How can you improve your closing rate on lost opportunities?

In the world of sales, every lost opportunity hides a wealth of valuable information. The use of sales pipelines, particularly within the HubSpot tool opens up a range of possibilities for in-depth analysis of the reasons behind every failure. In this article, we'll explore in depth the often underestimated potential of capturing reasons for not closing an opportunity, and look at how sales teams can leverage this information to improve their strategies, reduce future losses and optimize their sales process.

1. Understanding your sales pipeline

When working with HubSpot's sales pipelines, you have the opportunity to define which stages are successful for your sales and which are unsuccessful. For example, in the last stages of your pipeline, you should most often find a stage for winning deals and another for losing deals. In this stage, you'll find a set of sales opportunities that didn't come to fruition, but for which there may still be considerable potential. Generating leads for sales remains a major effort for both marketing and sales teams, which is why it's important to keep working on these opportunities if they seem important.

2. Understanding the reasons for non-closing/non-closing

As Hubspot is built on the notion of objects and properties, the latter offers you on transactions a "Reason for lost closed conversion" property. By default, this property is a text field, but you can modify it to display it as a drop-down menu with several options, for example.

When building the stages of your pipeline, you have the option of forcing your team members to fill in certain information, known as "Conditional Stage Properties". This is where you can force your teams to enter a reason for non-closing. A pop-up window will appear when the transaction enters your lost transaction phase. Work out the values of this property in advance with them, so that they have access to all the reasons that seem important to them. Generally speaking, when we make sales, we're able to identify 5-10 recurring reasons why our services don't close. These often include price, timing, competition etc.

3. Exploiting lost transactions

Analyzing trends: Gathering and analyzing the number of lost transactions according to the stated reason enables sales teams to identify emerging trends. If a particular pattern emerges repeatedly, this may indicate a wider problem to be solved.

Optimizing strategies: Non-signature patterns provide direct indications for adjusting strategies. For example, if a lack of product understanding is a frequent reason, teams can invest more in prospect education.

Optimization of strategies.

Improved personalization: with clearly identified reasons, teams can tailor their approaches to overcome the specific obstacles faced by prospects.

Marketing-Sales alignment: Non-signing reasons can guide the marketing department to create more targeted content, addressing common objections and thereby increasing conversion rates.

Marketing-sales alignment.

4. Using workflows for personalized follow-up

Thanks to the data that has been collected you'll be able to use HubSpot's automation features to automate certain actions:

Team notification: when a transaction is marked as lost with a specific reason, a workflow can trigger an automatic notification or task to the relevant team. This enables a rapid and targeted review of the missed opportunity.

Post-Transaction follow-up: workflows can be configured to automatically send personalized follow-up e-mails based on the reason for non-signature. For example, if high price was an issue, a follow-up e-mail could suggest special offers or payment plans.

Post-Transaction Follow-up.

Opportunity recovery: For certain temporary non-signing reasons (such as a lack of urgency), specific follow-up workflows can be set up to re-engage prospects after a certain period of time.

5. Automated reporting

To track trends and the volume of lost transactions according to their reason, you can create customized reports that will show you by month, for example, the number of lost transactions as well as the reason(s) for non-closure that would come up the most. This report can be automatically emailed on a weekly or monthly basis.

In conclusion, the use of non-signing reasons offers incredible potential for improving the performance of sales teams. Every lost opportunity becomes an opportunity for learning and growth. Using this data, teams can refine their strategies, adapt their approaches and reduce future losses. Analysis of reasons for not signing opens the door to a culture of continuous improvement, propelling sales to new heights of success. Automated workflows complement this approach, enabling personalized follow-up and proactive recovery of opportunities.