30
Jan
2026
•
5 min read
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Why NPS is often the wrong answer to the right problem
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has become a standard for measuring customer satisfaction and customer experience, especially in B2B organizations and SaaS companies. Easy to understand, based on a single question, a clear rating scale, and responses that are easy to collect through surveys, it is often seen as a key customer satisfaction indicator reflecting customer health, service quality, and the overall customer relationship.
In many companies, the NPS score is tracked monthly over time, analyzed as a management data point, discussed at executive level, and compared quarter over quarter to monitor progress, identify trends, or assess overall performance. For many teams, using NPS becomes a reflex to measure customer satisfaction, evaluate satisfaction levels, and track customer loyalty.
Yet, a discomfort remains.
In many B2B organizations, NPS is now used more broadly as a tool to explain issues. It was never designed to address such as lost deals, declining win rates, stalled sales pipelines, results below expectations, or difficulties converting opportunities that were otherwise well advanced, despite high or even positive NPS scores.
The Net Promoter Score is not a bad indicator.
It is simply misused.
NPS in B2B: a useful but misused indicator
Before discussing the limitations of NPS in B2B, it is essential to recall why the Net Promoter Score became so widely adopted across companies and industries. And why, in some cases, it remains a relevant indicator for measuring, analyzing data, and evaluating customer satisfaction.
Why it is useful
- Simplicity: a single question asked in a survey, easy for responding customers to understand, with minimal cognitive effort
- Readability: an NPS score that is easy to read, compare, and track over time
- Comparability: a recognized NPS indicator that allows companies to benchmark themselves against their market, industry, or competitors
Thanks to this customer satisfaction measurement, teams can identify satisfied customers, passive customers, dissatisfied customers, assess recommendation likelihood, and estimate whether a company’s customers would be willing to recommend it.
Why it is so reassuring
Beyond its advantages, the NPS score reassures companies for more implicit reasons related to the nature of the data itself.
- a single number
- an easily interpretable average
- a clear reference point for performance tracking
A positive NPS creates the sense that customer relationships, retention, and loyalty are moving in the right direction. Conversely, a negative NPS is perceived as a strong signal indicating the need to act, launch initiatives, or improve customer experience.
This result, often treated as a decision baseline, appears complete and easy to use. But this simplicity hides a major limitation: as a tool, NPS says nothing about the why behind the response, nor about the implicit open question decision-makers are actually asking.
Why NPS cannot explain lost deals
Across many sales, marketing, and RevOps teams, NPS is used as an indicator or analytical input to try to understand complex business situations:
- Why are deals lost despite being well advanced and supported by a high NPS ?
- Why is the win rate declining even though survey responses are positive ?
- Why does the pipeline stall despite strong product or service adoption and high NPS scores ?
In these cases, the NPS score is often interpreted as explanatory data for commercial outcomes.
NPS cannot answer these questions.
NPS measures perception, not decision
The Net Promoter Score was designed to measure customer satisfaction and evaluate customer experience at a specific moment, based on a simple question asked through an NPS survey.
It measures:
- post-experience customer satisfaction
- perceived value of the product or service
- recommendation intent, the likelihood that a customer would recommend a brand or a company
It does not measure:
- budget trade-offs within an organization
- collective decision-making in a market context
- internal power dynamics
- choices made against competitors
Example: a satisfied customer may give an excellent score on the scale, become a promoter, submit a positive survey response and still not sign. Conversely, a passive customer or even a detractor may acknowledge service quality without it influencing the final decision.
This does not mean the experience was poor or that the product or service lacked value.
It means the decision happened elsewhere, based on criteria that NPS, as a customer satisfaction indicator, can neither identify nor evaluate.
The voice measured by NPS is not the one that decides
In B2B SaaS, when you review your NPS each month, it is primarily your users who respond. Those who actively log in. Those who experience long onboarding, work around poorly designed features, open tickets when something breaks, or finally save time when a product improvement is released. When they give you a 9 or 10, they are not saying “we will buy” or “we will renew.” They are saying, “this tool helps me in my day-to-day work.” And that already matters a great deal.
But if, at the same time, your win rate declines or your pipeline freezes, NPS is unlikely to explain why. Because the decision is not made there. It is made higher up: in committees prioritizing initiatives, within tightening budgets, by a CFO choosing to postpone, or through a status quo perceived as less risky. Your NPS speaks to usage, adoption, and perceived value but it will never explain the precise moment when, despite all of that, someone decided to say no.
