Why are we losing this.

The won deal gets a party. The lost deal gets a rationalisation.

That’s the pattern we see in nearly every conversation with directors and owner-managers. The win is celebrated. The win becomes a case study, an internal newsletter, a narrative for the team. The loss gets three lines in an email from sales. Too expensive. Wrong timing. They already knew the other party.

And then it disappears into a folder and nobody looks at it again.

This is a mistake. The win only confirms what you already thought. The loss contains information you can’t get anywhere else. But you only get that information if you’re willing to ignore the three standard excuses and look at what sits beneath them.

Underneath every lost deal, there are three layers the excuses never touch. This piece is about what those layers are, why they go missing, and why the director is the one who has to see them. Not the marketing manager. Not sales. Not a consultancy with a dashboard.

The three standard excuses

We start with the excuses, because you’ve heard them all before. They sound reasonable. They sound almost analytical. Which is precisely why they work.

Price. “We were too expensive.” Sales says it to the director, the director nods. It’s comfortable, because it moves the conversation toward margin and away from position. And it’s something you can act on: you can give a discount, restructure a package, make a commercial decision.

But price is almost never a cause. Price is a translation. When a customer says something is too expensive, what they’re actually saying is they didn’t see the value. That’s a different thing. It doesn’t sit in the price. It sits in what the customer thought they were getting for that price.

A Rolls-Royce isn’t too expensive. A Hilux isn’t too cheap. Both sell at what they’re considered worth. The difference between you and the winner isn’t that they were cheaper. It’s that they managed to suggest more value, or that they offered the same value in a context that justified the price.

Timing. “It was the wrong moment.” This is almost always true and almost always irrelevant. Timing isn’t an external factor. Timing is something you build. It’s the result of what you did in the previous twelve to eighteen months to be present at the moment the customer started deciding.

If your customer isn’t thinking about you when they’re buying, that’s not a timing problem. It’s a presence problem. And presence is something you built or didn’t build in the year before.

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?

Sales almost never goes looking for the answer. Because that’s a question about your own presence, not about the customer. And as Richard Rumelt writes in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: a good diagnosis of a problem points at what you can change, not at what’s happening to you. A bad diagnosis points outward, to the market, the customer, the timing. A good diagnosis points at the work you didn’t do.

Three excuses that neutralise the loss. And precisely for that reason, they block the learning.

The three layers underneath

Behind every loss sit three layers the excuses don’t touch. We’ll work through them one by one. They aren’t new. They’re just rarely seen in combination.

Layer 1: The customer couldn’t distinguish you from anyone else

Not because your product is worse. Because you didn’t make clear what makes you different.

Customers don’t choose the best option. They choose the option they can most easily explain to themselves. And, more importantly, to others. Most B2B purchases run through a leadership team or a board. Most consumer purchases get discussed in a group. What sells isn’t what’s objectively best. What sells is what can be passed on in a single sentence to the next person.

A good position gives the customer that sentence. “We’re the [category] that [something distinctive], for [particular customer].” That sounds simple. In practice, most companies don’t have the sentence. Or worse: they have it, but their competitor uses the same one.

A direct-to-consumer brand that says it offers “sustainable, high-quality products with personal service” has no position. An industrial wholesaler that says it’s “a reliable partner with fast delivery and expert staff” has no position. It’s language any company could use. A customer who hears it has nothing to remember about you.

When a customer says they chose the other supplier because “they fit better with what we were looking for,” what they’re really saying is something about your position. Not your product. The other party didn’t objectively fit better. They were more memorable.

This is the first layer. And most companies don’t investigate it, because choosing a position is a board-level decision, not a marketing activity. It’s not a campaign. It’s a choice about where you stand. And it gets missed because nobody actually owns it.

Layer 2: The customer wasn’t thinking about you when the decision came up

They didn’t consider you at all, because you weren’t in the list of brands that came to mind when the moment to decide arrived. In the marketing literature, this is called mental availability.

Byron Sharp has published thirty years of research on this from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The short version: market share correlates directly with who thinks about you when it matters. Not product quality. Not how happy your existing customers are. Not technical superiority. With how much your brand is present in the heads of potential customers at the moment a decision is being made.

This is uncomfortable. Because it means most companies that try to improve their product in order to sell more are turning the wrong dial. Their product usually isn’t the problem. Their presence in the collective memory of the market is the problem.

