Set up a program
Choose which deals get interviewed, who gets asked, and how outreach happens.
An interview program runs continuously in the background off your CRM. Set it up once and it keeps going.
Decide which deals qualify
The usual rules, in rough order of usefulness:
- Closed-lost above a deal-size threshold. The floor exists so you're not interviewing the buyer of a $2k deal.
- Competitive losses first, if you have to pick. They yield battlecard material.
- Closed-won, sampled. Cheaper than losses and answers a different question: what actually landed.
- Churn, if you have a renewal motion.
Set the threshold high enough that a human will read every interview. A program producing more interviews than anyone reads has the same value as no program.
Choose who gets asked
Taizen proposes candidates from the deal — the contacts it can see and their roles. Pick the person who decided, not the person who liked you. The champion who advocated for you will tell you a comfortable story; the economic buyer who signed with someone else will tell you the real one.
For competitive losses, both is better: the champion explains what went wrong internally, the decision maker explains what won.
Let outreach run
The agent reaches out by email or LinkedIn, in your tone, and books a short call. It handles scheduling.
Two things to configure and then leave alone:
- Tone. It should read like your company, not like a survey vendor.
- Timing. Not the day the deal closed. A week or two later, when the decision is settled but still fresh.
Interview the rep too
Queue the internal interview alongside the buyer one. This is the half most teams skip, and it's where the insight is — see interview types.
Read them weekly
Ready to read is the queue. Fifteen minutes a week is enough while volume is low. See read the results.
Automating the trigger
The whole flow can hang off an agent, so nothing depends on someone remembering: when a deal over your threshold is marked lost, queue the buyer interview and the rep interview, and when both complete, report where the two accounts diverge. See the win/loss follow-through recipe.
Re-triggering
An interview can be re-triggered — when the first attempt didn't reach the person, when you picked the wrong contact, or when the deal changed materially after the interview ran. The earlier interview is kept and marked superseded so the record stays honest; use Show superseded on the All tab to see them.
Volume, realistically
Start with your top-two-thirds of lost deals for one quarter. That's enough to see themes — a single interview is an anecdote, twelve is a pattern — without creating a reading backlog nobody clears.
If your CRM's loss reasons are mostly "price", you have the strongest possible case for running this. "Price" is what buyers say to end a conversation politely; it's rarely what decided it.