The Deals You Never Asked About

You have a story about why you lost that deal in March.

You’ve told it out loud. You told your partner, you probably told your wife, and you told yourself on the drive home. The story is usually one word long.

Price.

I want to be careful here, because sometimes it is price. But here’s what should bother you about that answer: you never asked. You ran a study, you drew a conclusion, and the sample size was one, and the only respondent was the guy with the most invested in the answer being something outside his control.

Price is the most comfortable loss reason in the world. It isn’t about your product, it isn’t about your process, it isn’t about how you showed up in the room. It’s the market. It’s their budget. Nothing to fix, nothing to feel bad about, and no work to do on Monday.

That’s exactly why it’s the wrong answer most of the time.

The people who study this for a living have a fairly consistent finding, and I’ll put it in plain terms.

When sellers are asked why they lost, price is the number one answer by a wide margin. When buyers are asked why the seller lost, price drops way down the list. It shows up, but it gets outranked repeatedly by things like: the seller didn’t understand our situation, we couldn’t get internal agreement, the timing collapsed on our end, we didn’t feel confident this would actually work, we went with the person we already knew.

Read that list again, because it has a property the price answer does not.

Every item on it is something you could have done something about.

That’s the whole reason this is uncomfortable and the whole reason it’s worth two hours of your quarter. The comfortable answer has no action items. The true answer usually does.

Here’s how you actually go get the true answer. Five parts.

Last twelve months. Everybody who received a real proposal or a real quote and did not sign.

Not people who ghosted after a first call. People who went far enough that you did work, made a case, and had a decision made about you.

You want ten to fifteen names. Most of you have between eight and twenty five and have never written them down in one place, which is itself the first finding.

Next to each name, write your current assumption in one word. Price. Timing. Competitor. Went dark. Whatever you believe today.

Do this before you make a single call. You’re going to compare this column to reality at the end and the gap is the most valuable thing in the exercise.

The email that gets a yes has four properties. It’s short, it’s not a pitch, it names the exact ask, and it makes it easy to say no.

“Hi Rachel. You went a different direction on the warehouse project back in April, and I’ve made my peace with it. I’m doing a review of everything we lost this year and I’m trying to get better rather than trying to get the deal back. Would you give me fifteen minutes to tell me honestly where we came up short? No pitch, I promise, and no hard feelings if it’s a no.”

Four sentences. Every one is doing a job.

“I’ve made my peace with it” tells her this isn’t going to be awkward. “Trying to get better rather than trying to get the deal back” is the line that unlocks it, because her actual fear is a sales call in disguise. Fifteen minutes is small enough to say yes to. And giving her permission to decline is what makes declining unnecessary.

Expect roughly four or five yeses out of ten. That surprises people. Buyers are generally happy to tell you, partly because most of them felt a little bad about it and never got to say anything, and partly because nobody has ever asked them before.

Send them all in one sitting. The whole thing takes twenty minutes and it’s the only part that requires any nerve.

Order matters here. You’re walking backward through their decision, not interrogating them about yours.

Two things about that list.

Price is dead last and it’s phrased as “how did it factor in,” not “was it price.” Ask about price early and you hand them the polite exit, and they will take it, and you’ll hang up with nothing. Ask it at the end, after you’ve already heard the real story, and you’ll get an honest weighting: “honestly it wasn’t really the number, it was that we couldn’t picture the first ninety days.”

Question nine is the one nobody asks and it’s often the whole answer. Most deals aren’t lost to a competitor. They’re lost inside the building, to a person you never met, who had an objection you never heard, defended by a champion you never armed. If that shows up three times in your calls, you don’t have a sales problem. You have a champion enablement problem, and it’s fixable in a week.

This is the part guys fail at, and it’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a discipline problem.

Do not defend anything. Not once. The second you explain why their perception was wrong, the call is over. They’ll be polite for eight more minutes and tell you nothing. You are not there to correct the record. The record is not the point. Their perception is the finding.

Do not sell. Not at the end. Not “well if things change.” Nothing. You promised. If you break it, word travels, and you’ve also just proven the exact thing they suspected about you.

