This document discusses the importance of conducting lost business analysis to understand why customers chose competitors over your company. Lost business analysis involves systematically investigating the reasons for lost orders to help prevent future losses and improve competitiveness. Some key benefits include indicating what changes are needed to the products, services, pricing or other areas to win more bids and increase hit rates. The document provides a simple method for conducting lost business analysis by reviewing past quotations and bids to gather useful information like competitor pricing, reasons for losses, which models or sales representatives need improvement, and top competitors.

1. Dinesh TK
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Enquiries
Quotations
Orders
Lost
Pending

2. ISO 9001 : 2008 emphasize
on Lost Business Analysis
to improve the business or
to stay in the business.
This is based on the
improved hit rates by the
companies who do effective
analysis on lost orders.

3. Effect of Lost Business Analysis
Imagine your hit rate is 3%, If
it increases by 1%, the sales
volume would be increased by
approximately 25-30%.

4. Do you routinely talk to customers who didn't buy?
Are you looking for new customers to replace lost customers?
What is your bid and quote hit rate?
Do you know what types of jobs have the highest and lowest hit
rate?
What is cost of preparing bid/quote?

5. What is Lost Business Analysis?
Lost order analysis is a systematic method of discovering why
customers did not buy. Knowing why customers did not buy is
critical in preventing future lost orders and maintaining a solid
customer base.
Lost Order Analysis highlights what changes in products or
services are needed to gain and retain customers.
Lost order analysis is specific information on pricing, service,
competitor strategies and even market trends to help you gain
competitive advantage.

6. Benefits of Lost Order Analysis?
Serves customers instead of replacing them.
Shows why customers buy from competitors.
Indicates changes that make you more
competitive.
Wins more bids on profitable projects and higher
hit rates.

7. Why Competitor?
When you lose an order it is usually
because a customer perceives the
competitor product or service as a better
solution. If you don’t know why they
selected the competitor then you won’t
be able to modify your product, improve
quality problems, and offer a new
product or a new service to compete.

8. Lost order analysis?
Despite its importance, lost order analysis is a
customer tool that is seldom used, particularly by
manufacturers who are shotgun marketers and do
not have a marketing or business plan.
More than 75 percent of small manufacturers do not
track lost orders, while 50 percent were unaware of
all the reasons why customers drop them as a
supplier. If lost orders are that important, why don't
more people seek out their underlying causes?

9. Why no analysis on lost order
Sales people don't like to pursue the reasons why they lose orders
out of fear those reasons will be held against them.
Sales people are so busy trying to get new orders they don't make
time to follow lost ones.
It's sometimes difficult to get customers to tell you why they gave
the order to your competitors.
Finally, lost order analysis doesn't happen because management
doesn't demand the information or make it a high priority. Many
companies simply depend on their sales department for this
information and have never developed a systematic way to dig out
the real reasons.

10. Ask yourself !
 What good will it do to invest money in
advertising, hire new sales people, or develop new
products if you don’t know why the customers
don’t buy the current products?

11. Analyze WHY?
 You might have the most cost efficient processes,
highly trained employees, and high-quality
products, but this becomes academic when
customers purchase the competitors products
instead of yours. The bottom line is in order to
grow you must count on most of your good
customers to continuously buy from you. If they
don’t you must find out why.

12. Simple Method
A simple way to find out about lost orders and
active projects is to periodically analyze your
quotation or bids

13. Simple Method
 Compile a list of all the quotations by sales
territory or salesman.
 Printout a status sheet that describes each
quoted project with one quotation per page.
 Check alternatives under the description of
the quotation:
a. Project is active _______%.
b. Project is dead.
c. Project is shelved.
d. Project is lost to competitor.

14. Simple Method
For active projects, the salesman must answer the percentage
chance of getting an order.
For dead projects, the file is pulled from the active quote files.
For shelved projects, the quotation is left in the active files and
reviewed again in the next six-month review.
For projects lost to a competitor, the sales representative is asked
to find out the specific competitor, model, competitor sell price,
and reasons you lost the order. If the answers are inadequate, the
customer should be called by the factory.

15. Information's
Eight kinds of information gathered from
quotation and lost order analysis can help making
strategy decisions

16. 1. Competitor sell prices
The competitor pricing information is used in
“Competitive Price Comparisons” to guide you in
new product design, price discounts as a tactic, and
making decisions about yearly price list changes.

17. If you can uncover the real or complete reason
why the customer decided to buy a competitor's
product, you will have insight into what strategy
must be changed in the future to get the
customer back or get the next order. Retaining
good customers is just as important to a growth
plan as finding new customers and new orders.
Strategies include pricing, current products,
new products, services, sales department, sales
channels, and advertising and promotion.

18. "Most valuable customers," (MVC) are the small
number of customers who make up most of a
manufacturer's sales volume. Losing the sales
volume from an MVC accounting for 40 percent
of business can obviously kill off growth for a
long time. If these MVCs are profitable, you
must find ways to retain them. If you do lose an
order on an MVC account, you need to call them
and pursue the reason for the lost order.

19. 4. Sales rep information
 By evaluating bookings to lost orders, it's easy to
see which rep groups (or sales territories) are
having trouble selling your product lines.
Changes may have to be made to the sales
channels to achieve your growth objectives.

20. 5. Model information
 Grouping lost orders by model reveals which models
(or product lines) might not have a competitive
advantage and should be considered for redesign or a
pruning decision. If you discover the customer
perceives your competitor's product to be superior, you
may have to redesign the product or develop a
completely new one to compete.

21. 6. Competitive information
 It is necessary to find out exactly which
competitors you are losing to most of the time.
For instance, if you have 25 competitors but are
predominantly losing orders to three of them, it
makes sense to focus a lot of attention on these
three competitors. At a minimum you should do a
competitor matrix for each of your models against
the equivalent model of each of three competitor
products.

22. 7. Hit rate
 The hit rate is the percentage of quotations won
(orders) to total quotes issued. This is important
for several reasons. First of all, it is a good
indication of the effectiveness of the sales
department. Secondly, if the hit rate drops to a
low percentage, it should flag management to
investigate why the company is losing or not
closing orders.

23. 8 The cost of quotations
The last point associated with the hit rate is the
overall cost of unsuccessful quotations. It is
relatively easy to examine the total costs of the
estimating or inside sales department and
develop an “average cost per quotation”. For
instance, if the estimating department does 500
quotations per year (which cost approximately
$250,000 or $500 per quote) and the success rate
is 10 percent per year or 50 successful quotes
lead to orders – it means that $225,000 was spent
on unsuccessful quoting.

24. Remember, you can't
really develop a plan to
increase sales growth
without knowing why you
lose orders and customers.