Zach Selch explains when to run sales post-mortems: after big losses or unexpected deals that slip away late. He walks through a South American distributor who lost millions by contacting the wrong people at the client, then fixed her approach and earned much higher commissions.
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I'm in Moscow in front of Lenin's tomb. Lenin is very well preserved inside, dead almost 100 years, and really you can go in and see him. They've taken very good care of him. If you want to wait in line, you can go in and see his body. I'd like to talk today a little bit about postmortems. How often do you do postmortems? When and why do you do postmortems? Well, we do postmortems when there's a suspicion of foul play. From my perspective, one way of looking at it is you say, well, how much of the annual sales budget of this distributor, of this salesperson, does that sale that we lost meet? Are we talking about 10% of their annual sales? Are we talking about 25%? Are we talking about 50% on this one deal? Because for all little deals, you don't necessarily have to go. The other way of looking at it, which I actually I am more attracted to is to say, well, if they lost a deal that they were convinced up until the day before, up until the week before, they were going to win, then we have a problem because they should have known they were going to lose. If they lost it, they should have known they were going to lose it. So what can we do to figure out what happened so in the future we shouldn't lose deals like this? And I'll give you a great example of one of the better postmortems I ever had. I had this distributor in South America with a saleswoman who was really good at relationships, but she wasn't very strategic. She didn't think things through well enough as far as I was concerned, but she had great relationships. And she lost probably the biggest deal of her career up until then. And it was a large deal, a multimillion-dollar deal. And I flew down to talk to her because she had been— up until the day before, she had been convinced she was going to get it. And she fought me on the postmortem. She was like, She's I'm not going to lose this like, deal. What did you you know, say to her? Zach, I'm really devastated. This hurt me so much that I lost it. I feel betrayed by my friends. I don't want to talk about it. And I said to her, you know, we really have to figure out what happened so, so that we can understand for the future. And we dug down into this and we dug pretty deep. And it turns out she had been talking to the wrong people. She had been talking to the people she liked within the organization. And in this particular case, they weren't the right people to To issue the purchase order. So we ended up losing it because she was talking to the wrong people. And going forward, she learned so much from this one postmortem that really it impacted her sales career for coming years dramatically, to the point where she was earning literally hundreds of thousands of dollars more over the course of her career from commissions because she was driving better sales and better deals. So I find postmortems extremely helpful for that, for teaching people, for understanding the systemic problems, for identifying where you have to improve things. Remember, when you can— remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us and we can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