Shut up. After every answer, count to four before you say anything. The best material in these calls almost always arrives in the second half of an answer, after a silence that felt too long to you and completely normal to them.

Use one phrase, over and over. “Say more about that.” It’s the highest yield four words in the entire call. Use it every time somebody says something vague, which will be constantly, because the first version of any answer is the polished one.

Don’t take notes by hand. You cannot listen properly and write properly at the same time, and the note taking is visibly what makes people cautious.

On that last one: I record these. Fathom sits on the call, transcribes it, and I go back through the transcript afterward. Two reasons that matters more than the convenience.

First, I’m fully present, which changes what people tell me. Second, and this is the part I didn’t expect, the transcript gives you their exact words. When five different buyers independently use the phrase “we weren’t sure how it would work with what we already have,” that phrase belongs in your proposal, word for word, next quarter. You are not just gathering reasons. You are harvesting the language your market uses to describe its own hesitation, and that language is worth more than the diagnosis.

Ask permission to record. Everybody says yes, and asking is part of why they trust the rest of it.

Ten calls of raw notes is a pile of anecdotes. Anecdotes feel like insight and produce nothing. You have to code it.

One primary cause per loss. Six buckets, and you force a choice:

Then count.

Any cause that shows up three or more times in ten calls is not a story. It’s a system defect, and it will keep costing you the same money every quarter until somebody fixes it.

And here’s the part that makes the whole exercise worth it: go back to that assumption column you wrote before you started. Compare it to what you actually found.

The last time I ran this properly, I had written “price” next to six of eleven. When I coded the actual calls, price was the primary cause on two. Two of the six were Clarity, which meant my proposal was doing a bad job of explaining what happens in the first sixty days. One was Champion. One was Timing and there was nothing to learn from it.

Clarity was fixable in an afternoon. I rewrote one section of the proposal, added a plain one page timeline of the first sixty days, and stopped talking about methodology in the first meeting. I cannot prove causation and I’m not going to insult you by pretending I can. What I can tell you is that our close rate on that same kind of deal moved and it has stayed moved.

One fix. Per quarter. Not five.

You will finish this exercise with a list of seven things you could improve and the temptation is to start all seven on Monday. Don’t. Pick the cause with the highest count, make one specific change to the process, and run a full quarter without touching anything else so you can actually tell whether it worked.

Five simultaneous changes give you a better feeling and no information.

“It’s awkward.”

It is, for about ninety seconds. Then it becomes one of the more interesting conversations you’ll have all quarter, because you’ve dropped the performance and so have they. Several of these people will end up back in your pipeline within eighteen months, which is a side effect and not the reason.

“They won’t take the call.”

Half will. And the half that won’t is data too, especially if the ones going quiet all lost to the same competitor.

“It’s over. Why relitigate it?”

You’re not relitigating anything. You’re doing what any operator does with a piece of equipment that failed: you take it apart and find out what broke, so the next one doesn’t break the same way.

You’d never scrap a machine without opening it up. You do it with deals every single week.

“My deal cycle is too long, the info will be stale.”

Then your losses are worth more, not less, because each one costs you more to produce. A twelve month cycle means eleven losses represent an enormous amount of your year. Go find out what happened.

You lose deals. Everybody loses deals. Losing is not the problem and it never was.

The problem is losing without learning, over and over, on repeat, while telling yourself a comfortable story that requires nothing of you. That’s not resilience. That’s an expensive way to protect your own feelings, and you’re paying for it in the same deal, lost the same way, four more times before Christmas.

The information is sitting right there. It costs one email and twenty minutes. The only reason you haven’t gone and gotten it is that you’re a little afraid of what they’ll say.

They’re going to say something you can fix. That’s the whole point.

Open a blank page. Write down every deal you lost this year. Just the names.

Next to each one, one word for why you think it happened.

Then send three emails. Pick the three biggest.

You’ll have two calls booked by Monday and one real answer by the end of next week.

Sunday’s a different kind of piece. See you then.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus