You can often learn more from your failures than your successes. If you will just take the time to honestly reflect, and then decide how to improve. Lost sales, failures, hurt! But they can be remarkably beneficial as learning experiences. Each loss holds a lesson that will help you become better!
So let’s start at the other end of the spectrum. YES, there’s nothing quite like the feeling of closing a sale! It’s one of those YES! Moments where you leave the meeting and when no one can see you, you pump your fists up and down with a wonderful feeling of victory. It’s the best. Whether it’s a large or small sale we celebrate first and then we try to think about how we won so we can replicate our success. That’s great and it’s the right thing to do, but the fact is, there is often much more to be learned from losing a sale. The challenge is, most salespeople don’t want to reflect on their losses because it’s really not very comfortable.
Some salespeople will ask a prospect why they lost a deal, but they typically don’t get a straight answer. In fact, according to sales research data, prospects tell salespeople the complete truth about why they lost less than half the time. Additionally, research has shown that salespeople learn the complete and accurate truth about 40% of the time because most don’t even ask about it. In other words, in 60% of lost sales situations, salespeople don’t have a complete and accurate understanding of why they lost.
What follows are 5 guaranteed, proven ways to ensure you learn everything you can about why you lost a sale, and how to learn and grow from that knowledge:
1) Early in the sales process, tell your prospect that you will conduct a debrief (regardless of the outcome of the sale). In order to make the prospect comfortable and illicit honest and, more importantly, actionable feedback, you should let the prospect know early in the sales process that regardless of the outcome, you will be conducting a post-decision debrief call at the end of the process.
2) Schedule a separate debrief call. Don’t do the debrief in the same meeting in which you got the bad news! When you hear about a loss, prospects have one goal in mind: to get rid of you as quickly as possible. Instead, schedule a separate debrief call after you have accepted the loss and (this is important) let the prospect know that you will not try to change their decision.
3) Use a debrief guide. Research has shown that salespeople who use a debrief questionnaire have a 15% higher close rate than those who do not. It’s simple to create your own debrief guide or you can ask for help from your manager, mentor or colleagues. Just create a list of 5-10 open ended questions and let the conversation open up from there. Questions like, “how did you feel about our ability to deliver on the promises I made in the proposal?”, or “tell me how you felt about how we priced our service?” These sorts of questions uncover pure gold for future sales. Just make them open and honest and not manipulative.
4) Take responsibility. Make sure that you really want candid feedback; prospects will know if you don’t. Don’t get defensive, and PLEASE don’t debate with the prospect or try to resell them. (If they start to re-think their decision because of your professionalism, just let them do it. They will let you know if they might be willing to take a second look. But that’s THEIR call; you just want to learn from your loss.
5) Drill down for specifics. If their answers are vague, they may be nervous about you trying to re-sell them. Put them at ease by promising that’s not your purpose here; that you just want to learn and grow from the loss. So follow up vague answers with questions like “How do you mean?” or “Can you please give me a little more detail on that?” Other great questions for obtaining valuable feedback include asking, “How can I do better with my next prospect?”, “Is there anything you feel we should change about our offering or how I presented it?” or “Is there any other advice you could give me?” These are strong questions and your prospect will be flattered that you respect them enough to ask them.
So you can indeed learn a great deal from a lost sale. You just have to be willing to swallow your pride a little and make the debrief happen. Win or lose, with a lost sale debrief, you can win every time!