The Questions to Ask After You Lose a Deal

Nobody likes reopening a deal they lost. But the post-mortem is one of the fastest ways to lift your conversion rate. Here are the questions to ask yourself, and how to apply the answers to the deals still live in your pipeline.

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If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

Nobody likes to revisit lost deals. And nobody likes to take responsibility for why the deal was lost. Yet this is one of the smartest things you can do, as a seller or a manager, to improve your deal conversion. Have a post-mortem.

Ask yourself these questions.

What didn't I see coming? What could I have done differently in this account? What value did I miss communicating to the customer?

How could I have presented our value differently? Was there a different way to communicate the return on investment? Did I miss value that could have been calculated into the ROI? How many contacts did I have inside this account, and what was their behavior before things started going the wrong way?

Did I bring any of my own team into the meetings? If I did, was it too late or too early? Did I work through the stakeholder engagement properly and really uncover the decision makers, the financial beneficiaries, the influencers, and the advisors? Once you have a post-mortem on everything you could have done differently, and remember, you can only change the things you did, not what the buyer did, you have a real list to work from.

Take that list and apply it to the active opportunities in your pipeline.

Where might I be missing the same information? Where might I be making the same mistake?

Then go to work. Create a plan to actually execute on fixing it.

It's okay to lose a piece of business. It happens to everybody. What's not okay is to keep losing that business because you're making the same mistakes over and over again.