War-game a win-loss program before interview scripts, sampling rules, and action owners harden into how every competitive story gets told.
Win-loss programs fail when only friendly deals get interviewed, when CRM stages invent reasons that buyers never said, when notes never reach product or pricing owners, and when "we do win-loss" stands in for a measured cadence. A neat interview template is not evidence.
Freeze the package
State which deals qualify, who interviews and under what lag, how notes are tagged into CRM and product intake, who owns follow-up actions, and the success metric after two quarters. Attach sampling rules, interviewer capacity, privacy constraints, and the kill criteria if insights never change a roadmap or a talk track. If sales, product, and research disagree on who can see raw notes, reconcile before seating.
Name the decision you will make if the war game finds nothing new, and the hold criteria if any action path lacks an owner or a measured close rate on recommendations.
Seats
- Lost buyer. What feels extractive, late, or biased in the outreach.
- Account executive. Fear that candid notes will be used as blame.
- Product. Insight volume that never becomes a backlog change.
- Research or RevOps. Sampling bias and CRM field fiction.
- Skeptic. The claim that looks strongest and is least sourced.
Optional counsel seat if interview recordings or customer data rules bind storage. Same pack for every seat.
Run the loop
Feed Pingpong the program memo and exhibits. First pass steelmans the cadence. Later passes attack from the seats above. Final pass turns surviving objections into fairer sampling, clearer action owners, or a hold. Delete invented "we already know why we lose" claims and dual-counted interview hours.
Force a day-after narrative: what happens if sales blocks outreach to a strategic loss, if CRM reasons diverge from interview notes, or if product ignores the top theme for two quarters. If those stories are stronger than your insight-to-action plan, fix the package before you fund it. Separate a win-loss program from a competitive teardown or a pricing change so each decision stays testable.
Ask every seat to mark which steps are optional in practice. Optional post-interview debriefs that never run still appear in the plan doc. If managers skip tagging under quarter pressure, research should treat that skip as a design failure. Write the mandatory steps into the package, then attack whether capacity can actually clear them. Related: war-game a competitive teardown, war-game a pipeline review, war-game a churn playbook, pretend you are the lost customer, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how to run a Pingpong.