What NPS does not measure in a B2B decision
The limitations of NPS in B2B become clear when looking at how purchasing decisions actually happen.
Structurally invisible factors
By design, NPS fails to capture much of what truly weighs on B2B decisions. It ignores the status quo, often perceived as the safest option, internal politics and power dynamics, the presence or absence of an internal sponsor capable of carrying the project, cross-functional trade-offs, and the real timing of decisions shaped by budget freezes, shifting priorities, or leadership changes.
These rarely formalized elements are precisely what explain why a deal is won, lost, or remains stalled indefinitely.
The reality of B2B SaaS decisions
In B2B SaaS, decisions are rarely individual or strictly rational. They are seldom based solely on perceived product quality. Most often, they are collective, constrained by competing priorities, influenced by internal dynamics, and in many cases defensive.
NPS was never designed to analyze this decision complexity. It measures perception at a given moment; it does not explain the trade-offs or mechanisms leading to a final decision.
NPS and organizational comfort: why teams persist anyway
If NPS is so often overused in B2B, it is not due to naivety or lack of awareness.
It is most often due to organizational comfort.
An indicator already in place
In many organizations, NPS is deeply embedded in existing tools, executive dashboards, and management routines. It has become part of the operational and managerial landscape and is therefore rarely questioned.
Challenging it requires real structural effort: revisiting established habits, changing long-standing indicators, and accepting a period of uncertainty. This effort is often perceived as costly, risky, or difficult to justify, explaining why NPS continues to be used even when its limitations are well understood.
A “C-Level–compatible” indicator
A single score is easy to present, comment on, and compare.
It avoids diving into the complexity of frontline decisions, internal trade-offs, or contradictions between perception and commercial reality.
By contrast, understanding a lost deal exposes blind spots, challenges established narratives, reveals positioning inconsistencies, and creates discomfort.
And discomfort is rarely sought in established organizations.
This is where Win/Loss provides a complementary answer
Win/Loss is not a simple feedback tool.
It is a decision analysis.
What a Win/Loss analysis seeks to demonstrate
A Win/Loss analysis does not aim to measure sentiment. It aims to reconstruct decision logic. It identifies who actually carried the decision, why one option was chosen over another, and the exact moment the deal shifted.
It also reveals what blocked progress, even when the overall experience was perceived as positive. Where satisfaction indicators stop at impressions, Win/Loss illuminates the real logic behind the final decision.
NPS vs Win/Loss comparison
Importantly, Win/Loss does not replace NPS.
It answers different questions.
Why NPS and Win/Loss are complementary
Opposing NPS and Win/Loss makes no sense in B2B.
NPS sheds light on the relationship.
Win/Loss sheds light on the decision.
One measures how users feel.
The other explains why a decision was made or not.
This complementarity allows SaaS teams to connect user experience with real decision-making dynamics.
At Diffly, this complementarity is central: NPS captures user perception, while Win/Loss interviews reveal decision-maker reasoning.
Conclusion
The NPS score helps identify promoters, passives, and detractors, track customer satisfaction, and guide service improvement. But using NPS to explain decisions remains a strategic mistake for any B2B company.
NPS remains a useful indicator, as long as the right question is asked.
Win/Loss becomes essential when the goal is to understand a decision.
This is not a debate about tools.
It is a debate about questions.
Frequently asked questions about Net Promoter Score in B2B
Does NPS still make sense in a B2B context ?
Yes. NPS remains relevant in B2B when used to track user perception and customer experience over time. It becomes limited when asked to explain complex purchasing decisions or organizational trade-offs.
Why doesn’t a strong NPS prevent deal losses ?
Because B2B deals are not won solely on perceived satisfaction. Decisions are often influenced by budget constraints, internal priorities, political dynamics, or maintaining the status quo—factors NPS does not measure.
How can NPS be complemented to better understand commercial performance ?
By combining NPS with Win/Loss analysis. While NPS highlights usage and perceived value, Win/Loss explains real decision mechanisms and the concrete reasons behind wins or losses.
Do NPS and Win/Loss answer the same questions ?
No. NPS informs relationship quality and experience. Win/Loss focuses on the final decision: who decides, why, and when the choice shifts. They offer two different perspectives on the same reality.
Should companies choose between NPS and Win/Loss ?
No, and this is a key point. In B2B SaaS, combining both is often the most effective approach: NPS to understand user sentiment, and Win/Loss to analyze decisions made at the company level.
