What is Win/Loss Research?

Market research is broken up into a variety of different segments. Researching the value of a product towards overall sales, for example, is a type of market research – you need to know what the market will like as an addition to your product, and how that addition/feature will affect sales and satisfaction. Many people believe that customer loyalty is also a part of market research, and some include customer satisfaction in that group as well.

Another aspect of market research is known as "Win/Loss" research. Win-loss research is designed to answer the question of "why" when it comes to things like customer loyalty and competitor choice.

Ultimately, the basic idea of win-loss research is to try to understand buyer decision making, not just buyer habits or satisfaction. It's designed to see when and why your company "wins" (gets a customer sale) and when and why it loses (a customer choose a competitor's option). Research focuses on variations of the following questions: What it is that is helping our company lose a customer? What is it that is helping our company win a customer? How often do the potential causes of winning and losing occur with customers? From there, the researchers look to study how these factors play a role, and what can be improved upon in the future to help the company win more often.

Win/Loss research is also a method of developing procedures to analyze performance, both on a company level and potentially on an individual level, depending on the factors that go into winning and losing customers.

Win/Loss research is generally mixed mode. Quantitative research is still incredibly valuable, as it gives you the opportunity to truly quantify the information you gather to figure out the role it plays in your company's win/loss ability.

But qualitative research is also a major part of win/loss research, because often companies do not truly know what it is that caused them to lose out on a customer. Only by exploring this in qualitative research settings (including interviews) can the company really understand the customer's experience and thought process. Win/Loss research is not a new idea for businesses, but it is an aspect of market research that often goes unstudied, despite playing a fairly major role in company success.

Integrating it into your market research may help your company thrive in an otherwise tough economy.