Why Marketing & Growth Teams Should Analyze Closed Lost Deals

Marketing teams should analyze every single Closed-Lost deal. Yet a lot of teams don't look into them at all.

It can be tempting to think that anything that didn't result in new revenue was a bad prospect. However, that's not always the case.

As a marketing or growth team, it is important that you not only analyze channels and tactics by revenue but qualified prospects/pipeline that didn't close as well.

The insights gained from why they didn't close can help spark new ways for sales and marketing to collaborate and improve points in the prospect's journey.

Only analyzing Closed-Won deals or channel performance by new revenue is like only watching game film from the games you won.

So much learning and improvement come from studying the ones you didn't win.

Here are a few of the biggest mistakes to avoid:

Turning off a good campaign

If you have a campaign running that has generated $0 in new revenue, it is likely to be on the chopping block.

However, if the campaign is generated qualified opportunities and they just aren't closing, that's the time to dig in and figure out if there is a pattern to why they aren't closing.

If you can rectify that issue, you may start generating more revenue and also avoid turning off a good campaign.

Blaming Sales

It happens everywhere, all of the time.

Not your typical sales and marketing fighting over leads. This is much more concrete than marketing teams buying crap leads and expecting sales to close them.

I mean the marketing or growth team generating opportunities that sales has deemed qualified and pursued seriously.

If those are not closing, that's when it can become tempting to blame sales or lose faith in that team.

So, instead of doing that, marketing teams need to dig into the reasons why they aren't closing and collaborate with sales to figure out what both teams can do to improve close rates on those cohorts.

Not Turning Off Bad Campaigns  

Most of the time this should be caught in earlier qualification processes, but sometimes the qualification process isn't very strict and most opportunities pursued by sales.

In this case, analyzing Closed-Lost deals will help the marketing team to realize that these actually aren't good prospects and the campaign needs to be modified or turned off.

This also presents an opportunity to help improve onboarding and qualification processes to make sure that marketing is getting signals of campaigns or channels driving bad prospects earlier.

It can be time-consuming and likely requires some data cleansing or categorization to make sense of it, but the payoff can mean huge efficiency for new customer acquisition.