Lost review : why did we lose Lavoisier ?

'Les Editions Lavoisier" are a main professional and scientific book actor in France as a leading professional bookseller but also as a leading science and technology Publisher . Moreover this company is the french leading supplier of professional databases. This year, they decided to replace their old legacy information system and they asked us for a RFP and some demonstration of our software. The presentation (outstanding demo?) went well, with fun and with additional values and benefits they could get through our solution and i am convinced that actually we had a fully integrated and complete solution for them. (Above a Lavoisier's portrait who was a French 18th century scientist who revolutionised the study of chemistry through his systematic methods)

But but but but but ....

We lost the deal !!!

So i called to the customer in order to learn from this failure and i asked them the reasons why we lost against the competition... That's the kind of things we should always do even when we win because sometimes we can win not for the reasons we believe...

An indeed i learnt some interesting lessons from this call, and i can share with you 2 of them ( not all OF THEM ) :

• Fist we were too many participants (5) for the demo presentation : To this medium size company we appeared as an heavy company. Moreover this situation has been highlighted by the fact that i was the main guy who actually talked and ran the demos so that my colleagues seemed unnecessary. Surely i didn't enough make them participate and prove their value of being here. Indeed at the demo preparation phase we should exactly identify the role and the value of each participant. No one should attend a demo ( apart from the customer ! ) without having an important part to play in it.
  


• Above all, we have completely stopped the sales cycle after this demo, we though that it was good enough and we denied to Lavoisier an extra software demonstration by remote about a specific marketing feature they needed and they have asked us for. And eventually we get paranoid : we accused more or less ADONE (the consultant company that helped Lavoisier to choose their new system) to influence badly Lavoiser for the sake of our competitor !!!!

So we never succeeded to get rid of this image of a big and arrogant company and so we lost this interesting deal. Nevertheless i hope all the best for Lavoisier's team regarding their new project

Good luck and congratulations to our competitor. Anyway you deserved it, i am sure you will make a good job. Have fun with publishing business, it's great.