Win Post Mortems are better than Loss Post Mortems

You win some and and you lose some is the old saying set to music by mushy singers like Bryan Adams. In modern life, however, no one seems to takes things so philosophically. Especially the losses. 

And why should we? Why should we ignore lost deals, lost projects and lost success?

Look closer and you will find that reality is in fact the cliché - we do win some deals and we do lose some others. And, mostly we don't know why.

Why we lose deals seems to be every sales manager's pet source of worry, at least for a few days or weeks after a loss. He claims to worry about the loss and why it happened and what to do to prevent a repeat. He resolves to improve the win rate so that he can eliminate losses - as if deal losses were a disease like Polio that could be systematically eradicated from most of the globe. Alas, most of these sales and presales managers dont know how to do this.

They break their heads for a week, sometimes for a month after a big loss and claim to do post mortems and lessons learnt analyses and Kaizens and try every trick including Yoga and psychoanalysis. They claim to want to implement the best practices and eliminate the bad practices in all future deals. Of course, six months down the line, not much changes and yet another big loss comes calling!


Familiar Story? 

Why? It is not because these sales managers don't want to improve their win rates. It is not because they don't have the right data. It is not because they dont have the time to worry about losses. It is not because they are not serious in their intent to know the truth about lost deals. It is not that they do faulty analysis of the data they do have. It is not that they don't implement those improvements their analysis of lost deals tells them to do.

It is something more basic. Losses can't tell us nearly as much as wins. What is a lost deal after all? A deal not won. So, rather than worry about why they lost this deal or that deal, the question sales managers must ask themselves and their clients and their sales force is this: 

'What was needed to win that deal we just lost? How did the winner manage to eat my cheese?'. 

It's not the same as taking apart your lost deal which is totally focused on your bid and your mistakes. You were only one of the losers. Every loser would have made different mistakes. One would have put in a bad solution. Another would have had no clue about client requirements. Yet another would have overestimated costs. A fourth one surely under-priced his solution putting the project and client at serious risk.

The real answer is in the winning bid which most of the time has solved the key problems seen in all the other losing bids.

Obviously, you can't always find out how the winner won a deal when you have been on the losing team. And if you analyze just your bid and even if you (rarely) do a great job of it, a lost bid analysis can only teach you so much. But there are ways of finding out. Often clients are willing to share why someone else won.


One way to get around this is to systematically analyze your own won bids. 

Get your winning team to contribute to buidling a repository of practices that led to each deal win, immediately after the win if not during the bid. Now, it is not enough for everyone to identify the best practices. Knowledge needs context. Best practices need a setting. The deal story has to be written inter-weaving the context with the best practices, like a Grisham thriller with heart-stopping action at every juncture. 

The best part is, as you write the story and you re-live the story yourself, those subtle, nuanced best practices and smart ideas emerge from their hiding places and take a bow.  

I have been part of deal winning teams, and of course I have also been part of deal losing teams. The hardest question to answer for me has been 'Why did you win this deal' - much more difficult than 'why did you lose that other deal'. If someone asks me 'Who won that deal for you' I would probably be happy to blush and say thank you. If someone asks me 'Why did you lose that deal', I will have a ready list of people to blame. But how about ' How did you win that deal'?

I am not talking about the reasons we tell the press or the reasons we broadcast to our company executives but the real reasons which helped the client decide to do the deal with us.

So, when I have been asked this question, I dont have a simple answer. I tell a long story. In the story are lots of characters, from the client's side, from our side, from competitors, consultants and advisors and so on. There is relentless action - customer lobbing the ball over our heads, our team scampering and returning with a drop shot, competitors inching ahead only to be overtaken by us later, near death experiences, and ecstatic events making up the deal story.

The best practices come flooding, those wonderful insights which dawned eurekaesque on you as you cooled your heals between meetings in some seedy Extended Stay suite in small town America missing your family 3000 miles away and dreaming of the win that seemed ever elusive. So, when you tell yourself the story, when you tell other people the story, you begin to see those best practices, those critical innovations, those tipping points which enabled your win.
 
During this, something else amazing dawns on you. You realize how many different ways the client was playing along with you, was actually helping you win the deal, in the end almost longing for your win, almost as much as you.

A deal win is less a collection of events and practices than the collective experience lived together with the client. You win the deal with the client. The client wins the winning bidder that is you. What is born in the deal is not a contract but comfort and confidence in each other for a win-win outcome.
 
It's not unlike when you want to select a painter to paint your house. After all the stories, work samples, reference checks and price negotiations, it comes right down to  which painter's face you like, who you feel is least likely to let you down. In the end it is  down to feelings, hunches and risks for the client. Painting your house can go awfully wrong in spite of everything. And you know it well as you select the painter. I have alluded to this aspect in another post recently.  

So, why do we win some and lose some. I think we win those deals where we are one team first internally within our company, then we become one team with the client, sincerely and purposefully. Then, together, we, the client and us, decide to tell the world, `well, guess what, we just decided to do a deal yesterday!!!`

Now, how much of that deal can you find out about, talking to the losers?