How to Conduct B2B SaaS Win, Loss, and Churn Interviews

Customer research · Customer interviews

Most CRMs have a field called something like loss reason. The field usually holds a single word, chosen from a short list by a seller after the fact, about a decision taken in meetings the seller did not attend. Sellers are not usually misreporting anything. The trouble is that one word cannot describe a decision several people took over several weeks. Price is a common entry, and price is also the easiest thing a buyer can say to end an awkward conversation politely. A win, loss or churn interview is how you find out what happened. Asking the customer for the reason gets you the same word the CRM already holds. The method in this guide asks about events: you walk the customer forward from what started the search to who made the final call, and the reason comes out of the account they give.

What are win loss and churn interviews for?

Win loss and churn interviews reconstruct a decision your CRM records in one word

This guide covers three situations with one method: a deal you won, a deal you lost, and a customer who left. In each case the decision happened inside another company, several people took part in it, and what you hold is one line written by somebody on your side of the table.

A good round gives you the sequence of the decision, the people who took part, the competitors the buyer considered, and the difference between a reason and an outcome. "We went with someone else" is an outcome. The reason is something that happened earlier, such as a concern raised in a meeting three weeks before the decision that nobody answered.

A win interview is direct evidence about your messaging, because it tells you which of your claims the buyer could still repeat weeks after the decision. Wins need interviewing as much as losses, and in our experience they are the half that gets skipped.

When should you conduct win loss and churn interviews?

Book each interview within a month of the decision

Memory decays unevenly. People keep what happened and why reasonably well, and they lose when things happened, in what order and how often much more quickly. The sequence is what this interview exists to recover. Research on purchase recall describes the error this produces: people misplace their own purchases in time, an effect known as telescoping (Morwitz, 1997). That research concerned consumer purchases, and the thirty day deadline for a software decision is our own working rule, not a figure taken from it.

We use a month as the working deadline. In our experience a call held three months after the decision produces a tidy narrative that the person has assembled since, with the awkward parts smoothed out, and nothing in the transcript shows you which parts were smoothed.

The deadline also determines how the program is organized. A quarterly exercise that interviews everybody who left in the preceding three months reaches most of them after their memory of the sequence has faded. Book each call when the decision is made, even if nobody will read the output for six weeks.

Who should be on a win loss or churn call?

Don't let the deal owner run the call

The person who owned the deal cannot run this interview, and neither can their manager. The reason is the buyer's politeness, and it applies however skilled the seller is. A buyer talking to the seller they rejected will soften what they say, and a softened answer looks the same in your notes as an accurate one. Marketing is usually the natural home for the program, because the team took no part in the deal and has a use for the output. Where marketing is too small to run it, use an outside researcher.

Send somebody from another team, or somebody outside the company. Then say it out loud in the first minute: who you are, that you had nothing to do with the deal, that nothing you hear goes back to the account team with their name attached, and that nobody will call them afterward to reopen the conversation. Keep that last promise. A sales follow up after a research call can end the program. In markets where most buyers have worked with one another, a prospect who was promised research and then received a sales call will tell other buyers, and they will decline when you ask them.

As for whom to interview, talk to whoever ran the evaluation and, if you can get a second person, whoever had to approve it. Their two accounts of the same decision will differ, and the differences show you where to ask further. In a meta analysis covering 127 studies and 11,874 observations, the answers of two informants from the same organization correlated at about .50 on average when the question concerned that organization (Homburg, Klarmann, Reimann and Schilke, 2012). A purchasing decision is a question of that kind for the buyer, so two people who took part in it can be expected to give different accounts.

In our experience about a third of booked calls do not happen, and more than a third for losses, so book more calls than you need. We have also found that a modest thank you, such as a gift card or a donation, raises acceptance noticeably among lost prospects and churned customers and hardly at all among happy ones.

What does a typical win loss or churn interview look like?

The standard 30 minute format

The call has six sections, which follow the decision forward in the order it happened. Wins, losses and churn use the same running order.

A churn call keeps sections 1 and 6 and changes the questions in sections 2 to 5. Each changed section has a churn card below its standard questions.

Section 2 asks what changed, on your side or theirs, that made leaving thinkable. In our experience churn rarely starts with a vendor decision. It usually starts with something internal, such as a budget review, a new manager or a process that changed.

