Learning from the deals you lose

Ask, and make it easy to answer

Most people don't ask after a rejection, because it feels like pestering. It doesn't have to be, if you keep it small and make clear it isn't about the deal:

*"No problem at all, and thanks for letting me know. Can I ask one thing I'd learn from — was it mainly the price, the timing, or something else?"*

Offering three options works better than an open question, because an open question asks the other person to do work. And by saying you want to learn from it, you take the sales pressure out — at which point people answer surprisingly honestly.

A short, fixed list of reasons

This is the difference between information and a pile of text. A free-text box gives you ten wordings for the same thing, and six months later you can't do anything with it. Five fixed choices that everyone uses the same way say far more:

• Price. They went with something cheaper, or it didn't fit the budget.
• Timing. The project was postponed or dropped. This is often one that comes back later.
• Competitor. They chose someone else. Note down who, if you hear it.
• Feature or requirement. There was something you couldn't do that mattered to them.
• No response. It faded out. Record it honestly, even though it feels like a non-answer — see below.

"No response" is the most important category

This is the reason people most like to tidy away, and the one with the most in it. A deal that fades out isn't a rejection: nobody said no. Nobody came back, that's all.

If that's your biggest category, you don't have a pricing problem or a product problem — you have a follow-up problem, and that's the cheapest kind to solve. You don't need to get better at selling; you need to come back on the day you said you would. What that rhythm looks like is in the piece on following up.

What ten losses tell you

One lost deal says nothing. Ten begin to form a pattern, and that pattern is usable without a dashboard anywhere in sight. Three things usually come out of it:

If price dominates, you aren't necessarily too expensive — you're probably explaining it too late. Look at where in your conversation the figure lands: if it only appears in the quote, the customer has already formed their expectation somewhere else.

If timing dominates, you're talking to people who aren't there yet. That isn't a loss, it's stock — those contacts belong in the slow rhythm of twice a year, not in the bin.

If features dominate, check whether it's the same missing thing every time. If it is, you have a choice to make: build it, or say earlier in the conversation that you don't have it. The second costs you a few quotes and saves you more.

Actually mark lost deals as lost

The biggest enemy of all this is the deal that never gets closed off. Nobody dares mark it lost, so it sits in negotiation for months — and with it, your whole pipeline becomes a number nobody trusts any more.

A workable rule: once your quote's validity date has passed and one follow-up has gone unanswered, it goes to lost. That isn't giving up. The company stays in your records and comes back round in the slow rhythm; all you're removing is the false hope.

And note the reason. Without one, a lost deal is information thrown away — you've lost the customer and the thing they could have taught you.