We had a great whale hunting session working with the Asia/Pacific sales team of an international company. This company specializes in “spend management.” They help their customers significantly reduce their purchasing costs for many goods and services.

In the course of the workshop, this team reached a very interesting and unexpected insight about their most promising business deals, which was this:

We are not closing the proposals that demonstrate the very best ROI for our prospects. In fact, on our very best proposals, where we believe we can have the biggest positive impact for our customers, we are only closing 20%.

How would we explain that apparent anomaly? Something’s going on that they don’t understand.