The win/loss analysis that never comes
Everybody wants it. It is on a flipchart at every sales offsite, usually with three exclamation marks. And then what happens: nothing.
The reason is always the same. Win/loss gets framed as a program, and programs are heavy. External interviews with lost customers, a 30-item questionnaire, a quarterly report with an executive summary. It sounds serious, but it immediately costs a budget, an owner, and political courage, because who enjoys calling the customer who just went to the competitor. So the program gets postponed to “when things calm down”. Things never calm down.
Meanwhile the usable version sits three floors below and costs almost nothing.
Three required fields when closing a deal, won or lost. First, the reason, as a picklist with eight to ten clean values, not free text where “price”, “too expensive”, and “budget” later sit side by side as three different reasons. Second, the competitor it came down to, including the option “none, lost to the status quo”, because for most companies that is the most common and least understood loss reason. Third, one sentence of free text from the rep about what really happened, while the memory is fresh.
Plus one meeting. Once a quarter, 90 minutes, the quarter’s closed deals on the screen, grouped by reason and competitor. No deck, no prep, just the data and the question of what keeps repeating. That is it. That is the whole system.
Sure, data quality is mediocre at first. Reps click the first reason they see, “too expensive” gets overused because it was the customer’s polite excuse and the rep just passes it along. That is exactly what the quarterly review is for: if 60 percent of losses were supposedly about price, but the deals you won ran at the same price, the code is wrong, and the conversation about it sharpens the categories with every quarter.
After a year you have forty, fifty coded losses and a pattern no gut feeling can deliver. Maybe you never lose to competitor X, but constantly lose to “let’s do nothing for now”. That changes your messaging more fundamentally than any persona exercise.
You can still run the big study with the external interviews if you ever need it. But honestly, how many quarters has it been on that flipchart now?
