The 20 Lost Deals in Your CRM Might Be Hiding Your Most Valuable Competitive Intelligence

While running a software agency, the author — Inc. 5000 CEO and business coach Bruce Eckfeldt — could rattle off his competitors without thinking: the same three firms kept showing up on the same short lists, pitching the same thing. What he couldn't say was where lost deals actually went. Company reports always cited 'price' as the reason, and he had no reason to question it. He's since seen this same blind spot in nearly every sales funnel he's looked at.

Fixing it doesn't take new research — a single day's work is enough. Pull the last 20 lost deals, ignore the reasons logged in the CRM, and answer one question for each: how is this company solving the problem you solve, right now? Tally the answers, and what emerges is a genuine competitive map grounded in actual customer decisions.

The trouble is that the CRM reason is just whatever a rep — who has just lost the deal and wants to explain it as little as possible — picked from a short dropdown menu. 'Price' is the safe choice, because it shifts blame away from the rep and onto the pricing page and the market. That's not to say reps are lying — under mild social pressure, people reach for the nearest plausible answer, and 'price' is usually right there.

As a result, 'price' as a reason absorbs a wide range of very different losses. Deals lost to plain inertia — inaction — may carry no logged reason at all, because none of the available options fit. And it's precisely those blank fields that can hold the most valuable data accumulated over the year — data your system is built to push to the margins.