The vast majority of mature Sales Operations teams care about why their Sales Reps lose deals. They care so much they often highlight losses in reports, on team dashboards and they talk about the losses as much as they talk about the wins. Losses can be categorized as regrettable (“wish I had that one back…”) or non-regrettable (“thankfully, we didn’t win that business”). I don’t mind if I lose on price. Typically if the prospect I’m working with is only thinking about the $$$ “out”, they’re not thinking about the efficiency introduced on $$$ “in” or $$$ “out” avoided through process inefficiency. Typically, these clients are otherwise painful to work with. My regrettable losses are those prospective deals that check all my qualification questions:
- Does the client have budget?
- Does the client recognize that they have a problem I can solve and do they genuinely want to solve that problem?
- Am I positioned to deliver the best possible solution for the client, because I have uniqueness I can bring to bear?
- Is the client easy to work with?
If the answer to any of the above is ‘no’, an outcome where we don’t win the business is probably not regrettable. This blog post is about regrettable losses. The ones that keep you up at night.
It is so common that Sales Ops teams want to understand why their reps are losing that Salesforce has now created a ‘quasi-standard’ field for Loss Reason. It accompanies new (Enterprise Edition) orgs out-of-box although it bears the marks of a custom field (Loss_Reason__c). The problem with Loss Reasons (and any reason code for that matter) is that reps, agents, basically whoever you ask to fill out the field will often just pick the first value that’s in there and not give it a second thought. ESPECIALLY if they don’t want to talk about the loss. Also, what comes out-of-box (Lost to Competitor, No Budget/Lost Funding, No Decision/Unresponsive, Price, Other) are largely useless. If you lost, you likely lost to a competitor (or they chose to do the work in house because you were too brutally honest in pointing out their flaws). So that’s not really relevant. Other is totally useless. First and foremost, be sure that the Loss Reasons you are reporting on are valid for your business but more importantly…
Create another custom field on Opportunity.
Ask the rep to use natural language to describe the Loss Narrative. Natural Language Processing is getting advanced enough that we’ll soon be able to train Einstein Prediction Builder on that field using Artificial Intelligence models and come up with the corresponding reason why the deal was lost. Make the categorization of Opportunities into Loss Reasons a Sales Ops responsibility, not a Sales responsibility. At the point of Sale (or Loss), the Rep knows why they lost and whether it’s regrettable. Let (require) them to say something about it, not just pick some random reason. Assuming you’re not chasing 100s of deals a month, this isn’t too burdensome and will result in marketing insights that are extremely useful: Why are reps chasing deals that are disproportionately non-regrettable losses? Why is that one rep losing regrettable deals referred from a partner repeatedly because they can’t get past Procurement or IT gatekeepers? How can you provide them collateral to get them past the objections?
If you want greater insights into why you’re losing, consider a different approach. Questions? Contact Us and start a conversation.