Learn Through Loss
It happens to the best of us; losing a deal is part of sales and an area often overlooked for valuable information to build future success. It has always amazed me that we humans seem always need to learn the hard way. I have heard that a SMART person learns from their mistakes, but a WISE person learns from the mistakes of others. Unfortunately, the majority of us have to learn from our own mistakes. We always seem to think our situation is different. Nevertheless, we have the ability to be smart by establishing a framework that ensures we learn from our own mistakes, even if we don't feel we can learn from others.
It is the end of the quarter, and you are working long hours trying to close every possible deal you can. You have three deals left in your commit for the quarter, and bringing all three of them in would blow your number way out of the water. Unfortunately, you just discovered that one of your committed deals inked a deal with your competitor. As a top performer, YOU HATE LOSING! It crushes you. You are mad as hell! How could this have happened? We did everything we could; this deal must not have been winnable. Then you tell yourself, "Chin up; you have two more that must close; I will come back to this one." The truth is rarely do people return to inspect why they lost the deal.
Moving forward, I want to challenge you to make the time to perform an introspective review within a week of losing any deal. I call them Loss Retrospectives. During the Loss Retrospective, I encourage you to do the following:
What did you miss? Review Your MEDDIC. Did you get any part of the MEDDIC wrong? Was there an unknown economic buyer? Did the competition have a more influential Champion than you? Was your Metric weak? Did you miss a step in the Decision Process? Was there some unknown Decision Criteria? What did you miss?
How did you miss it? Once you understand step one, What did you miss? Now it is time to understand why you miss it. The most important is to ask yourself, what question(s) could I have asked to have uncovered it? Did you get your information from a single source and not validate it with anyone else? Did you think you had a Champion when you had a Coach?
How can you not make the same mistake? The best salespeople are lifelong students of sales. You should be constantly investing in making yourself better. Go to your notes on MEDDIC, your cheatsheet, and add the miss to that cheatsheet so as you work on all your future deals, you have a recall method to ensure that those misses don't happen again.
Words of Caution
I have performed hundreds of Loss Retrospectives. The biggest mistake I hear is the blaming. People blaming the product for not having a particular feature and blaming the competition for having a special relationship with the CEO or board member. Remember, the purpose of MEDDIC is to help you better qualify your deals so that you can appropriately commit them. The better you are at MEDDIC, the higher your win rate will be. If incorporating MEDDIC properly, you would know about that particular feature that your product may be missing or that relationship the CEO has with the competitor. Knowing these things would change your behavior in how you forecast and attach the deal. It is easy to blame an external force for losing the deal, but as a salesperson, our job is to uncover those opposing forces and go after the deals we can win.
The only way we get better is by conducting these Loss Retrospective. Those who fail to learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
MEDDIC offers a structured approach to identifying and addressing technical and business pain points. Understanding the difference and connecting these pains empowers presales professionals to offer compelling solutions and drive successful sales engagements.
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