Three excuses for a lost deal.
That block the learning
The won deal gets a party. The lost deal gets a rationalisation.
Companies evaluate what they’ve won, not what they’ve lost. The won deal goes on the website as a case study. The lost one disappears in an email from sales: “Too expensive. Wrong timing. They already knew the other party.”
That’s a mistake. A lost deal contains information. A won deal only confirms what you thought.
The three excuses
Lost deals almost always get placed into one of three buckets.
Price. “We were too expensive.” Sales says it to the director, and the director nods. It’s comfortable, because it moves the conversation toward margin rather than position. But price is a symptom, not a cause. The question isn’t whether you were too expensive. The question is why the customer didn’t see value to justify the price.
Timing. “It was the wrong moment.” This is almost always true and almost always irrelevant. Timing is what you create, not what happens to you. If your customer isn’t thinking of you when they’re buying, that’s not a timing problem. It’s a presence problem.
Relationship. “They already knew the other party.” That’s a fact. But it’s not an explanation. The explanation sits with the other party, not with you. Why did the customer know them and not you? What did they do in the last eighteen months that you didn’t?
Three excuses that neutralise the loss. And precisely for that reason, they block the learning.
What sits underneath
Behind every loss sit three strategic layers the excuses don’t touch.
The first is position. The customer couldn’t distinguish you from anyone else. Not because your product is worse, but because you didn’t make clear what makes you different. Customers don’t choose the best option. They choose the one they can most easily explain to themselves.
The second is presence. The customer wasn’t considering you at all, because you weren’t in the list of brands that came to mind when the decision came up. The fact that you exist isn’t the same as the fact that someone thinks of you. Byron Sharp calls this mental availability.
The third is proof. The customer had to make a leap they couldn’t justify to their leadership team or board. It wasn’t you who failed. They failed, with you in their hand. And that produces exactly the same result: they chose someone else.
Three layers nobody spontaneously investigates, because sales doesn’t have time, marketing doesn’t know what to ask, and the director isn’t running the conversation.
Why the question is uncomfortable
“Why are we losing this” is an uncomfortable question, because it points inward. The three excuses point outward: at the market, the customer, the timing. The three layers point at your own position. At what you didn’t build, didn’t communicate, didn’t substantiate.
A director who asks this question has to be willing to discover something about himself. Most prefer the comfort of “too expensive”.
But the loss is the teacher. The win is the confirmation. A company that only seeks confirmation learns nothing new.
What the loss actually tells you
The difference between “we lost because we were too expensive” and “we lost because the customer couldn’t explain our value to his boss” is a world apart.
The first leads to discounts. The second leads to sharper proof, better sales material, a position that’s easier for others to repeat.
The first solves a symptom. The second solves a cause.
The diagnosis
Good strategic work starts with understanding what’s actually going on. Not with goals, not with actions. With the question: what’s happening here, really?
Most marketing strategies skip that understanding. They start at goals or actions. “We want more leads.” “We’re investing in content.” No understanding of what’s happening under the surface.
“Why are we losing this” is, for us, the understanding-version of marketing. It’s the question that forces you to ignore the three excuses and confront the three layers.
The question isn’t how to win more often. The question is what you’re losing, and why.
Further reading
This is the short version. The pillar piece goes deeper into how the three layers are investigated and addressed: Why are we losing this? The three strategic layers underneath every lost deal.