Lost reasons report

What is it?

The Lost Reasons Report is one of the most actionable templates on Actiondesk. It shows all the deals you lost in a given month (or week), sorted by the reason why you lost them.

Let’s say that you sell insurance policies. For every month, you’ll see how many sales you missed for one of the following reasons:

• Bad timing. Maybe your customer has just paid to renew his old insurance policy and is not ready to move to yours, even if it’s a better fit.
• Chose a competitor. After considering multiple insurance policies, including yours, your client ended up choosing one of your competitors.
• No budget. This is pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it?
• Not qualified. Maybe the customer simply doesn’t have the problem you’re solving with your product. For a car insurance policy, this may be a customer who doesn’t own a car. Maybe your client borrows a friend's car and only needs a cheap non-owner car policy.  
• Key feature missing. The policy you proposed might not cover something that is of critical importance for your client. For example, if you proposed a sole driver policy and your client often shares his car with his wife, that might be the reason why you missed the sale.
• Too expensive. Again, this is self-explanatory.

You can see the percentage of deals lost for each reason in an easy-to-understand chart.

What problem does it solve?

If you keep losing deals but don’t know the reason why, how can you fix the problem?

Let’s keep pretending you sell insurance policies. You sell two different policies and the reps are constantly missing sales for one of them. The other, instead, sells just fine. 

Let’s say you lose deals for policy A because it’s a sole driver policy, and your target customers like to share their car with family and friends. Policy B is fine because it’s an “any driver” type. But you don’t have the lost reasons report on hand, and therefore don’t know all of this information. You’re completely in the dark about why you’re missing deals. 

The next time you create a new policy, you’ll insert a sole driver clause again and keep losing sales. See where is the problem?

How is it going to help your business?

The knowledge derived from the report empowers you to limit the number of deals lost. Think about it: If you know exactly what is causing the loss of deals, you can remove that reason, and start selling more.

If the report tells you that you’re losing sales because your product is too expensive, you can try lowering the prices. Maybe you can close a deal with a supplier who can provide you with the raw materials at a lower price. Or, you can introduce specials to increase sales, especially during the peak season.

If you discover that you’re losing deals because of a missing feature, just introduce it and sales will start growing.

After making these changes, you can keep monitoring the report, to see if they were effective and impacted your deal loss rate.