“We’re losing customers and deals we should be winning.”
How do we respond when customers, sales results, and the market are telling us the product is falling behind?
Fix what’s losing the deal.
Talk it over
Good enough to be considered, every time. Never good enough to win.
It costs you three ways at once: lost deals, support load, and churn. Usually only the lost deals get talked about. And sometimes you did not even build the thing that is losing. You inherited it.
How this problem shows up
- The product makes the shortlist but loses the final decision.
- Competitors demo better even when your underlying capability is strong.
- Sales needs specialists to explain or rescue the demo.
- Buyers cannot find the product’s strongest capabilities without help.
- Onboarding requires too much human intervention.
- Support volume comes from workflow friction rather than defects.
- Different acquired products create an inconsistent customer experience.
- Win/loss reviews identify “features” but do not explain why customers actually chose someone else.
- Win rate
- Churn and retention
- Expansion and upsell revenue
- Sales cycle length
- Onboarding cost
- Support cost
- Product adoption
- Pricing pressure
- Customer satisfaction
- Ability to cross-sell across acquired products
Product experience becomes a business problem when it changes who buys, who stays, how much support they need, and how hard sales has to work to explain the value.
“It was really hard for us to win bake-offs… I’ve had millions of dollars get into pilot, and then at the end of the day, we don’t win the pilot.”
Health-tech sales leader
Ask the buyers who chose someone else
Not sales, whose explanation has to protect them. Not your customers, who already bought. The people who saw both demos and picked the other one.
A better user experience is only worth paying for if it helps you win the deal.
Two ways to start
Plan first to find out why buyers choose someone else. Start building when you already know the gap to close.
Blueprint
Research with the people who decide, the architecture, and a development plan with milestones and a budget you can fund. Two or four weeks.
Build with Us
A solution architect who builds, on your first piece of work, alongside the person who owns the problem. Two weeks to start, then month to month.
Not sure which fits? Call us to talk it over.
Need a business case for the board first? Assessment →
Questions buyers ask
Does a better user experience actually help win more deals?
Only when the product is what’s losing the deal. “Every product in our space has a bad UI” doesn’t tell you whether it is. Ask the buyers who saw both demos and chose someone else. If they name price or a missing capability, a redesign won’t move win rate. If they couldn’t see what your product does better, it will.
Read the ToolsGroup case study →
We’re funding a rebuild of our product. How do we avoid ending up with the same experience?
The team that built the current product will rebuild it the way they already see it. The workflows come out right and the experience comes out the same. Start from the job your buyers are trying to finish. Test the riskiest part with real users, before the build starts and while changes are still cheap.
How the Blueprint tests it with real users →
How do I build the business case for redesigning our product?
Tie it to numbers the board already tracks: win rate, churn, support cost and time to onboard a customer. Then back it with evidence from the people who decide, not internal opinion: what lost buyers said, and how real users did on a prototype. If the board needs the case before any design work, start with an Assessment.
What an Assessment delivers →
What should a product design engagement deliver besides slides?
Something your engineers can build from. A Blueprint ends with research from the people who decide, then an architecture and a development plan with milestones and a budget. The four-week version adds working software tested with real users. The research, designs and IP are yours, whether we build it or your own team does.
What a Blueprint includes →Tell us about the last deal you should have won
Thirty minutes. Walk us through the bake-off and what you think happened, and we will tell you where we would look first.
The problems clients hire us for most
New Product
“We have a product opportunity, but not the team to build it.”
Explore New Product →
Prototype to Production
“Our prototype works. Now it has to hold up in production.”
Explore Prototype to Production →
Platform Modernization
“Our business has outgrown our platform.”
Explore Platform Modernization →
Or see every problem we hear.