.

• Scorecards: To correlate deal outcomes with customer health metrics and identify patterns.

What’s next?

Completing this series provides you with a comprehensive framework for driving expansion through data-driven strategies and effective collaboration. Reflect on the journey from developing account plans and fostering team collaboration to analyzing closed deals for valuable insights. Use these comprehensive steps to refine your processes, ensure alignment with customer needs, and drive sustained growth. Continuously adapt and improve your strategies to stay ahead in a dynamic market and maximize the value from your existing customers.

Further reading and inspiration

• Blog: What Is Customer Churn Analysis