While the deal is still open, walk the buying process with the buyer: what was supposed to happen, what happened, why they differ, and what each side changes. The library's own combination of the Army's review and a lost-deal conversation.
The deal has stopped, and you are not sure why. The usual way to find out, a win-loss review, happens inside your own company after the deal is lost, without the buyer in the room.
Run the review with the buyer instead, while the deal is still open. Put the buying process itself on the table and walk through four questions in order: what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, why the two differ, and what each side does differently from here. The subject is the process, not your product, and the buyer answers before you do.
Nobody publishes this joint version. It is the library's own combination of two published things: the US Army's after-action review and a lost-deal conversation with the buyer.
The US Army's after-action review, from its 1993 training circular TC 25-20. It defines the review as a professional discussion of an event that lets the participants find out for themselves what happened, why, and how to keep what worked and fix what did not. The sequence runs from what was supposed to happen, to what happened, to why and how to improve. Three rules open every review: it is not a critique, nobody regardless of rank has all the information or answers, and it does not grade success or failure. Reviews happen during or right after each event, not only at the end, and the manual bans yes-or-no questions: ask what happened when the vehicle crested the hill, not why the crew did not fire.
The Brooks Group's questions for a lost buyer, from Michelle Richardson's post of September 2025. The opener asks, "as a professional courtesy", what the company could have done differently to do better next time. When the answer is price, the follow-up is "Let's take price off the table", and the same question again. These are written for a deal already lost; the joint version asks the same kind of questions while there is still a deal.
Nobody has measured it. No study compares deals reviewed with the buyer at the stall against deals left alone, and no study tests even the after-the-loss version against a control.
What buyers say when asked, from a vendor. Corporate Visions, which sells win-loss programmes, reports from buyer feedback on more than 100,000 B2B deals that sellers and buyers gave different reasons for a loss 70% of the time, and that 53% of buyers said the losing vendor could have won by doing something different. Its overview page says that in 10% of deals marked lost the buyer was still considering options, while a third page gives the same figure as 12% from 150,000 decisions. None of the three publishes a method.
Structured reviews make teams better, reviewing themselves. Scott Tannenbaum and Christopher Cerasoli's review of 46 samples and 2,136 people found that debriefs improved performance by about 25% over teams that did not debrief, in real and simulated settings alike. Tannenbaum's firm sells debrief training. Nathanael Keiser and Winfred Arthur's larger review of 61 studies found a large effect as well, strongest when the review was aimed at the right level, the individual or the team, and used a record such as video rather than memory. Tannenbaum's own conference handout advises debriefing as close to the event as possible, or at regular check-ins, the nearest published support for reviewing while things are still running.
What those studies are not. Every one comes from military, aviation, healthcare or simulation work in which one team reviews its own performance. None involves two parties to a deal reviewing it together.
Every measured result comes from a team reviewing itself, never from a buyer and seller reviewing a deal together. A buyer in a live deal has reasons to stay polite that a soldier in training does not, so the candour the studies depend on is the part least likely to carry over.
Ask the buyer to walk the process with you: what both sides expected, what happened, where the two parted, and what each side changes. Use the Army's three rules so it does not turn into a defence of your pitch, and let the buyer speak first. The evidence that structured reviews help is strong and comes entirely from teams reviewing themselves; this joint version is untested.