How a $1B Social Impact Company Increased Win Rates by 28% with IcebergIQ
Over the last seven years, this enterprise social impact
software company has partnered with IcebergIQ to integrate
independent buyer insights to their customer intelligence
program. Today, these insights play a critical role in shaping
the company’s GTM strategy, sales processes, and product
enhancements, resulting in a 28% YOY increase in win rates.
Understanding their buyers and market is a key objective for
the company leadership team, but even with a mature
customer intelligence program in place, they recognized a
critical perspective was still missing around why buyers
purchased.
To better understand the “why” behind decisions and validate
internal assumptions, the company chose IcebergIQ to
conduct, analyze and deliver buyer interviews.
Challenge
The company’s market research team had extensive data gathered through CRM reporting, customer surveys, conversation intelligence, competitive intelligence platforms, AI-generated win-loss summaries, and their own internal market research. Although these tools were useful for capturing feedback during the sales cycle and identifying trends, they were still missing some critical details, such as the true context behind buyer decisions and direct feedback on competitors' strengths and weaknesses for more robust competitive intelligence. One challenge in particular was getting unbiased and complete feedback from their enterprise prospects who didn’t end up purchasing. These prospects often developed strong relationships with sellers during the cycle, and some were reluctant to share candid feedback directly.
The team also faced resource constraints when they downsized, making it difficult to scale and capture accurate input across a large customer base. The company needed an independent, experienced win-loss provider to help them gather more complete competitive intel, validate various internal assumptions, and provide an unbiased view of what buyers were really thinking.
In this article, you’ll learn:
How, even with CRM data, surveys, conversation intel, competitive intel and AI- generated win-loss, you still miss the true context behind buyer decisions
Why prospects often develop strong relationships with sellers during the cycle, making them reluctant to share candid feedback directly
How customer intelligence programs using independent, 3rd party insights have a direct impact on win rates
Why IcebergIQ?
The company initially began with IcebergIQ’s predecessor, Eigenworks, and continued that partnership when IcebergIQ launched seven years ago. Today, IcebergIQ is an important trusted partner in qualitative research efforts for multiple teams within the company. Rather than committing to a quarterly number of interviews, the engagement is based on a number of studies per year. This way, the company can prioritize the internal requests for research accordingly across multiple products. The continuous research partnership allowed the company to launch new win-loss and customer success studies quickly, and investigate any new competitive questions without starting from scratch.
“We get a lot of really juicy competitive intel from IcebergIQ insights that we don’t get from Klue or Gong, which provide more real-time data. With IcebergIQ, we can overlay various parts of the customer journey with direct buyer feedback.”
Results
IcebergIQ's research has become an integral part of the company's broader customer intelligence program. Insights from buyer interviews are incorporated into competitive and GTM strategies, and individual reports are regularly used during sales training and internal case study reviews. The company’s research team gets answers to important, strategic questions that internal data alone can’t provide. Learnings have been used to:
• Validate and prioritize internal assumptions
• Strengthen sales messaging using direct buyer language
• Assess if upcoming renewals are at risk
• Improve go-to-market content with direct competitive insights
• Help enterprise/upmarket reps stay confident and successful, thus increasing tenure
• Build internal team alignment and support
The results speak for themselves. The company’s customer intelligence program has increased win rates by 28% year-over-year.
“The Iceberg team has stepped up to every challenge we threw at them, and the quality has remained exceptional year after year. Their win-loss insights have absolutely contributed to our double digit increase in win rates!”
Their tech stack helped this $1B enterprise company identify important trends, but IcebergIQ services added the necessary layer to validate and put learnings into action.