Commercial

Why you lose, and why nobody writes it down

Every lost deal contains information you paid for. Almost all of it gets thrown away.

When a deal is won, everyone knows why. When one is lost, the file closes and the reason lives in one person's head for about a week. Over a year that is a considerable amount of purchased information, discarded.

Two piles, not one

The first job is separating noise from real loss. A great deal of what gets marked lost was never a deal: the tyre-kicker, the student, the competitor pricing you, the enquiry with no budget behind it. Counting those alongside genuine losses produces a number that is technically accurate and useless.

Real losses are the ones where a qualified buyer with a real need chose someone else, or chose nothing. Those are the only ones worth analysing, and there are far fewer of them than the raw figure suggests.

Ask a smaller question

“Why did we lose?” is too big and gets answered with “price”, which is almost always wrong and never actionable. Ask instead: what did they choose instead, and what did that give them that we did not? Price, speed, range, confidence, someone they already knew. Those distinctions lead somewhere.

Count, do not calculate

Report loss reasons in numbers of opportunities, never in the value attached to them. Pipeline values on lost deals are optimistic fiction, and totalling them produces a dramatic figure that tells you nothing. Eleven losses for the same reason is a finding. Two hundred thousand in “lost revenue” is a feeling.

The value of this is cumulative and slow. One quarter tells you little; four tell you exactly where the business leaks.