28 April 2009 | brian

When a sports team loses a game, the team’s performance is dissected by the coach to identify the reasons for the loss and craft a plan to either eradicate or compensate for areas of weakness. But when a sale is lost, too often we just wash our hands of the matter. Only after a problem has metastasized into declining numbers across an entire month or even a quarter do we act, and by then all we have to work with are sweeping generalities that make coherent, focused action difficult.

Improving sales performance requires hard facts, not just to understand what makes your top performers successful, but also to understand why you miss. Writing for Sales & Marketing Management Magazine, Bill Golder notes:

It’s surprising the number of deals that fall out of the funnel long before they reach the proposal stage and how often they are “lost” to other factors – such as competing priorities or internal resources vs. a true competitor.

Did you fail because you were trying to force your product into an unnatural shape to fit the client’s needs? Or because the client hadn’t reached internal agreement as to what the true problems were? Is there confusion between the signals sent by sales and marketing? Getting at the truth is vital if you want to avoid spinning your wheels or charging off in the wrong direction.

An honest loss-review process needs to be candid, and this means it needs to avoid laying blame or being used to score points. This process is never easy, because egos and reputations can be on the line. The focus needs to be on processes more than people, and solutions instead of condemnations. The goal of the process is action, discrete and verifiable steps that your organization can take to improve future performance. Keeping that goal in mind, you then review every stage of the sales process to recognize where things went off track.

The data gathered, combined with what you’ve learned of your best performers’ reproducible skills, can be used to fine-tune your team, allowing you to better identify which potential clients show true promise and which are likely to turn into tar pits that devouring resources for little return. Once you’ve identified your true strengths and true weaknesses, you can better choose which fights are worth extra effort and which you need to walk away from.

To learn more about improving sales performance through an organized loss review processes, read Bill Golder’s “Learn From Losing,” originally written for Sales & Marketing Management Magazine’s monthly column series, Chronicles of a Sales Leader.

Photo credits: respres, Gildardo.