When you operate in a fast-moving industry, staying ahead of what’s happening with your customers and the market at large is crucial. You need to know what people are thinking, what they need today, and what they are going to need tomorrow.
Take the financial services sector — it’s one of today’s most dynamic and rapidly evolving industries. New services and products are being invented every day. The speed of innovation and expansion is inspiring and exciting, but can also be overwhelming. If your organization can’t keep up, they will soon fall by the wayside.
Galileo Financial Technologies is not only keeping up, they are setting the pace. Galileo has a proven track record of helping the largest, most successful fintechs launch, scale, and grow their businesses.
One of the key ways Galileo has differentiated itself in this highly competitive market is by putting their team’s deep expertise at the core of their brand. As they say, “Financial technology begins and ends with humans” — a concept that speaks to their pivotal role as trusted guides helping innovators successfully navigate a complex and ever-changing landscape.
The insights from win-loss interviews help Galileo capitalize on the potential of this role. It is only by having a deep and accurate understanding of their customers that they are able to deliver exactly what those customers need exactly when they need it.
Two of the architects behind Galileo’s win-loss program joined us on the Blindspots Podcast to share their story. Sheri Chin, CMO — Head of Marketing, and Sarah Spagnola, Senior Director — Demand Generation talked about why they launched a win-loss program, how they use win-loss insights now, and what they see for the future.
Humble-but-strategic Beginnings
Today, the Galileo win-loss program is on its way to a third cohort. Even though it’s still fairly new, the program has already seen great results.
But only eighteen months ago, there was no program to speak of, and only a skeleton marketing team. Sheri was brought on to spin up a marketing center of excellence, and Sarah was one of her first hires.
Sheri and Sarah both realized early on that they needed a broader approach to researching the competitive landscape and capturing competitive intelligence. “There was a lot of anecdotal knowledge in the organization,” Sheri recalls, “but not a lot of unbiased, detailed buyer insights we could draw on. We knew immediately that we needed to put some research and tracking in place to really understand our brand and sales process in a way that would effectively inform our marketing strategies and programs.”
In the beginning, when the team was still very small, they chose to work with DoubleCheck in part because Sarah had previous experience with the team and in part because they didn’t have enough in-house resources. “We only had two people, so we relied on external experts like DoubleCheck to support specific efforts like competitive tracking and competitive intelligence,” Sheri says. “The truth is, you just can’t do it all internally.” Today, they continue to partner with DoubleCheck for many reasons, including their expertise and the advantage of having access to unbiased third-party insights.
How Galileo Uses Win-Loss Interviews
Galileo uses win-loss interviews in a wide variety of ways that cover everything from higher-level messaging to very specific sales tactics.
🎳 To Inform and Refine Brand Positioning
The relationship between win-loss insights and brand positioning at Galileo is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. On the one hand, the team uses win-loss interviews to determine how Galileo’s brand messaging is hitting in the marketplace. They use interviews to learn how prospects and customers perceive Galileo’s brand in general and compared to the competition. They pay special attention to whether the sales process effectively highlights Galileo’s brand pillars key differentiators.
On the other hand, the interviews informed the development of Galileo’s brand pillars. “The win-loss interviews really helped shape our brand pillars and positioning,” Sheri explains. “The themes that come up over and over again — our technology platform, solutions, products, services, and people — really helped us refine our brand pillar messaging.”
Win-loss interviews also helped the team uncover additional buyer audiences. “It was through reading interview transcripts that we learned about new consulting groups and other firms that help our prospects investigate the solution landscape,” says Sarah. “This was really interesting to discover an important community and constituency that we could be nurturing.”
“Overall, the information we get from win-loss interviews is unbeatable from a messaging perspective, as well as informing tactical actions for improving our process,” says Sheri.
🏃♀️To Stay Ahead of Rivals with In-depth Competitive Intelligence
It’s important for any organization to understand their strengths as well as where there are gaps that can be transformed into opportunities. For a company like Galileo, which places such strong emphasis on the value they deliver through their people’s expertise, it’s also important to get exceptionally detailed and actionable insights rather than generic and general findings.
