In the unrelenting focus on driving new business, most sales teams overlook a source of information that pays back in spades.

We at Brandpoint believe it’s critical for companies to understand the real reasons for their losses. What’s recorded in salesforce almost never represents the dynamics of their customers’ decision making. We’ve had clients for which salesforce showed that 80% of losses were due to either price or no decision. Years of work in the software industry confirms that a far smaller percent of prospects walk away for one of these 2 reasons.

To get to the bottom of a “no” decision, it’s not enough to talk to your sales people – you need to talk with the decision makers that decided against your solution. We believe this information is so critical to the business that companies need to do this with a regular cadence: at least every 2 quarters, if not quarterly. An open-ended conversation with your prospects allows you to dig -- really dig -- into the reasons you lost the business. Ask big questions and probe into the dynamics of the decision. If they selected a competitor, understand what tipped the scales in their favor. B2B buyers combine rational and emotional factors. Dig into both. Review the feedback, do the pattern recognition, and feed this information back into your product development, marketing folks, and any other part of the company that should hear this.

At the end of every quarter, pull together a complete list of your losses. Get a complete profile about them: how long were they actively in the sales cycle? What did your team assign in terms of probability of winning the deal? What industry were they in? Get the names of the decision makers involved in evaluating the purchase. Ask your lead sales person to set up a meeting with the 1-3 decision makers, depending on the complexity of the sales. The conversation should be between a neutral person (perhaps someone from Marketing) or, even better, (shameless plug, yup!) an unbiased third party.

This is not a way to check on your sales people. You do that every day, in other ways. This is only and exclusively about getting to the bottom of your value proposition and how you need to evolve it to grow your win rate.