Category Archive

Twenty-five years is a long time. Yet, operating a business and striving daily to assure clients are satisfied affords little time for reflection about what it all means.

Usually we think of win-loss analysis as something we do to put losses under the microscope. That way, the common thinking goes, you will see what you did wrong and fix that, in order to win more often in the future. A worthwhile motivation to begin the exercise if you’re not engaged in it already.

Perhaps a better title for this post would be Family – OR – Factors. Regular readers of my posts know that Win-Loss Analysis is a central theme. After all, if you’ve been focusing on something for over 20 years, you tend to – I’ll admit it, ‘obsess’ a bit about that something.

As a provider of Win-Loss Analysis, we interact with quite a few companies about their opportunity set. Depending on who you speak with, they may refer to it as their …

As companies wrestle with the pain and disappointment of losing a sale to a competitor, especially when confidence was high that they would win, some interesting psychology comes into play.

So, why are you surprised? As hard as you work on closing significant sales, you think you might know better. Yet, even as a finalist, you find yourself sweating bullets while waiting to hear if you’ve won the deal.

The importance of customer feedback in achieving sales success

All companies are committed to winning – but sometimes leadership teams don’t act like it. As much energy that goes into strategy and planning, CRM deployments and sales analytics – you would expect spectacular results.

Making sense of the seemingly random things that happen in business and in life is just part of human nature. It’s how we’re wired. When a significant sales opportunity is lost to a competitor, that instinct goes into hyper-drive. There is a lot of explaining to do.

With all the attention given to AI and machine-learning driving business processes, are we at risk of losing sight of the need to apply authentic human learning to improve results? With so much focus on AI, we tend to overlook the meaning of the leading word of that phrase, “artificial”.