Section 3 asks what replaced you, and the answer may be nothing at all. A customer who went back to a spreadsheet is a different kind of loss from one who went to a competitor, so record the two separately.

Section 4 asks what happened inside the account over the final months: the support tickets, the usage and the renewal conversation.

Section 5 approaches what would have kept them through the past, with a question such as "When you raised it with us, what happened?" That question produces an account of something that occurred. The direct version, "What would have kept you?", invites the customer to design a retention offer, and the answer describes what they can imagine. It tells you nothing about how your account team responded when the problem was raised.

The order puts the decision last and never asks for the reason directly. By section 5 the customer has described the trigger, the shortlist and the evaluation in sequence, and a socially easy answer such as price no longer accounts for the events they have just described. The order costs time. Asking for the reason directly would take four minutes, and it would return the answer the CRM already holds.

Section 1 · 3 minutes

Role and framing

Most of this section is framing. The customer decides in the first minutes whether it is safe to tell you what happened, so say four things in plain language and do not hurry them. Tell them who you are and that you had no part in the deal. Say that this is research, that nothing goes back to anyone with their name on it, and that nobody will follow up to sell them anything. Explain what happens to the recording, including that it will not go to the account team unless they agree, and ask permission to make one. Then say that you want to understand what happened and are not trying to change their mind.

Collect the names here. In section 4 they let you ask what a particular person thought. A question about what the security lead made of a vendor produces a specific answer, and a general question about who had concerns usually does not.

Section 2 · 5 minutes

What started the evaluation

This section establishes whether a business problem started the evaluation, and what made it urgent enough to spend money on.

Deals lost to no decision usually show up in this section. The trigger turns out to have been one person's initiative, with no business event behind it. Record these deals as no decision and keep them out of your count of competitive losses.

Section 3 · 6 minutes

How the shortlist formed

The competitors a buyer considered are often different from the ones your company believes it is up against. This section asks how the shortlist was built, so the buyer's list comes out before you mention any names.

After they have given you their list, you may read out the names you expected to hear and ask which they recognize. Record whether each competitor's name was volunteered or prompted, and keep the two apart in your analysis. A name the buyer offers unprompted tells you the competitor was part of their thinking. A name they recognize only after you say it tells you very little. The discovery guide gives the same instruction (do not name competitors before the customer does), and it matters more in this call because the competitive set is the subject of section 3.

Section 4 · 7 minutes

What happened in the evaluation

This is the longest section, because it covers the period in which the decision was made in practice. You are looking for the turn: the meeting, the demo, the security review or the email after which the evaluation started going one way.

Use the names from section 1. Ask what the security lead made of the vendor's answers, or what the finance director said when the number went up.

In a win interview, listen for which of your claims the buyer repeats back to you. Those are the claims that reached the people who made the decision. A claim your team spent time on that the buyer never mentions either did not reach them or did not stay with them until the decision.

Section 5 · 6 minutes

The decision

This section asks about the decision itself and what would have had to be different.

Price will come up. When it does, do not accept it and move on. Ask what the product would have had to do for that price to have been worth paying. Sometimes that produces the underlying objection, and sometimes it confirms that the budget was the constraint. A CRM records both as price. The first is an objection to what the product does for the money, and the second is a budget limit that no change to the product would have moved.

Section 6 · 3 minutes

Wrapping up

We ask the peer question before the open closer. The earlier sections ask the customer to account for a decision, which puts them in the position of a buyer being debriefed. The peer question asks what they would say as themselves to somebody they might advise, and in our experience the answers are less guarded and more quotable than anything earlier in the call. After the open question, stop talking and count to seven before you speak again.

limitations

What a win loss or churn interview does, and doesn't, tell you

A round gives you the sequence of the decision with dates attached, the people who could have stopped it, the competitive set as the buyer saw it, and a separation between the reason and the outcome. From a win interview you also learn which of your claims the buyer could still repeat weeks afterward.

You should not expect the interviews to confirm what the CRM says. A recorded loss reason is one person's account of a decision inside another organization, written by somebody who was not present when it was made. The Homburg study cited above found that two informants inside the same organization, describing that organization, correlate at only about .50, and a seller recording a loss reason is describing a different organization from outside it.