“There’s a little bit of magic in these interviews,” says Sheri. “You get so much more from an interview conversation than you do from a quantitative survey that asks people to answer questions on a scale of one to five. You get much deeper insights.”
Sheri also points out the value of working with an external expert. “How you interpret and draw conclusions from interviews is critical to really understanding what’s going on,” she says. “ The DoubleCheck team really helped us in that area.”
Galileo’s sales team is highly engaged with the win-loss program because they’ve seen just how helpful the learnings can be in helping them overcome day-to-day tactical challenges. For example, in one scenario where Galileo was going into a bid situation with a bank partner, the Galileo team was able to feed the partner all the information they needed to ensure they could respond well to any objections.
🏄 To Onboard New Hires Quickly and Efficiently
A good new-hire onboarding experience is one that gets people up to speed quickly. The unsung benefit of an excellent onboarding process is that it does more than help the individual hire.
“Our competitive intelligence helps to create a rising tide for everyone,” Sarah explains. “It brings everyone to the same level, and then each person can dig deeper into specific areas depending on whether they are in sales or marketing or another function.”
Using win-loss insights to enhance the efficiency of the onboarding experience is especially crucial for growing companies that are doing a lot of hiring over a short period of time. The intel from win-loss research plays an important role in ensuring people can hit the ground running.
🤝To Build Trust in the Industry
The best way to build connection, trust, and a positive rapport with prospects and customers is to provide these audiences with the information and guidance they need when they need it.
The only way to deliver this is to have a really deep understanding of who your buyer is. You need to know everything from what they are looking for to how they search for that information to exactly which information will help accelerate their journey through your pipeline. Win-loss research helps uncover the answers to these important questions.
“DoubleCheck interviews really help us understand our buyers so we can be there when they are looking for information,” Sheri says. “This is a critical piece of building our reputation because if someone consistently finds your information helpful and comes to rely on you as a resource for making decisions and accelerating their thinking, that reflects their trust in you.”
🧞♂️To Uncover Future Trends and Customer Needs
It’s challenging to know what’s coming next in an industry that is constantly evolving. But that’s exactly what you have to do if — like Galileo — you want to stay one step ahead of your prospects so you are prepared to serve them when the landscape shifts.
Galileo’s win-loss program helps them get insight into what their customers think about the future. “Being forward-looking is about figuring out how to drive future success based on past success in a really dynamic environment,” Sheri says. “You need to strike the right balance between leveraging existing expertise and the lessons of the past with the ability to stay focused on the future.”
The in-depth, quantitative nature of win-loss interviews leaves space to extend the conversation beyond past successes and failures. It provides the opportunity to capture a vision of the future that is invaluable when it comes to shaping an organization’s roadmap to the next big thing.
In a data-driven world, qualitative win-loss insights add a whole dimension
“Financial technology is exploding, and at the heart of it is data — both quantitative and qualitative,” says Sheri. “Quantitative data is going to drive everything we do in the future. And the qualitative data from win-loss interviews adds a whole new dimension to that data.”
Galileo has set themselves up to thrive in this data-driven environment. They have made the internal investments in time, personnel, and organizational buy-in to ensure program success. They also cite their partnership with DoubleCheck as a strong advantage.
“DoubleCheck is an objective, unbiased observer that can look across all the different disciplines and make conclusions that we probably wouldn’t come to on our own,” Sheri says. “An external partner like DoubleCheck also brings a valuable breadth of experience and knowledge to bear. They have the context of working with many other companies, and they can share their best practices with us.”
As the team at Galileo wraps up their second round of research and prepares for their third, they expect to see continued value from their win-loss program. “When we put everything together, we’ll have even stronger and more detailed information, trends, and conclusions,” says Sarah. “The sky's the limit, really. It’s up to us depending on what we do with the information and how we share it.”
To hear more from Sheri and Sarah about how Galileo is using win-loss research to strengthen Galileo’s market position and fuel continued growth, tune in to listen to the full episode 👆
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