Introducing a brand new series: Why deals really died
Every lost deal has a story. Not the one you tell your manager (“they went with an incumbent”). Or the one logged in your CRM (“budget constraints”). But, the real story. The moment everything actually went wrong.
Welcome to The Sales Autopsy. Here, we dissect lost deals, missed targets, and failed initiatives to find the truth beneath the comfortable explanations. Because, the deals you lose teach you more than the ones you win, But, only if you’re honest about what killed them.
This Week’s Case: They Said “Budget Issue” – It Wasn’t
The Setup
Nine-month enterprise software deal. £180k annual contract. Three discovery calls, two demos, a pilot programme, and a champion in the IT department who loved the product. Procurement asked for final pricing in November. We sent it. Silence for three weeks. Then: “Unfortunately, budget has been reallocated. We’ll revisit next financial year.”
What We Told Ourselves
Timing issue. Bad luck. Budgets get frozen, it happens. We’d positioned everything perfectly. However, they just couldn’t free up the funds. We stayed in touch. Sent quarterly check-ins. Waited for Q1.
But they signed with a competitor six weeks later. For £220k.
The Real Cause of Death: Sales Stakeholder Gap
The deal died in August, not December. We just didn’t notice.
This is because, our champion was in IT. The budget holder was in Operations. We never built a relationship with Operations. IT told us they’d “handle the internal stakeholder management.”
What IT actually meant was: “I’ll mention this in our next leadership meeting.”
When the Operations Director finally saw our proposal in November, it was the first time she’d heard about the project in any detail. No context. No relationship. Therefore, no understanding of why this mattered to her department’s objectives.
In addition, our competitor had spent three months building rapport with Operations. Not through IT. Directly. When procurement asked for proposals, Operations already knew which vendor they wanted. The budget wasn’t frozen. Actually, it was allocated to someone who’d done the political groundwork, and did not have a sales stakeholder gap.
The Warning Sign We Ignored
In our third discovery call, our champion mentioned: “I’ll need to loop in Sarah from Operations eventually, but let’s get the pilot results first.” We heard: “She’s a formality.” We should have heard: “She’s the person who actually controls this decision, and I haven’t convinced her yet.”
What Actually Killed This Deal
Not budget. Not timing. Not product-market fit.
We outsourced stakeholder management to someone who didn’t have the authority or political capital to deliver it, leading to a gap when it came to closing the sale. We optimised for the person who liked us, not the person who could buy from us. And we mistook our champion’s enthusiasm for organisational consensus.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The competitor didn’t win because they had a better product. They won because they identified the economic buyer in month two, while we were still doing discovery calls with IT. By the time we sent pricing, they’d already won.
If you have a sales autopsy story you’d like to share, or any advice on a story you see, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch, today!
