What can you do to help your reps learn, and improve, from a lost sale? What can you do to use your losses as opportunities for research, for follow-up and to help increase your team’s competitive edge? Join me as I share how you can help your reps still get significant value out of their lost sales…so they can sell even more!
What are you doing to get more value out of your lost sales? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And the reality, the sad reality for a lot of sales teams, is your losses have no value. Sales reps spend months sometimes going after business, puts a lot of effort into it, proposes, is not chosen. You lose to a competitor. So what do you do now?
Well, the reality, the goal is how can we use that loss, even though we didn't win the business to still contribute and have value to what we do? One of the best ways to do that is after we have lost, after the customer has made a decision, to go back to them and ask them, to say, "We were really interested in your business and worked hard to try to show you how we could earn the right to do business with you. We realize you chose another vendor that I'm sure is going to do a great job for you. So I would love you to help me understand, what could we have done better? What would've made any difference? What could we have done that impressed you with the other organization that would have had and shown us of having more value that we might be considered as a finalist? What could we have done to be of more help to you?"
And just the idea of surveying a customer. Now, we wait sometimes a couple weeks after they've decided so they know it's not just a last minute ditched effort to try to change their minds, but that we're trying to understand how we can improve so next time we could be more competitive and maybe give them a better offer. The reality is these questions need to be asked. If it was a major selling effort you went after, it might even be more effective to have a manager make this call than a sales rep, just to research and survey, not to try to put pressure on the customer, but to try to learn.
The reality is even a lost sale can have value to help you increase the uniqueness of what you offer and the messaging of how you position yourself. But to do that, we got to ask questions. Would love to know what you're doing with this, would love how it's going for you and what you've done to follow up after a lost sale to provide value. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.