5 Ways To Convert Closed Lost Opportunities Into Clients
You’ve spent months entering data into your CRM system while running your sales process, now it’s time to gain some leverage from that work.
Lets face it. Most salespeople avoid marking deals as lost, and businesses end up with a swollen pipeline full of deals that don't seem to move. At Mindracer, we believe that sales teams benefit from the mindset where a “YES” is great, a “NO” is equally great (it usually means not now) and “MAYBE” is a killer of sales success. Great sales managers know this and help salespeople avoid MAYBE wrecking their forecast and productivity.
If you’re a business owner growing a sales team, or a sales leader running one - this realization above may be a gamechanger. If you clear out the “MAYBE” deals that are not progressing from your sales meeting discussions and focus instead on deals that you can unstick and win this month and quarter, you can get more done with less resources.
The result of this is that those MAYBE deals will be recorded as “Closed Lost” in your CRM system, which creates a potential goldmine of future revenue as they already showed interest and passed qualification to go into your sales pipeline, but they just shouldn’t be there right now.
In this guide we share the strategies that we use to unlock those closed lost deals, so that you know you won’t miss out by getting them out of your daily view in CRM.
1) Create and use a set of closed lost reasons that make sense for your business, and a policy around when you re-engage. Requiring that these are added to CRM and that a follow up task is set when a deal is marked as closed lost generates great returns.
When a CRM is newly implemented, we recommend allowing a free response box in your closed lost reason until you have around 50 deals to review, then you can refine the loss reasons as a set of options. If you prefer to start with a set of reasons, allow an “other” category and make adding a description with that choice mandatory so that you capture the data.
Here are some example loss reasons and re-engage dates you can use.
Closed Lost Reason
2) Create time with your salespeople to review their closed lost deal call recordings.
Depending on how many deals each rep is working, you can choose a frequency for this. We recommend at least once per quarter to ensure you can identify opportunities and take action regularly.
The goal is to identify missed opportunities. Listening to the start and end of a recorded call for the challenges identified and next steps that were discussed, then comparing that to the follow up actions that were taken by the rep often creates opportunity to get back to the prospect with a new conversation that is related to their challenge, which can restart a sales process, or at gain more valuable information about their situation and timeline.
Your goal here is to restart a conversation that died - building on the discovery that has already been done and making sure the prospect feels heard.
3) Review the contact record in CRM - looking back over the contact record in a closed lost opportunity often uncovers forgotten gold.
Example: Think about when a prospect initially inquires through your website, they fill out a form and mention that they would be working on a specific project, or that they require something specific. When you check back over the lost opportunity you see that these details are not included in emails or notes from when the rep followed up after the sales meeting.
You just found an opportunity to go back to that prospect and potentially revisit. You only need one reason to contact the prospect and see if they still need that problem to be solved.
4) You just won a deal with one of their competitors - using the industry or geography filter as appropriate and looking for those deals that were closed for loss reasons such as “bad timing/ghosted/no budget” will give you a list of people to contact.
Business owners may respond well to this for several reasons, the most common being that they don’t want to be left behind if their competition is investing.
We have used this very successfully in both service and SaaS companies to deliver more clients that are very similar to each other, allowing your team to double down on learnings and deliver them even more expertise for their investment.
5) Your team just solved the problem your prospect was having for another client.
Paying close attention to the “other” closed lost category here - when your team shares a success they have had with a client, go back and take a look at the “other” category to see if you had a prospect that had that same problem
Going back with a specific story that you know they were experiencing that specific issue and offering to walk them through how you solved it for a similar client will often be a successful way to get a conversation restarted. Sometimes you will find they solved it already and don’t need your solution, other times you will find they still feel that pain and the conversation can pick back up where you left off.
Either way this is a strategy that sets your team apart because they listened to the prospect and got back to them when a solution became available.
If you don’t execute on these, you are leaving money on the table. You’re also leaving open the opportunity for competitors to outsell you by adopting these plays.
If you do execute these five strategies well, you will be doing more and performing better than most sales teams. You will be differentiated from most companies. If you take a moment to think about the last time a rep followed up with you in this way (rarely or never?), you will realize what a huge opportunity you can create by making this part of your team’s routine.
As always, these strategies take time to execute and must be considered against all other priorities - this is a high value activity that has a proven high ROI and has the potential to either drive record sales further up, or even help save slower sales quarters.
We hope you enjoyed these Five Ways To Convert Closed Lost Opportunities Into Clients.