The huge opportunity of winning 53% of winnable deals – that you lost
The power in B2B-Sales has shifted from seller to buyer. These days buyers do their own research, they are very well informed, they decide what to buy and can do that at any moment, online. This means that for sellers to be successful, you need to have a much better understanding about how buyers buy, and why? This is supported by Corporate Visions’ research which has found that there is for sellers still a lot to learn from their customers.
53% of Buyers said that a losing vendor could have won the deal. This is a massive amount of opportunity and revenue that you leave on the table. You might be thinking that this is easy to solve? As a seller you just need to take the time to do a loss analysis, learn from it, and then next time you won’t make the same mistakes in your customer engagement. Easy, right?
No, it isn’t, because if you look at the reasons that a seller gives for a loss, compared to the reasons the buyers give for a loss, 50% of the time sellers identify different reasons for the loss than what the buyer identifies. Let that sink in. Half of time the seller is wrong about why the deal was lost. While Corporate Visions’ research shows 50%, Gartner’s research shows that 70% of the time the seller got it wrong.
Of course, these figures might be slightly higher or lower for you in your organization, but the fact is, this is a very significant percentage you are losing of winnable deals. So, for your customer engagements, it is important to better understand where the misperceptions are. Let’s dive into that.
These are the Top 3 reasons identified by Sales why a deal is lost:
- The customer perceives us as too expensive.
- The customer asked for features and functions that we simply don’t have.
- My customer contact suddenly stopped responding by an uncontrollable event.
All 3 reasons are out of the control of a salesperson. Now let’s look at how buyers perceived this.
According to buyers, none of the top 3 reasons given by sales are in the top 3 of buyers.
Here are the top 3 reasons given by buyers, for why sellers lost a winnable deal:
- 79% of the buyers said that losing vendors showed no, or very little, competitive differentiation in their messaging. There was no clear reason to choose them above others.
- Poor discovery that resulted in a lack of understanding of what the real customer needs are. If you don’t know the real customer needs, then you are not aligning your solution to the real problem they are facing. Three missteps stood out here:
- There was not enough time spent on the problem, and the seller jumped immediately to the solution.
- Instead of discovery, buyers felt they were “sold to”.
- The vendor failed to map a tailored solution to the buyer’s specific business and industry problems.
- Finally, a lack of timely response or interest in fulfilling requests, and that starts with following up on leads if a prospect asks to be contacted via the web or a contact form.
That’s where 2ENGAGE comes in. 2ENGAGE developed training courses about the huge opportunity of winning 53% of winnable deals – that you lost. You will learn from data-driven sales insights and clear call to actions, how you can become the winner in the perception of your buyers.
These eight make-or-break selling topics have a direct impact on your win rates and are covered in depth in 2ENGAGE training programs:
(1) Why most sales outreaches fail and what to do about it.
(2) How to uncover the real customer problem to increase win rates.
(3) How smarter targeting and qualification will boost your conversion rates.
(4) Why go-to-market alignment is your biggest growth lever.
(5) What happens when you follow the buyer’s journey instead? Sell less, win more.
(6) Buying is a Team Sport: what Sales gets wrong about buying groups.
(7) How you can make Industry and LoB executives your best advocates.
(8) How purchase regret is costing you growth and how to prevent it.
My next eight blogs will dive deeper into each of these eight topics.