EightBlack.

We lost a deal yesterday.

No drama’s. We all lose sometimes and as they saying goes, you can’t win them all.

But in the post mortem, I learnt some things. And I probably should have known better.

The project was a major website build for a power retailer. Value - about $60K. Now, I hate building websites because the work has become a commodity and the difference between a “good” site and a “bad” one is too subjective. But that doesn’t mean we dont want the work or we’re not competent at it.

Originally, we thought we had the deal all sewn up as were leveraging off a relationship within the business.

We had assumed that this person was the sole decision maker. We quickly learnt otherwise.

At the 11th hour, we were told that the company was now going to get a competitive quote.

Lesson 1: Control the environment.

When we look back on the past week’s events, we discovered that the deal was really being driven by the company’s IT folks. Go figure.

The marketing folks wanted a website for marketing purposes, the IT guys just wanted to outsource the “headache” of building and managing the new website as they were too pre-occupied with all the other stuff in their life.

Lesson 2: Understand who is making the decision.

As soon as another company was involved in the process, we should have worked harder at understanding the elements within the deal.

We assumed way too much. And as the famous line by Tommy Lee Jones in a Steven Seagal movie goes, “Assumption Is The Mother Of All Screw Ups”. Actually he said “fuck ups” but I wasnt quite sure if some of you would be offended by that word. I digress.

We learned a few things with this deal.

When selling to a corporate, understand that there’s always more than one person involved in the sale. Thats the way corporates work.

Our mistake was not being able to read the signs from their IT Director, who was clearly the strongest influencer in the whole process.

It was never about the quality of what we had proposed or our technical competence, it all boiled down to us not being flexible with what the customer wanted and not reading the signs.

I think there was also an element of “lack of desire”, and when complacency slips into your sales process, it’s time to fire the sales director or take a holiday.

I’m not pissed at losing the sale. It’s not about the money.

But I am annoyed at my inability to see the signs and to act.

If one thing, it’s given the team a renewed sense of determination, and that’s important.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 8:02 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.