Unless you have a monopoly on your industry, it’s inevitable that you will lose more deals than you win. However, many sales teams make the mistake of chalking up their losses to things outside their control, like features or pricing, even when win rates can be increased simply by improving your sales process.

An easy starting point for figuring out where to focus is to look at your most frequently reported closed lost reasons. Most sales teams use variants of the following:

• Non-responsive—used when the buyer stops responding to the salesperson’s follow up and “goes dark”.

• No-show—used when the buyer does not show up to a scheduled discovery call.

• Timing not right—used when the buyer slows or stalls the deal because something else has taken priority. Sometimes also captured as “no decision”.

• Price too high—used when the buyer selects a lower priced option.

• Feature missing—used when the buyer says they needed a feature that you didn’t have.

• Not qualified—used when the salesperson did not identify a business need on the initial discovery call.

Here’s what each of these reasons tells you about your sales process and how to address them:

Non-responsive = single-threaded selling

Single-threaded selling, or relying on a single buyer to champion the deal, is the #1 reason that deals stall and buyers stop responding, particularly at the proposal stage. If you’ve shared a proposal without knowing who else is going to review it and what they care about, the likelihood of one of them reacting unfavorably is high.

The way to overcome this is to ensure that your salespeople identify the additional buying stakeholders and bring them into the buying process before building a proposal, so that when the proposal is shared all stakeholders feel that their concerns and criteria are addressed. For a deeper dive on this check out last week’s post on how to bring decision makers into your sales process.

No-shows = under-qualifying prospects

No-shows are very common when you have a sales development team doing high volume outbound prospecting and optimizing for quantity of meetings rather than quality.

The 3 ways to address this are to:

1. Have your sales development reps actually verify the prospect’s situation and pain before booking the call with an AE. This can be done quite easily over email once you’ve engaged a prospect through relevant insights.

2. Send an agenda ahead of the call and ask what else the prospect would like to cover during the meeting. This gives your prospect the opportunity to give themselves a reason to come to the meeting.

3. Send a reminder a day before the call to confirm and provide a link to reschedule if needed. Work calendars are always unpredictable and it shows you are being considerate.

Timing not right = not identifying a critical event

Critical events are deadlines your buyer has for existing initiatives to which you can attach the purchase of your product. Common examples of critical events are incumbent vendor contracts ending, use-it-or-lose-it budgets expiring, new products launching and regulatory deadlines.

When a buyer says the timing is not right, it’s a sign that they don’t have a critical event in mind to drive change. This is very common when dealing with an outbound prospect as they are usually in the very early stages of the buying cycle.

The two ways to overcome this are:

1. Ensure your salespeople are aware of the all common critical events that your customers have had in the past and are armed with the right set of discovery questions to ask to surface them.

2. Create a critical event by helping your prospect imagine the next time they will experience the pain that you solve. The key to doing this is to identify the last time the pain was felt, then ask the buyer to consider the positive impact of making a change and the negative consequence of maintaining the status quo. Then simply ask, “When will that happen again?”. There’s your critical event.

Price too high = not establishing impact before the proposal

A very common mistake salespeople make is to start selling features as soon as pain points are established. “You have problem X, we have feature Y to solve it”. While this often plays well with champions and power users, it doesn’t work with economic buyers because they care more about impact and business outcomes.

The way to address this in your sales process is to ensure your salespeople are identifying the impact that each stakeholder is looking for and making sure that it is addressed upfront the proposal. In many ways, the remedy is very similar to solving for non-responsiveness.

Feature missing = not establishing impact before the demo

Buyers will often ask, “do you have feature X?”, or “do you integrate with system Y?”. When you don’t have that feature or integration, it’s very easy to find yourself on the defensive, especially if you are in the middle of a demo.

The two ways to address this are:

1. Probe for the pain behind the feature request and impact of solving the pain. My favorite way to handle this is, “You mentioned feature X. I’m curious, why do you ask? What problem are you trying to solve?” Doing so will tell you how important that feature or integration is and give you a chance to show how you can solve the problem a different way.

2. Identify the key pain points and impact of solving them before giving the demo. Then set up the demo to address each pain point and use a pocket story about another customer to show how the product is delivering the impact.

In some cases, you will find you have a legitimate feature gap, however even the biggest product team cannot fill all feature gaps at once. It’s important in this case to keep a record of how often each feature is requested, so that you can help your product team prioritize which ones to work on first.

Not qualified = targeting too broadly

Sales development reps will sometimes disqualify the customer on the basis of a firmographic or technographic mismatch.

When this happens a lot in outbound prospecting, it’s a sign that the target account list is too broad and your ideal customer profile is not well defined. For a guide on how to solve this, check out my earlier post on how to build the ideal customer profile for your business.

When this happens a lot in inbound prospecting, it’s a sign that your website messaging isn’t clear or that you aren’t asking the right qualifying questions in your lead intake form. This is common in environments where the ideal customer profile is not clearly established and marketing teams are focused on volume rather than quality of leads.

What other closed lost reasons are you tracking and how are you using them to improve your sales process?

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