Sales

Deals are not lost at the end. They are lost at the start.

Late-stage losses are early-stage mistakes with a delay on them.

By ··8 min read·Sales

Autopsy honestly

"Lost on price" and "lost to a competitor" are usually translations of the same sentence: this deal was mis-qualified at entry, and nobody wanted to say so while it still looked like coverage.

The last meeting only reveals the first one.

Qualification is a decision, not a form

Fields filled in a CRM are not qualification. Qualification is a deliberate choice to spend your scarcest resource — senior attention — on this account and not another.

Design the first call

Problem, power, timeline. If the first conversation cannot establish all three, the deal enters the pipeline as fiction. Fiction is expensive at the end.

← All insights3 / 10
Next in Sales

Heroics are a process failure.

Read ↗

The next move

Let’s build
what’s next.

Share your challenge