Handling Lost opportunities
You will loose an opportunity, but it's essential that you get some knowledge about why a prospect never came to become a client. So it's better to have a "No" than "No answer". We need to know: Why? they you lost the opportunity and potentially to which competitor.
Push hard to get the underlying reasons why they decided against Prezly, often people don't want to hurt your feelings, but we want to tell it to us, at least we've learned something after the time and effort we put in.
As an example an email, or pick up the phone and ask the hard questions:
Hi xxx,
Thanks for getting back to me, It would be really helpful for me and my colleagues if you could share the internal reasons for not deciding to go forward with Prezly. Often people don't want to be harsh or are afraid of hurting ones feelings, but getting this feedback from you can actually be very valuable in improving our product and the way we do things. So please give this 30seconds and let us know why you chose to go another route.
Thanks so much and good luck.
SALES OBJECTIONS
In close.io you can find a custom field which shows "Sales Objections" this is a dropdown with potential reasons. Please mark the correct one, you can add stuff to this list if necessary. But try to use the reasons consistently:
Company: owner left
Competitor
Feature: Email templates
Feature: Filters
Feature: Media monitoring
Feature: Permissions
Feature: provide contact lists
Feature: Reporting
Feature: Social Sharing
No local office
Price
COMPETITOR
Next, if you know that they went with a competitor, or used internal software, make sure you add this to the "To competitor" custom field. This is a free form text field, but please use this consistently:
self-build
mynewsdesk
belga
prowly
cision
gorkana
vocus
meltwater
...