We Lost a Deal We Thought We’d Won

Borrowed

"Clarifying expectations sometimes takes a great deal of courage. It seems easier to act as though differences don’t exist and to hope things will work out than it is to face the differences and work together to arrive at a mutually agreeable set of expectations."

From "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey [Book]

Learned

We recently lost a project we’d already been counting on as a win. Internally, we’d been describing it as a verbal yes with contracts in legal review.

Here’s what happened:

After the proposal, they told us we were one of a few agencies they liked and asked if price was flexible. We had a couple of calls, revised the scope, and came down. A few days later, they emailed to say they were happy to move forward with the MSA and scope. That same email included a handful of questions about scope flexibility, change requests, and code ownership, and asked to meet the person who would run the project day-to-day. We answered the questions in writing. They asked for the SOW. We sent it, walked through it on a call with the account manager, addressed feedback live, and it went to their legal team. A couple of weeks became a month. Someone was out, then someone was sick. Then they wrote to say they were going with another agency.

Huh?

I asked what happened. It was a close call, but the other agency came through a trusted referral and had sent an SOW with more detail, including things they apparently hadn’t thought of themselves. Together, both factors gave them more confidence going into a brand launch.

Looking back, I’m not sure we could have done much to win it. The feedback on the SOW is fair and useful, especially as we’re in the midst of improving these contracts to reflect our current process better. What bothers me is how we handled the deal.

We have a rule that we don’t start SOWs until we know a prospect is ready to move forward. Putting those documents together takes real time from the team, and we want to be sure we’re heading in the right direction. We thought we were. But going back through the thread, we knew in July that we were one of a few options. We assumed the comparison ended when they said they were moving forward. Nobody ever said they had chosen us. And the questions in that same email, read now, were the questions of someone still deciding. We didn’t ask, not because we forgot the rule, but because we thought we had already satisfied it.

Asking wouldn’t have saved the project. It would have told us where we stood, and we would have spent that month selling instead of waiting on legal.

I’ve been thinking about this concept beyond the deal, especially as we bring on new people and I’m still learning how each of them works. It’s easy to take an answer that sounds like the one I wanted and move on it, because asking the direct question feels like pressing on something that doesn’t need pressing. The danger is if I fill in the rest myself, and things go sideways, it’s the same story as this one. Nothing anyone said was wrong. I just never took the time to clarify.

Not long after we heard the news about this deal, we signed a client we first talked to in January of last year. They went quiet after our proposal, came back, went quiet again after a revised one, and came back again. That’s twenty-some months, two MIA moments, and now a signed SOW. I’d stopped counting on this one long ago.

So… you never really know. The one we were sure of went the other way, and the one we’d written off came through. The only part we control is staying disciplined, doing the work well, and going back through the thread afterward to see what we missed.

Thought

What have I written off that isn’t really over, and what have am I counting on that isn’t a done deal?