Morning. Your pipeline report says you lost on price. The buyer would say something else.
Sales.
The Loss Review
Of the last five deals you lost, for how many could you state the reason in the buyer's own words rather than the rep's — and which of those two versions has been quietly setting your discount policy ever since?
Rick Marcet ran Microsoft's World Class Selling programme, and in Win/Loss Reviews (Wiley, 2011) he made an unglamorous argument: the most underused source of competitive intelligence a company owns is the outcome of its own deals, and it goes unused because collecting it has been made too expensive. His fix was mechanical rather than clever — a review process hung off the sales system the reps already lived in, built so that logging a case took no more than fifteen minutes. Cheap capture beats a thorough programme nobody completes. But capture isn't the hard part. The source is. Ask the rep and you'll get price, because price is the one loss reason that costs the person answering nothing: it blames the pricing committee rather than the discovery call. Ask the buyer and you get something specific and usually unflattering — the demo never covered the thing they cared about, security stalled it, nobody inside built the case, the incumbent moved first. Timing then decides how much of that survives. Ask at quarter-end and you're asking someone to reconstruct a decision they've stopped thinking about; ask inside a fortnight and they can still walk you through the week it turned.
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