Before calling a lost bid a price problem

Price is an efficient explanation for a lost service bid. It is easy to understand, difficult to disprove after the event and often supported by something the buyer said. It can also be incomplete. A buyer may compare prices because it has not understood the difference between the services offered, or because the proposed work does not answer its main problem. Before changing a price position or blaming a low-cost competitor, I want to understand the question the buyer was actually trying to resolve and the evidence behind our account of the loss.

At Serlavi, a quarterly discussion described a run of lost bids as a translation-price problem. We examined forty-eight closed-lost opportunities with account teams and research colleagues. The review identified nineteen primary concerns about release integration, fourteen about translation price, nine about interface testing and six about work outside our intended service. That split did not prove that price was unimportant. It showed that one explanation could not usefully describe the whole set. The findings helped us rebuild the service narrative and the questions asked before a proposal was prepared.

## Recover the buyer's question before coding the answer

The first task is to find what the record can support. A contemporaneous note, a buyer's later explanation and an account manager's interpretation are different forms of evidence. They may all be useful, but they should not be treated as equally direct. I want a review to preserve uncertainty where the buyer's reasoning is unclear. Otherwise a team can replace an uncomfortable unknown with the explanation it prefers and then present a confident chart built from those assumptions. The appearance of consistency in the final categories does not repair weak evidence underneath them.

A review should also distinguish the stated purchasing question from our own service description. A software company might ask for translation while its practical difficulty concerns integrating changing content into a release process. Another might need interface testing rather than a broader language service. If our material encourages every enquiry to begin with word volume, we may hear a familiar request without understanding what the buyer needs to accomplish. Research is useful when it lets us revisit that framing, not merely decide whether the buyer agreed with the proposition we had already chosen to promote.

Account teams need a fair role in this work. They hold context that a retrospective researcher may miss, and they should not experience the review as a trial in which every lost opportunity proves poor selling. At the same time, their interpretation should be open to challenge. I prefer a documented approach with clear definitions and room for an unresolved case. The purpose is to improve future decisions, not allocate blame or produce a league table of explanations. That makes it more likely that colleagues will share the inconvenient detail that a useful review depends on.

## Keep the categories useful and their limits visible

For the forty-eight cases, we selected one primary concern per opportunity and kept secondary observations separately. This prevented overlapping reasons from being added as if they described different buyers. The classification was a working interpretation of the available evidence, not a claim that a real buying decision has only one cause. Price, timing, internal capacity and confidence in the supplier can interact. A chart that hides that complexity may be easy to present, but it can encourage a response too simple for the problem. The narrative around the categories is therefore part of the finding.

The set was also not a representative survey of every potential customer. It consisted of particular opportunities that reached our process and were recorded as lost. Buyers who never approached us, those who chose another route much earlier and those whose requirements lay outside our channels were not necessarily represented. I did not use the proportions to estimate a whole market. Their value was closer to home: they challenged our explanation of our own pipeline history and pointed to questions our service material had left unanswered. That was enough to justify a specific improvement without inflating the research's authority.

The six cases outside our intended service were especially useful. They suggested that the proposition could attract interest we were not well placed to serve. I did not ask marketing to make every possible enquiry fit the business. A clearer explanation of scope may reduce some kinds of demand while improving the relevance of the conversation that remains. That is uncomfortable when teams are judged mainly by the size of a prospect list. It is nevertheless a legitimate marketing decision if the alternative is to consume sales and delivery time investigating work the company does not intend to offer.

## Change the service conversation, then examine what follows

We allocated ₹34 lakh to revised service pages, proposal introductions and discovery support. Product marketing worked with delivery to explain release integration, language review and interface testing as related but distinct work. The change needed more than a new set of labels. Buyers had to understand which question each activity answered and what preparation it required. Sales colleagues worried that the conversation would become longer. My response was that a short first meeting based on the wrong service assumption does not make the overall buying process efficient; it moves the clarification to a later, often more expensive stage.

The immediate outcome was approved material and a different discovery approach. I did not report the work as recovered revenue from the forty-eight lost bids. Those contracts had not been won by the act of rewriting the narrative. Nor would a later change in win rate automatically establish that the new material caused it. Sales effort, opportunity mix, delivery capacity and market conditions could also change. A subsequent review should examine the specific contribution of the material and the usefulness of the conversations it supports, with a method suited to the question rather than a convenient before-and-after claim.

A board can ask whether customer research has altered a real decision and whether management understands the limits of the evidence. It should be wary both of research that always confirms the existing strategy and of a small exercise being used to justify a sweeping market conclusion. Directors do not need to code individual bids. They need to understand why the proposed response follows from the findings, what it costs and how the company will learn whether it helps. The link between evidence and action is more important than the visual sophistication of the report.

The next review should begin with a question the business is prepared to reconsider. In our case, it was whether price explained the losses well enough to guide the response. The answer led us towards a clearer account of the service and a better discovery conversation. That did not remove price from the discussion or turn every loss into a marketing problem. It gave us a more useful explanation than the one we started with. I would judge the exercise by that improvement in decision-making and by the quality of the follow-up learning, not by how confidently the final chart appears to describe buyers we never studied.