Learning from Lost Opportunities: 3 tips to get relevant insights

I have seen this in most of the CRM implementations in which I got involved at a late stage. Product Marketing is eager to pull some meaningful insights from the opportunity data the sales team has produced over the past period. One of their interests is the loss-reasons to identify potential product issues leading to lost opportunities. Their quest for insights usually leads to disappointment due to inconsistent and inappropriate use of the available loss-reasons by the Sales team.

Consequently, two questions surface: why did this happen? And, how do we turn this around?

In most cases, there is a combination of two underlying causes.

The Loss Reasons have not been well defined

During the CRM implementation phase, the loss reasons have not been designed to meet the future business needs for analysis and insights. It is even not uncommon that CRM still uses the default, out-of-the-box loss-reasons. Although these default reasons might be a good start of your thinking process, they are rarely a good match with the specifics of a particular business. The insights you need in the future need to be the key driver in defining your loss-reasons during the CRM implementation.

The Sales team does not recognize the relevance & value

If we want Sales to contribute information to CRM, then the relevance of this contribution should always be clear to them. Who will review their input, and what is done with the outcome of this review? If this is unclear to Sales, then why should they spend time on deliberately choosing the best applicable reason?

In a best-case scenario, we can prove the value to Sales. For example: if they are contacted for more background on deals “lost-on-price”, or even better, if they see changes to the price strategy after structurally raising ‘lost-on-price‘ as loss-reason.

Path of least resistance

If relevance and value are not clear, then most Salespeople revert to the path of least resistance. This path usually leads them to not selecting anything, which means the default value gets submitted.

Get started: Three tips to upgrade your loss-reasons

1. Define the loss-reasons you need.

Design to meet two criteria:

• • • usability for sales (keep it simple)
    • the future insights you need from your loss-reasons

2. Review your definitions for Relevance & Value

Assure that your Review Cadence addresses the below three questions:

• • Who will challenge an Account Manager on the loss reason he selected for a lost deal?
  • How are the loss-reasons contributed by Sales used? What is the value for the organization?
  • Can we pinpoint specific value for the Sales rep? How can prove this value to them?

3. Remove the path of least resistance

Choose a default loss-reason that Sales reps will preferably not want to pick, for example, “Lack of relationship with Opportunity stakeholders‘. This unwanted default value will then create an additional trigger to choose a loss-reason specifically

Want more?

Need some more inspiration than these three tips? I can provide you with our best practice for loss-reasons: give us a call (top-right-on-this-site), or fill out the form on the right with your email address.