Why Good Salespeople Lose Deals They Should Win

Your best salesperson just lost a deal to someone who knew less about the product, had a weaker solution, and probably charged more. It doesn’t make much sense until you look at what happened in the room.

Your salesperson knew the product inside and out. They understood the competition, the pricing, the implementation process, and every possible objection. If the customer had asked them to talk about the solution for an hour, they probably could have done it without taking a breath.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty close to what they did.

The customer asked a simple question and got the history of the company, a walkthrough of the product, an explanation of the implementation process, and three examples that may or may not have had anything to do with the question. By the time the salesperson finished, the customer certainly understood that they knew what they were talking about. What they didn’t necessarily understand was why any of it mattered to them.

That’s how good salespeople lose deals they probably should have won.

Why Do Good Salespeople Lose Deals?

Good salespeople sometimes lose deals because knowing your product and communicating its value are two different skills. In fact, the more someone knows about a subject, the harder it can become for them to decide what the customer actually needs to hear.

Everything feels important when you’re the expert. You understand how all the pieces connect. You know the terminology, the history, the exceptions, and all the reasons your company does things the way it does. The customer doesn’t have any of that context.

They’re trying to answer much simpler questions. Do you understand my problem? Does your recommendation make sense? Why should I choose this solution? What happens if I do?

If the customer has to sort through forty-five minutes of information to find those answers, you’ve made their job harder and making a customer’s decision harder isn’t usually a great way to win the business.

More Information Doesn’t Always Make a Better Sales Presentation

This is where companies can misdiagnose the problem. A salesperson loses a few deals, and the assumption is that they need more sales training. Maybe they need a new methodology, better closing techniques, more objection handling, or another way to qualify the opportunity.

Sometimes that’s exactly what they need.

But sometimes they already know how to sell. They know how to ask questions. They understand the customer. They know the product. They can handle objections. The problem starts when it’s their turn to explain the recommendation.

Instead of helping the customer see the answer, they start demonstrating everything they know.

Those aren’t the same thing.

One of the hardest things to teach someone who knows a subject extremely well is what to leave out. Your customer doesn’t need to know everything you know. They need enough of what you know to understand the problem, believe your recommendation, and feel comfortable making a decision.

What Makes a Sales Presentation Persuasive?

A persuasive sales presentation makes it easy for the customer to understand the problem, the recommendation, and why that recommendation matters to them. It isn’t about cramming more information into the presentation. It’s about making the right information easier to understand.

Before an important customer conversation, I think a salesperson should be able to answer three questions.

What Does This Customer Actually Need to Understand?

Notice that the question isn’t, “What do I want to tell them?”

There is a big difference.

Your salesperson may have seventeen things they want the customer to know. But if only three of those things really matter to the decision, those three deserve most of the attention. The other fourteen aren’t necessarily bad information. They just don’t necessarily belong in the presentation.

They can come up if the customer asks. They can go into supporting material. They can be discussed later in the process. Being an expert doesn’t mean proving you know everything. Sometimes it means knowing which three things matter right now.

Why Should the Customer Care?

This is another place where technically strong salespeople can get themselves into trouble. Features aren’t value. Processes aren’t value. Even expertise isn’t automatically value.

The customer has to understand what those things mean for them.

Maybe faster implementation means less disruption to their business. Maybe a particular feature eliminates a problem that’s costing employees hours every week. Maybe your company’s experience reduces the likelihood of an expensive mistake.

The salesperson understands those connections because they live with the product every day. The customer doesn’t.

Don’t make the customer connect the dots. Connect them for them.

What Do You Want the Customer to Do Next?

A surprising number of business presentations end without making this clear. The salesperson talks, the customer asks questions, everyone thanks everyone for their time, and the meeting ends.

Then what?

Not every customer conversation should end with someone signing a contract. The next step could be another meeting, bringing another decision-maker into the conversation, reviewing a proposal, agreeing on the scope of the problem, or simply deciding whether it makes sense to continue.

But the salesperson should know what the next step is before the presentation starts. If they don’t know where the conversation is supposed to go, there’s a pretty good chance the customer won’t either.

Your Sales Team May Not Need Another Sales Training

This is the distinction companies sometimes miss.

If your salesperson doesn’t know how to prospect, qualify an opportunity, handle an objection, or ask for the business, that’s a sales skills problem. Train the sales skills.

But if they understand the customer, know the product, and have the right solution but struggle to explain an idea clearly, hold someone’s attention, simplify complicated information, or confidently recommend a course of action, another sales methodology may not solve the problem.

You’re training the wrong skill.

At Effective Presentations, we’ve worked with more than a hundred thousand professionals over more than twenty years, and one of the things we’ve seen repeatedly is that smart, experienced people don’t necessarily struggle because they have too little to say. Quite often, they struggle because they have too much.

Learning how to organize that information around the audience, making the important part clear, and deliver it with confidence is why business presentation skills development can be just as important for a customer-facing team as traditional sales training.

Try This Before Your Salesperson’s Next Important Meeting

Before the next big customer presentation, don’t ask your salesperson, “What are you going to present?”

Ask them this instead:

“What are the three things this customer needs to understand before they can make a decision?”

Then listen to the answer. If it takes ten minutes to explain those three things to you, imagine what it’s like for the customer. If they give you nine things instead of three, keep going. If everything is important, nothing is important.

Eventually, you should be able to hear a very simple story. Here’s the problem. Here’s what we recommend. Here’s why we recommend it. Here’s what it means for you. Here’s what should happen next.

That’s a sales presentation a customer can actually follow.

It gets back to the question companies should probably ask before scheduling another sales training. What problem are we actually trying to solve?

If your salespeople aren’t asking the right questions, aren’t recognizing buying signals, or don’t know how to move an opportunity forward, work on their sales skills. But if they already understand the customer, understand the product, and understand the solution but can’t make all of that understandable to somebody else, that’s a different problem.

Your best salesperson may already know enough to win the deal. They may just need to get better at deciding what not to say.