The problem with learning reviews…
Learning reviews are a waste of time.
Well, they shouldn’t be, of course. But the sad reality is that (from the perspective of the proposal team, at least), they usually fail to lead to any real change.
Debating this with a client in Germany shortly before Easter, I came up with a list of four disconnects that act as barriers in the process for lost deals – even if a review does take place.
First, there’s the disconnect between the real reasons why a vendor lost and the story that buyer tells to the salesperson. So much easier as a buyer to send the account team away with “you lost on price” (and hence aren’t personally to blame) than to tell the whole truth.
Second, there’s the disconnect between whatever the buyer tells the salesperson, and the spin that the salesperson feeds back to their organisation. There’s a degree of self-protection at play, resulting in sanitised messages and “it wasn’t my fault”.
Third, there’s the disconnect between the messages the salesperson feeds back, and any learning specifically about the quality of the proposal. It’s vital for the organisation to know about pricing, solution quality and suchlike. But the proposal team need to know what the buyer thought of the document itself (and how it compared to those of their competitors), and these topics are rarely discussed.
And finally, there’s the disconnect between the outcomes of the review and the actions that should result. I can often look back over a dozen learning reviews that an organisation has conducted over the past six months, to find that they all show the same fundamental causes – yet nothing substantive has been done. If you don’t schedule the follow-up checkpoints with someone with clout – to take place (say) three months later – nothing will happen.
This article was written by Jon on 26 April, 2006 and filed under Processes & best practice. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
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AND – leave us not forget that reviewing the process – the planning, management, team, milestones and such – is critical as well (Those who know both Jon and I will know that Jon leans a bit to the front side of the process – that being the business aspects – while I lean a bit more towards the process side – that being proposal management, etc.
Too often, in my experience, the focus of a learning review is entirely on the business aspects.
Discovering, capturing and taken actions on all the areas Jon mentions is critical .
But if the way you produce proposals isn’t reviewed, and to Jon’s point, action isn’t taken, then how will the process ever improve (and how will you ever get out of the ‘Late nights, cold pizza’ syndrome.
I divide a learning review into three areas – the Strategy (every thing related to the ’sell’), the Document (the proposal itself) and the Plan (every thing related to producing the proposal)