This is the sixth post in a series called “Lifecycle Management – what’s in it for me?”, which shows how to audit and transform your process at every stage of the sales cycle.
- Link to the first article – Introduction
- Link to the second article – Prospect or Suspect Stage
- Link to the third article – Lead Stage
- Link to the fourth article – Opportunity Stage
- Link to the fifth article – Closed-Won 🙂
Today, we will cover Closed Lost deals.
Unfortunately, we all lose deals. The key thing is to learn from these and understand the reasons, both for individual deals as well as all closed lost deals. If the product or service you offer has a high value, you probably have an established Lost Deal process in place. Glean valuable information about lost Opportunity so you can identify trends and adjust products and services accordingly.
Who’s conducting those surveys now?
If it’s your Business Development team and the problem was relationship-related, do you think you’ll find that out?
Even if it’s not, do you want to task your hunters with administrative follow-up?
And what if your product or service has a lower value or you have hundreds of Opportunities to review?
Keep your humans focused on human tasks and engage automation. Automation can save time and gather value insight.
Opportunity Number 7 for Automation – Postmortem data collection
Figure 8 – Lost Opportunities are still valuable. Not only can a postmortem process help evolve product and service offerings, but you can get a head start on trying to re-win the business at renewal time.
In the case of closed lost deals, use automation to conduct a neutral online follow-up survey. Have the Opportunity form in your CRM adjusted to accommodate responses and Marketing Automation will post the feedback right there.
You could even enhance the system to notify individuals if you receive extreme responses. Any information that you collected through conversations with your prospects can also be collected in your CRM as closed lost reasons.
Recognizing trends in the responses could lead to new product or service development, geographic expansion, an understanding of how aggressive your competitors may be pricing, an additional cross-sell, or maybe it can quickly alleviate a misunderstanding and rescue a souring relationship.
Once set up and established, the process is executed no matter the volume of the need, and all with minimal human intervention. All of this helps improve the experience for the next prospect, and also gives you additional understanding of how you might approach that lost Opportunity when they are up for renewal with your competitor.
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MRM can help
Let Measured Results Marketing transform your end-to-end sales pipeline process and return 15 hours per BDR back to your team so they can focus on revenue-generating activities instead of administration. Click here to learn more about MRM’s Revenue Operations Ecosystem™ and see if it is a good fit for your goals. You can also call us at 571-606-3106 or leave a comment on LinkedIn.
