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About the Event
As product managers, we need to understand our target users and why they make the decisions they do. Do you know the real reasons you win or lose major pieces of business? In this session, we will look at how to interview customers, find out how and why they made the decisions that they did, and turn the results into a reliable and repeatable model for roadmap planning and business improvement. We will cover:
- Why do win/loss and what customers and sales reps can and can’t tell you.
- How to identify the best customers to call.
- Interviewing approaches and tradeoffs (blind vs. non-blind; anonymous vs. attributed; etc.)
- How to prepare a questionnaire that covers all the points without making you read from a script.
- How to get both the quantitative data and color commentary needed to prioritize findings and drive concrete actions.
- A way to forecast revenue impact of prospective competitive changes in the market—yours or those of your competitors.
About the Speaker
Ken Schwarz is the owner and Managing Principal of Peer Survey Professionals (PSP) Enterprises, a market research consultancy specializing in competitive win/loss. Ken draws from his 30-year career in enterprise software development, sales, and marketing to help clients identify and prioritize specific actions that will improve their market share and win-rate.
Before he acquired PSP in 2019, he ran market intelligence and set up win/loss programs at SimpliVity/HPE and Progress Software.
Ken’s also held roles in product marketing, product management, software engineering, professional services, sales, and partner management at Pegasystems, GE Digital, IONA Technologies, Object Design/Excelon, and QMS. He lived and worked in Japan for eight years and is fluent in Japanese.
Ken holds an AB degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University.
