Everyone wants to win. Companies love tracking sales growth. But what about the losses? Don’t overlook them. They are important to your company as well.
In the MediaPost article, “9 Metrics Every Company Should Use,” writer and senior vice president of strategy and solutions Martha Bush, suggests:
As the number of sales channels continues to increase, so has the need for organizations to get a strong, metrics-based grip on all that data to maximize their successes and learn from their failures.
Even though most people hate to dwell on their defeats, experts note,
“moving on without reflecting on why you lost a sale can be a mistake.” As Susan Greco discusses in her Inc. article, “How to Set Up a Sales Tracking Process,” it is only through the analysis of losses that a company can identify their underlying weaknesses and determine how to improve.
For Greco that means finding out not only why you lost, but also why the other company won:
It’s useful to get a price-to-value comparison of your company, which lost the business, versus the winner. You can also ask open-ended questions about competing products. What features did a rival product have that ours lacked? Was another product perceived to be a better value? A sales loss driven by pricing concerns may have nothing to do with the sales rep’s performance.
Finding out why a customer didn’t buy can give you valuable insights into your competitive positioning, value proposition, pricing model, and sales process. Losing a sale is a great learning tool, and sometimes it takes losing multiple sales to learn enough to win.
Download our white paper on “Sales Success Requires a Tracking Processes: Tracking your follow-up determines your success.“
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