Cookbook
Capture why you lost, in a form you can add up
Everybody writes down why they lost. Almost nobody can add it up, because it went into a note. The difference between a story and a number is one decision made before the first loss, not after the twentieth.
The situation
At the end of the quarter somebody asks why the win rate moved. The answers exist: they are in twenty call summaries, phrased twenty ways. "Price" and "too expensive" and "went with the cheaper option" are the same fact written three times, and no amount of reading turns them into a total you can act on.
The fix is to decide the small set of reasons in advance and record against it. The interesting part is that the fixed set is worth less than the free text, and you want both.
What must be true when you are done
- A closed set of loss reasons exists, and the agent can only use those.
- You can ask for a count per reason and get one, computed rather than read.
- The sentence explaining the loss survives too, on the record.
- Deals lost before you started this are visible as unrecorded, not as zero.
Define the set, and make it reportable
Keep it short. Five reasons that get used beat eleven that get guessed at, and a list nobody can hold in their head produces data nobody believes.
You
That last sentence is the one that matters, and it is the thing this recipe exists to tell you. A field has to be marked as reportable when it is defined. Skip it and everything still works: the agent records reasons for a quarter, they are on every record, and then the first time you ask for a breakdown you are told the field cannot be grouped. The data is fine. The question is the thing that fails, months later, in front of somebody.
Asked without it, the refusal is at least specific about what you could have asked instead:
Agent
Worth reading past the error: that list is every dimension you can total by, including ones that reach through to the company. "Pipeline by customer industry" is in there, and most people never think to ask.
Record the reason and the sentence
When a deal dies, the agent sets the reason and writes what actually happened. The enum is for adding up; the summary is for understanding, and the second one is what makes the first one trustworthy six months later when somebody disputes the category.
You
Agent
Ask for the breakdown
You
Agent
The eight with no reason set are not a bug and should not be filtered out. They are every deal that has not been lost, plus any that were lost before you defined the field, and keeping them in the same answer is what stops the report quietly implying you have understood every loss. When that row is large and your closed-lost count is also large, the answer to "why do we lose" is that nobody is recording it, which is a more useful finding than a pie chart.
Verify it
- Try to record a reason outside the set. It should be refused. If a sixth reason gets in, the field is text pretending to be a list and your totals will drift within a month.
- Ask for the breakdown the same day you define it. Do not wait for real data to discover the field is not reportable.
- Read three summaries against their reasons. If the sentence and the category disagree, the category is being chosen carelessly and the total is already wrong.
Run it again
The reason goes on at the moment of the loss, never in a catch-up pass: the sentence is only accurate while somebody still remembers the call. Read the breakdown monthly, and take it to the quarterly review, where the honest version of the question is not why you lost but whether the reasons changed.