Vendors also appear to misread buyers in general, according to one study that surveyed both groups. In the TrustRadius 2024 B2B Buying Disconnect report, 66 percent of 2,164 technology buyers surveyed in March 2024 said they chose their product because it met their needs for the best price, the most commonly chosen reason in the report. Thirteen percent chose "the demo blew us away", the least chosen reason the report lists. In April 2024, 64 percent of 243 technology vendors said deals are won mostly because their demo is compelling. TrustRadius is a software review site, and the two groups answered different questions: buyers explained a purchase they had made, and vendors gave their view of why deals are won and lost. The two samples are also independent, with no deal appearing on both sides. The figures support a general perception gap, and they say nothing about any particular loss. A sales leader who objects that buyers asked in a survey will name price has a fair point about the buyer half.

Nor do you get a rate. Twelve loss interviews cannot tell you what share of your losses come down to price, because the people who agree to talk are not a random sample of the people who said no. The interviews give you the categories of reason. A survey built on those categories and sent to enough lost buyers to count the answers tells you how often each one occurs.

We could not find primary research with a stated base that compares the churn reason a vendor records with the reason the departing customer gives, and we found none on how much running a win loss program improves win rates. The figures in circulation on both subjects come from companies that sell win loss or retention services. They give no dates, sampling method or definitions, and most give no sample. One widely quoted figure does state a base of 1,000 deals, but it gives no dates, no sampling method and no definition of what counted as a match. We have not used any of these figures here.

We recommend running the round despite the missing evidence, for a practical reason. Nobody outside your company can tell you how far your own loss record departs from what buyers would say, because the answer depends on your sellers, your CRM fields, your market and the kind of deal you run. You find out by taking a set of decisions where you already hold a recorded reason, asking the buyers what happened, and comparing the two accounts yourself.

The comparison is also what to report internally. After about twenty interviews you can say what proportion of recorded reasons matched the buyer's account, where the two diverged, and in which direction. A figure from your own deals is harder for a sales leader to dismiss than a published statistic, which can always be said to describe a different company. Suppose, as an illustrative figure, that twelve of twenty recorded losses turned out to be about something other than what the field said. A sales leader shown that has grounds to change what the field records. The change we usually suggest is to replace the single reason with four fields: the trigger, the point where the evaluation turned, who could have blocked it, and whether the competitor named was volunteered or prompted. Design those fields with whoever administers the CRM, since that person will maintain them.

What you should watch out for

Dos and don'ts in a win loss or churn interview

FAQs

Frequently asked questions about win loss and churn interviews

Should win loss and churn interviews use the same guide?

Yes, with different questions for churn in sections 2 to 5. All three are reconstructions of a decision taken by several people over several weeks, so the same running order works for each. Separate guides tend to drift into slightly different question sets, and the results can then no longer be compared across wins, losses and churn.

How do you get a lost prospect to agree to a call?

Ask soon after the decision, ask for thirty minutes, say plainly that it is research and that nobody will try to sell them anything, and offer a modest thank you. In our experience lost prospects agree more often than sellers expect. Plan on about a third of booked calls not happening, and book more than you need.

Can the salesperson who owned the deal sit in and listen?

No. A buyer who knows the seller is listening answers as if speaking to the seller, which is the problem the framing in section 1 exists to remove, and this holds even when the seller stays silent with the camera off. Give the seller a summary with the buyer's name and identifying details removed, which keeps the promise made in section 1. If the seller wants the recording itself, ask the buyer's consent to share it in section 1, when you explain what happens to the recording, and expect some buyers to decline.

How many win loss and churn interviews do you need?

Run them continuously, as decisions happen, without a target number for the round. Two or three a month over a quarter will teach you more than fifteen run in a single week, because each decision is discussed within a month of being made and the findings arrive while there is still time to act on them. Fifteen calls booked into one week will mostly be about decisions older than that. Each interview costs thirty minutes of call and about an hour of preparation and write up. The match rate described above becomes worth reporting at around twenty interviews.

What do you do when the interview contradicts the CRM?

Treat the gap as the finding. The buyer is also a single informant, and the Homburg research cited above applies to them as much as to the seller, so neither account settles what happened on its own. The places where the two accounts diverge are where to ask further questions. Across a round, the useful measure is how often the gap appears and in which direction, and you need enough calls to see a pattern before you report it.

Does running win loss interviews improve win rates?

We have not found a published study with a stated base showing that it does. The case for running them is the one made above: your record of why you win and lose was written by people who were not present when the decision was made, and these interviews let you measure how far that record departs from the buyer's account.