Analyse lost deal reasons

Open your CRM and add a field called Lost reason to the deal. Make it a dropdown, not free text, and require it before a deal can move to Closed lost. HubSpot and Pipedrive both let you do this.

If the field is optional, it stays empty on half your deals. Then you have no data to analyse.

Seven options is plenty. Start with these:

• Price too high for the value.
• Chose a competitor.
• Did nothing, no decision.
• Bad timing or budget frozen.
• Missing something we do not offer.
• Not a fit, we should not have pursued it.
• Lost contact.

Add one free text line next to it: "What did the buyer say, in their words?" The dropdown gives you counts. The sentence gives you the language you will later use in your copy and your calls.

Add a second field for the stage the deal was in when it was lost. A deal lost after the first call has a different cause from one lost after the proposal. Without the stage, you mix two different problems in one number.

Pick ten recent lost deals. Send each buyer a short, honest note from you, not from a bulk tool:

"I am reviewing why some deals do not go ahead. Could I ask you three questions by email? What was the deciding factor? What did the winner do better? What would have changed your mind?"

Expect a reply from two or three of them. That is enough to learn from. Write each answer into the deal.

Buyers say "price" because it ends the conversation politely. Often it means they could not see the value. Check the call notes or the recording. If the buyer never heard how you save them time or money, the real reason is a gap in the sales process, not the number on the quote.

Mark the deal with the reason you believe, and keep the stated one in the text line.

Once a month, export the lost deals into Google Sheets. Build one table with four columns: reason, number of deals, total deal value and the stage they were lost at. Sort by total value.

Five lost deals worth a few hundred each matter less than one lost deal worth twenty thousand. Value order tells you where to look first.

• Fixable by us: messaging, follow-up speed, proposal quality, missing proof.
• Fixable earlier: the deal should have been disqualified. See Qualify out faster than you qualify in.
• Outside our control: the buyer's budget collapsed, they were acquired.

Spend your time on the first two buckets. Ignore the third, except to note it.

Choose the biggest fixable reason and write one change against it. If you keep losing after the proposal, work on Reduce time from proposal to close. If you lose on negotiation, go to Improve your negotiation approach.

Change one thing. Then watch the same reason's share for the next two months.

• Letting reps type the reason in free text, so you get forty spellings of "price".
• Reviewing fewer than twenty deals and drawing a firm conclusion. Read each one by hand until you have more.
• Only counting the reason and ignoring the deal value.
• Collecting the data and never changing anything.
• Blaming the rep for every loss, so reps start choosing the safest reason on the list.

Within a quarter, more than nine in ten of your lost deals have a reason and a stage. You can name your top two reasons by value without opening the CRM. After you make your monthly change, that reason falls as a share of your losses, and your win rate for the stage you worked on starts to rise.