We don’t like to have lost deals. It is usually caused by one of several factors. We’ve listed the top seven below it expands on these in more detail.

Another thing you need to think about is what stage the deal was lost. By observing and noting what stage the deal was lost, you can understand where there are weaknesses in your process or approach. If, for example, you repeatedly lose deals in the negotiation phase, you can look to see where your pricing and your proposal may be letting you down. It’s not uncommon for a prospect to disappear once it had received a price , so you will find that the proposal piece is very often where deals die. When we talk about a deal dying, we don’t necessarily mean the customer says no. Sometimes, they just disappears and your attempts to contact them are in vain.

The other aspect of course is where you decide to withdraw from the selling process and you and the prospect decide it’s time to drop. Qualifying out is a central piece of modern selling and it makes sense that the earlier that’s done the better. So if for example if you typically qualify out after a certain stage you need to look at that stage and make sure that you’re qualifying out for good reasons. If for example, you repeatedly qualify out right at the beginning then maybe you need to look at how your initial outreach or your website etc. positions your product as they may not be exciting somebody enough to proceed further into the selling process or differentiate you well enough. Equally, the person or people doing the initial outreach may not be bringing strong deals into the pipeline.

As a rule of thumb, we usually expect in enterprise SaaS to close about one deal in 3 or one deal and 4 or even one deal in 5. This is your win rate. It will change over time – as you start out, you may get for example a 33% win rate ( 1 in 3) but as you expand to more prospects or hire people to see this may drop to 1 in 5 (20% win rate) and you need to work at bringing it back up.

So the implication of this is that you going to lose more than you win. This is important to bear that in mind and make sure that you learn to increase as much as possible in your business when rate. This is the whole tenant of this training and application to help you to improve your win rates. So you should always conduct a business loss review. All those involved in the deal should be encouraged to get involved in a discussion about why deals are being lost. This can be tricky as many people don’t like the potential of being associated with failure, so the tone in which the deal review is conducted is very important. You must learn from a win and from losing deals and take action to resolve reasons why the deals didn’t close in your favor. Bearing in mind as we said above that we lose more than we win if you work from that point the review is conducted in a positive and open fashion.

Velocity-related issues (for example deal stalls) are commonly the source of deals being lost. Sometimes the velocity issues relate to the prospect asking questions that you are not geared to answer. If you are a young business, this is often because maybe you haven’t been asked these questions before. You need to capture the fact that you are something that is likely to go up again and figure out how you can address this issue faster.

Velocity and friction are very closely related. By friction, in this context, I mean cycling back to the prospect. What I mean by this is that if they ask you a question that you don’t know and then you have to set up a follow-up call involving a colleague to discuss it and then another call for the colleague to present a solution and maybe another call to address other issues relating to it. That’s friction! In the early days, some of that is inevitable but you need to watch out because not only does it affect the velocity but introduces elements of friction that can adversely affect your competitive situation.