In B2B, this is even more visible than in consumer. The buying cycle is longer, the number of decision-makers larger, and what gets into the list at the moment of first orientation almost always determines who eventually gets the deal. A director who, in week one of his search, can think of three suppliers, will, with very high probability, choose from those three. Anyone who shows up in week six via an ad or a cold call doesn’t get a look in.

In consumer the rhythm is shorter, but it works the same way. The customer who’s about to search a webshop is already thinking of three or four brands before they start. The ones in that list get consideration time. The ones outside have to muscle in with paid ads. It works, but it’s a more expensive route with worse conversion.

Sharp and his colleague Jenni Romaniuk have shown that this presence is built through consistent visibility at the right buying moments, with distinctive cues (colours, shapes, words, sounds) that customers can attach to your brand without thinking. It isn’t really a story about advertising. It’s a story about how memory works.

What this means for the lost deal: if your customer didn’t mention you when we asked them which suppliers they thought of at the start of their search, the deal was lost before the first meeting. That’s not a sales problem. It’s a presence problem that marketing and the board have to address together.

Layer 3: The customer couldn’t explain their choice to anyone else

A B2B customer needs three kinds of proof. Not one. Not two. Three. For themselves (my instinct is right). For their team (we’re not just doing this on a hunch). And for their boss (I can explain this later). Most companies only provide the first kind. A whitepaper, a product demo, a case study. Enough to convince the individual decision-maker. Not enough to get the organisation behind them.

In consumer it works in a shorter version of the same pattern. Impulse purchases are rare at any price point that matters. Most consumer decisions get discussed: with a partner, a friend, a community. If you don’t give the customer something repeatable in that conversation, you don’t get the sale. The customer says: “I need to think about it.” That’s almost always code for “I can’t explain this to the people around me.”

The three kinds of proof work differently.

Proof for the customer themselves needs to be logical and analytical. Numbers, comparisons, product features. This is what most companies provide, and it’s usually good enough. The customer looks at your website or brochure and thinks: this could work for us.

Proof for the team needs to be social and recognisable. Which similar companies have done this? What did they get out of it? How does this fit our sector? This kind of proof sits in case studies, references, testimonials that don’t just say “we’re satisfied” but describe what actually happened. Most companies have something here, but rarely deep enough.

Proof for the boss needs to be short and irrefutable. One sentence that justifies the purchase to someone who wasn’t in the room. One fact that legitimises the choice. One distinguishing point that can be passed on in a twelve-second exchange in a meeting. This is what nobody provides. And it’s exactly where most B2B deals fall apart.

When a customer says they chose the other party because “internally, the other one was felt to be safer,” they’re telling you something about your proof for the boss. Not your product. The other party gave them something to say in an internal meeting. You only gave them something they could believe in themselves.

How we investigate the three layers

This isn’t sales research. That’s the first mistake people make. Sales has too direct an interest in rationalising the loss. The manager wants to know why he lost. His rep has an interest in a story that doesn’t make them accountable. The result is a report where “too expensive” and “wrong timing” feature prominently, and the three strategic layers stay untouched.

It also isn’t traditional external market research. An agency phoning lost prospects gets the polite answer. The customer says price, timing, relationship. Because those are the answers that don’t hurt anyone. The three layers don’t surface in a structured interview.

What does work: a conversation that goes directly at the three layers, conducted by someone who understands the strategic context and has no emotional skin in the outcome.

In practice, three conversations need to happen.

The conversation with the customer about their first list. Don’t ask the lost customer why they chose the other party. Ask which suppliers they thought of in week one of their search. The names they mention, and the name they don’t, give you the first layer. Whether you were in their head when they started is measurable here.

The conversation with the customer about their internal justification. Ask what they said internally to legitimise the choice. Not what they decided about you, but how they explained the decision to others. The sentence they used to sell the winner to their boss or their partner is what you didn’t have. The third layer becomes visible here.

The conversation with your own sales about the customer’s terms. Ask your sales team what the customer said at the start of the engagement. What did they say they were looking for? In which terms did they describe their need? Those terms come from your position or from a competitor’s. If the customer came in using the other party’s language, you were behind before you said anything.

Three conversations that walk past the three excuses and expose the three layers. No sixty-page report. No quarterly research cycle. Three to four hours of work per lost deal, conducted at board level.

What the marketing manager misses if she isn’t the one investigating

A marketing manager can’t do this work. Not because she lacks the skill. Because she lacks the mandate.

The three layers are board decisions. Which position you choose gets decided at the board table or not at all. Building presence in your market is a one-to-three-year investment that goes well beyond a marketing budget. The three kinds of proof require alignment with sales, product development, and pricing.

