Ever since I started this newsletter, I’ve been fortunate enough to post breakdowns of 5 “deal won” scenarios—showing you what I did right and wrong to get the contract over the line. But now it’s time for my first loss report.
I’m not gonna lie—this one hurt. I’m very close to achieving my annual revenue goal, and this would have put me over over the edge.
In this post, I’ll write about what happened, the glaring technical mistake I made, the role of luck, and some of my mental game flaws.
The setup
About 3 months ago, I got a fresh inbound lead. We jumped on the phone and I found there was pain, urgency, and budget. Check, check, check. Looking good.
Now, I’ve learned this year that you can’t circumvent a customer’s decision making process about your product. Instead, the most helpful thing you can do is learn how they want to make the decision, then track and support it all the way through.
The idea was to run a POC to make sure ShadowTraffic could handle their critical use case (among others), and then bring it to senior management for a quick final decision. Since I verified that there was budget and decision making authority, it seemed like the technical win was all I needed.
ShadowTraffic was lacking a few features to come through on the POC, so we spent the next couple of months adding small things to make it happen.
We clinched the technical win, and the champion set up the assessment for management to make a decision.
But just before that happened, I found out an internal prototype in a different part of the company solved an overlapping use case. No worries, though, because ShadowTraffic was going to be useful for multiple use cases. It’s fine, right?
The decision went up to management. Blammo. Dead deal.
What could I have done differently?
The technical mistake
Earlier this year, I met up with a sales friend of mine and asked what advice he had for me. “No surprises”, he said.
When a deal comes together, all he asks of the people on both sides of the table is for there to be no surprises. Get all the decision makers and stakeholders in the room early, and as the deal progresses, keep open lines of communication.
To be clear, no one was intentionally hiding anything. It just never occurred me that it might be worthwhile to connect with others in the company who could have been related to the use case—even if just to hear about the motivations for not using my product. I failed to avoid a late surprise.
Along the same lines, I should’ve made an effort to connect with the decision makers in management earlier. By the time the deal went up for a decision, I was still a faceless vendor, which doesn’t help my chances.
Variance
The other piece of advice my salesfriend gave me, and many of you reading this can attest, is that you can do everything right in sales and still lose. What would have happened if I tried to connect with all the other stakeholders but still didn’t get to everyone I needed? Is it my fault?
Nope. But that’s life. Sometimes you run up against a coin flip and get the wrong side. This is why sales can be an emotionally-taxing job.
Mental illusions
I spent approximately one day feeling crappy about this, saying things like, “I almost had the deal.”
But here’s the thing: if the folks in management were never on board in the first place, what deal did I lose? There never was a deal to be had!
The other mental trap I fell into was moving my goal posts. At the start of this year, I set a revenue goal to achieve by September 1. But as this deal moved through the pipeline, I started counting this as an obviously closed deal and started thinking about my next goal. The net effect is that I now felt set back on two goals: the original and my new, imagined one.
I write all the time about setting goals and reviewing them each day, but this is still an easy trap to fall into.
Anyway, the best way to shake off a loss is to go after the next win. So here we go. :)
Love these quick, to the point updates, and the transparency they provide. Thanks for sharing your journey!