What the losses tell you

Every business loses more opportunities than it wins, and almost none of them record why. A year of recorded loss reasons is the most useful document a small business can own, and it costs one line per loss.

Ask, and ask properly

The question is not why did we lose, which invites a polite answer. It is: what made the difference. Asked once, after the decision, with an explicit statement that you are not trying to reopen it.

That last part is what produces honesty. People who know the conversation is over will tell you things they would not say while a sale is live, and they are often more specific than you expect.

The categories, and what each one means

• Price, meaning value. Usually not about your number. Look at whether the problem's cost was ever established.
• Fit. You were not the right answer. Good news, and a qualifying lesson rather than a sales one.
• Timing. Not a loss. Diary it.
• Trust. They were not confident it would work. Look at the risk structure: the size of the first commitment, what you showed rather than claimed.
• Nothing. They did not do it at all, with anybody. The most common outcome in many markets, and the one most often misrecorded as a competitor win.
• Process. You were slow, or unclear, or did not follow up. The most fixable and the least comfortable.

Reading the pattern

1. 01Review the reasons quarterly, not individually. One loss is an anecdote and twelve are a pattern.
2. 02Look for concentration. If a third of losses share one reason, that is the thing to change, and it is usually earlier in the process than the loss itself.
3. 03Separate the ones you could have affected from the ones you could not. Budget and timing are frequently outside your control; process and trust are not.
4. 04Check which stage they died at. Losses at the proposal stage mean a qualifying problem; losses after a first conversation mean the conversation was not doing its job.

What to do with a loss in the moment

Three things, in order, and none of them is persuasion.

1. 01Accept it cleanly, in one line, with no argument. How you lose determines whether you are considered next time, and a gracious loss is remembered.
2. 02Ask the one question.
3. 03Diary a return, if the reason was timing, with the date they gave.

A noticeable amount of work arrives from losses handled this way, a year or two later, usually from somebody whose circumstances changed. The supplier who took the no well is the one they call.

The uncomfortable use of the record

Over a year the reasons will tell you something about your own business that you may not want to hear: that you are competing on price in a market you cannot win on price, that your specialism is not as clear as you think, or that you are slow. The record is only useful if you are willing to read it that way.

Examine the wins too

Losses get analysed, when they get analysed at all, and wins are filed as confirmation that everything is working. That asymmetry costs you, because the wins contain the information about what to do more of.

Ask the same question of a new client in the first weeks, while it is fresh and before the working relationship rewrites the memory: what made you decide. The answers are consistently more specific than anybody expects, and frequently point at something you did not consider important.

• A particular sentence on a page, or a particular question in the first conversation.
• Something a competitor did badly rather than anything you did well.
• A piece of writing they read months earlier and did not mention at the time.
• The speed of your first reply, which comes up more often than the content of it.

Read alongside the loss log over a year, the two together describe your actual sales process, as opposed to the one you think you run. That comparison is worth an afternoon annually and almost nobody makes it.