A marketing manager who’d want to do this work runs into three organisational walls. Sales guards the customer contacts. Product development isn’t on her agenda. And the board doesn’t have time to discuss it with her.

The result: the three layers get partially seen in every organisation (by marketing, by sales, by product), but never get brought together. Nobody has the overview. Nobody can address the three layers in combination. So they stay untouched, and the loss stays a rationalisation rather than something you learn from.

This is exactly the work Dogfight exists to do. Not to replace the marketing manager. Not to take over sales. But to bring the three layers, in combination, to the board table, with the director or owner-manager as the principal.

How this works through to product and pricing

A lost deal investigated on the three layers often produces insights well beyond marketing.

If your position turns out to be too close to a major competitor’s, the question arises whether your product is distinguishing itself on the right attributes. That’s not a marketing question. It’s a product question. Maybe the distinction sits not in what you sell, but in what you withhold or don’t offer. Roger Martin writes about this in Playing to Win: strategy is a sequence of choices about where you play and how you win. Not trying to do everything at once.

If presence turns out to be lagging, the question arises whether your marketing budget is allocated correctly. Not more budget into performance, not more budget into lead gen, but shifts toward investments that pay back over one to three years. Les Binet and Peter Field have a rule of thumb: roughly 60 percent of marketing budget should go to building the brand, roughly 40 percent to direct activation. Most companies we encounter are running at 10/90 or worse.

If proof for the boss is missing, the question arises whether your pricing structure supports the choice. Sometimes a higher price is easier to sell internally than a lower one, because it does the legitimisation work for you. Sometimes a specifically positioned product line for one industry or use case is easier to choose than a general solution. This isn’t a marketing decision. It’s a commercial design that sales, marketing, and pricing have to do together.

The three layers, then, aren’t only diagnostic. They’re work-points for the organisation as a whole. Which is why the director has to see them. The marketing manager can execute. The director signs.

One lost deal a month. Not more, not less.

One lost deal investigated well beats ten investigated badly.

What we propose to directors who want to take this seriously: every month, take one lost deal of significance. Not all lost deals. Not the small ones. Not the ones you knew you were never going to win. The one that would have been discussed by the leadership team if it had come in.

Each analysis takes three to four hours. Two customer conversations of an hour each. One sales debrief of thirty minutes to an hour. One session in which we write out the three layers and connect them to actions.

After six months, you have six analysed loss cases. Patterns emerge in those six. What was missing in six different sold stories. What the competition was doing well. Which weakness in your position keeps repeating. That pattern is your marketing brief for the year ahead.

This is how you build marketing strategy on data from lost deals. Not on market research with prospects you don’t yet know. On the most bitter material an organisation has: the loss of a customer you should have won.

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?

That’s Rumelt’s starting point in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. First understand. Then direction. Then action. Most marketing strategies skip the understanding and go straight to direction or action. They address symptoms rather than causes.

“Why are we losing this” is the diagnosis version of marketing. It’s the question that forces you to ignore the three excuses and confront the three layers. It’s the question for which the empirical marketing literature (Sharp, Romaniuk, Binet, Field, Rumelt, Martin) has accumulated decades of evidence, and which sits unanswered on the agenda of nearly every marketing department in Europe.

The question isn’t how to win more often. That’s a tactical conversation about conversion rates, pricing tweaks, sales training. A departmental conversation.

The question is what you’re losing, and why. That’s a strategic conversation about position, presence, and proof. A board conversation.

A company that only has the first conversation keeps spinning on symptoms. A company that takes the second seriously discovers where it can grow without having to get better at what it’s already doing.

It isn’t a pleasant conversation. It’s the right one.

---

Further reading

Marketing at the board table. Why strategic marketing has disappeared from the boardroom agenda, and what belongs there.

AI as the engine under commercial strategy. The difference between AI that speeds up and AI that redesigns.

Marketing in the wrong meeting room. Why strategic marketing ends up between the gaps.

AI as the engine, not the flashing light. The short version of what changes when AI redesigns the work.

Three excuses for a lost deal. Why the standard excuses block the learning.

Mental availability. Why your market share isn’t determined by your product.

Five marketing questions for the board. Five questions a director should ask, and almost never does.

Why do AI projects fail?. Three failure patterns in commercial teams.

Reading a marketing report as a director. Six signals that reveal what’s missing, and which questions to ask.

Win/loss analysis: how to make it work. Three common mistakes and how to set it up differently.

The commercial team under AI. Which roles disappear, which get heavier, and what the director has to do.