What sales teams aren’t (but should be) doing with closed-lost opportunities
Modern revenue organizations tend to follow a tried-and-tested formula when it comes to lead qualification. Leads that come in via a marketing channel like an event or webinar receive an engagement score, then they’re passed to a Sales Development Representative (SDR) once they hit a certain threshold before being referred to a sales rep once buying intent is established.
Meanwhile, Business Development Representatives (BDRs) and sellers conduct their own targeted outreach based on their network and the company’s buying personas.
Regardless of how a lead reaches sales, whenever it does, the emphasis is on one thing: Close the deal. Sales approaches, product training, and qualification methodologies can help sellers spot and navigate obstacles in the process, but none of these things are infallible. Deals still fall through.
Sales leaders have a unique opportunity when this happens. Instead of moving quickly on to the next deal, leaders can bring awareness to closed-lost similarities, gather learnings in a structured way, and apply them where relevant across team processes. This builds a strategy that maximizes growth and learning—setting teams up for more success in the future.
Why B2B revenue organizations lose deals
There are a multitude of reasons why a deal is lost even after many rounds of qualification, hard work, and due diligence. Our work with hundreds of high-performing revenue organizations has revealed four common factors that are often beyond the seller’s control:
An existing relationship in play: When a buyer has an existing relationship with another tech stack or someone who works with a competitor, it can be extremely difficult to disrupt these connections. At Numentum, we teach the importance of a company’s relationship capital, and the only way to overcome these losses is to better leverage your own organization’s network.
Bad product fit: Even when sellers are trained to focus on product benefits rather than features, a buyer will still walk away if the fit isn’t right—particularly if the company isn’t able to offer custom development or integrations that can help close the gap.
Price: It’s unlikely that a buyer is looking at your product in isolation. And they’ll be tough to win over if your price is above market average and your brand promise can’t make up the difference.
It’s not the right time: Some buyers withdraw from the process altogether due to a change in budget or their team’s requirements. These lost deals present some of the best opportunities—which are outlined in detail below.
All these reasons offer valuable opportunities to adapt your lead qualification process and go-to-market motion, provided that learnings are gathered in a way that can be turned into action.
Three ways to gather closed-lost learnings
A culture of learning from failure starts at the top. Leaders are responsible for owning the narrative and removing any stigma surrounding sellers who lose deals. This is a mindset shift in many sales teams, which typically operate with a competitive culture focused on wins. It’s common to celebrate closing deals, share the stories of obstacles overcome, and highlight the team involved. But talking about failure is worth it.
1. Create a safe space to discuss failures
Wins are important to celebrate, but CROs should also work with the CHRO to intentionally establish a safe environment for team members to share experiences with deals that didn’t end so well. This is unlikely to happen ad-hoc; lead by example and provide dedicated spaces for people to discuss closed-lost deals.
Sales leader Gary Fowler highlights that while failure affects us all, the mindset that sellers take to it can dramatically change the outcomes. He says: “Don't let having to adjust to a failure stand in the way of great success. It happens to all of us […] The best salespeople carry a positive attitude, visualize and think of ways around challenges.”
Leaders must proactively foster this positive culture of learning from failure for their teams to succeed. At Numentum, we’ve seen this done well by inverting the professional wins meeting to focus on professional losses. Normalize failure, focus on learning, and the insights will flow.
2. Speak to buyers that didn’t convert
Buyers who take their business elsewhere are valuable sources of insight and learning. Establish a regular cadence of interviewing closed-lost opportunities, with consistent questions (both quantitative and qualitative) to make it easier to analyze the results in aggregate.
3. Evaluate losses against a qualification methodology
Evaluating losses against a methodology like Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champions, Competition (MEDDPICC) will help highlight where a seller fell short in the deal process. Was there a legal process they underestimated or didn’t understand? Did they confuse the champion for the economic buyer and get unexpectedly hit by the “We don’t have budget” rebuttal?
Gathering these insights can help to surface improvements for the sales process as a whole, as well as opportunities to coach individual sellers. Again, a culture of openness and acceptance of failure will help to ensure that sellers engage with the honesty needed to make change that has an impact.
How to leverage learnings from closed-lost deals
The nature of learnings will dictate how your sales managers implement changes, but some common observations and corresponding actions include:
Identify the right buying committee: The group of people involved in a B2B sales deal can be complex. Going through a MEDDPICC evaluation will highlight whether a seller misidentified key decision-makers. Managers can also look at their team’s deals as a whole to compare the committee in a closed-lost deal to those typically found in a closed-won deal. If there are key differences, further training on a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help sellers identify and nurture the right connections.
As sales leader Clinton Senkow explains, qualifying buyers accurately will also help avoid winning deals that aren’t the right fit for the product: “The best way to solve [for failure] is to make sure all new clients are qualified correctly, and as a business, we only accept clients that will be good high-value clients that aren't going to be a pain.”
Improve the quality of buyers in the pipeline: Problems with lead quality are more common than many organizations would like to admit. Closer alignment with marketing and data teams is the solution, both in terms of creating more accurate buyer personas and properly scoring when a lead is warm enough to be passed to sales. These changes are often particularly necessary if the buyer is lost at an early stage in the deal cycle, like the discovery call.
Automate the process of staying in touch: Sometimes a deal fails because the buyer just isn’t ready to buy yet. This can be an opportunity in disguise—particularly in organizations that can thoughtfully automate the process of keeping in touch.
Sellers should determine when the buyer’s next budget cycle is and any known objections, such as perceived product limitations or difficulty with getting internal buy-in. With marketing, they can establish an email nurture stream with content that speaks to that objection and an automatic reminder to get back in touch on an assigned date.
When implemented the right way, this course of action balances the efficiency of automation with a personalized touch that sets a seller apart from the competition.
Learning from closed-lost will supercharge your closed-won
It’s not easy for most sellers to spend time analyzing their failures. An emphasis on winning is what drives the craft. But for executives who want to drive organization-wide improvement, the juice is worth the squeeze. Facilitate sharing and learning from closed-lost deals, and you’ll develop a team that is more agile to changes in the market and more able to drive revenue growth in the next quarter and beyond.
Revenue Forward
Numentum is a B2B enterprise sales training company that integrates social selling into existing sales processes to engage today’s hyper-informed buyers. Our programmatic approach maximizes the utility of brand, marketing assets, and sales technology to generate predictable pipeline and revenue. We partner with forward-thinking brands to bring focus, routine, and accountability to their sales teams. Our customers include SAP, Workday, Vodafone Business, Verizon Business, Broadcom, and RELX.
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