Your lost data is lying to you.
Open Scene: End of year strategy meeting CEO, CRO, CFO & COO all sit around a table looking at a screen showing a pie chart. Lost data analysis from their CRM - the source of truth.
A significant wedge of the pie is labeled “Became unresponsive/unengaged/no decision.”
COO turns to the CRO and says “Why the long face?”
This scene plays out in B2B teams all across the world. The pie chart is meant to highlight where deals are lost and ideally, revenue leaders are meant to be data-led and attack those lost reasons to improve win rate. That’s how it's supposed to work…
The problem is that most teams are tracking the symptoms, not the cause.
“Unresponsive”, “Went Dark”, “Ghosted”. That’s the death knell in the coffin of the deal but it’s not the decision that killed it.
It's a bit like an autopsy saying “Cause of death - body is dead”
The reality is that way before the buyer exited stage left, something, somewhere went wrong.
The biggest mistake we see teams making is acting like the silent treatment is a reason and not the outcome.
So why isn’t the lost data accurate?
- It relies on a single human's retrospective opinion on the deal
- It’s filled in after an emotional loss and usually with an unwillingness to honestly assess the deal
- CRMs are generally optimised for speed, ironically to ensure completeness of data but in this case it has the opposite effect.
Most sales reps don't deliberately lie but the reality is that most also aren’t willing to face the harsh truth that they themselves may be at fault.
Sales is hard, reps are under huge pressure to deliver and it's hard to blame them for not truly unearthing lost reasons when leadership only wants a box ticked.
So instead of:
- We failed to engage the decision maker
- We dropped the ball and didn’t send a follow up email until 3 weeks later
- We failed to mitigate a risk the prospect clearly stated
You get that large piece of ‘ghosted’ pie that is entirely useless in helping C-Suite understand what’s actually going on or how to fix it.
Rep opinion alone is no longer enough. It’s one signal, one potential reason. But the best revenue teams are taking a much deeper view.
There are four facets that can truly unlock your lost data.
- What the rep thought
- What the buyer actually said
- What risks surfaced
- What didn’t happen. (EB absent, no multi-threading, no next step, no activity)
If you are able to understand all of these for each deal then you can create lost data that is complete and actionable.
This is where AI actually earns its crust. LLMs are great at spotting patterns, looking at objections, identifying risk, comparing deals that stalled to ones that closed etc. All autonomously and at scale.
This isn’t about AI being a judge or surveillance to make sure AE’s do their job, it's there as a witness to everything that happens through the deal and when deployed correctly will shine a light on lost reasons that you had no idea were even there.
We work with sales teams every day to help them uncover the truth from their call data.
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