This is a short article because the exercise is short. Run it before reading anything else this quarter.
The exercise.
Pull your last twelve closed deals. Six won, six lost. (If you don't have twelve yet, do it with what you have.) For each deal, write down three things:
- The first meaningful conversation. Who was on the call, what did they tell you, what did you ask.
- The middle moment. The specific point where the deal either turned toward close or turned toward stall. There is almost always one.
- The closing condition. What specifically had to be true for the deal to land (or, for the lost deals, what wasn't true).
An hour of work. Some of it from memory. Some of it from notes you'll have to dig for. The deals where you can't remember any of these three things are themselves data: those deals closed or lost despite your process, not because of it.
What you'll find.
Three categories of pattern emerge for almost everyone who runs the exercise honestly:
Behavioral. Moves you made, or didn't make. The won deals usually share a specific discovery move, a specific multi-threading move, or a specific objection pattern. The lost deals are missing one of them.
Contextual. Conditions that were true. The won deals usually share a buyer condition: a recent organizational change, a budget-cycle alignment, an executive sponsor with skin in the game. The lost deals are missing one.
Timing. When things happened. The won deals usually share a sequence: discovery before demo, multi-threading before procurement, executive engagement before contract. The lost deals broke the sequence.
Most reps run this exercise once, find three moves they didn't know they were running, and stop running it. The reps whose trajectory compounds (the ones who turn one good quarter into a career) keep running it. Quarterly, at minimum. After every cycle, ideally.
The exercise is not the point. The discipline of looking at your own deals with the same honesty you'd bring to someone else's is the point.
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