Survivorship Bias in Win-Loss Analysis: Why You’re Probably Learning the Wrong Lessons
One of the great rituals of business is the win-loss analysis. Executives love it. We gather the sales team, dissect the quarter, and attempt to reverse-engineer some grand unified theory of victory.
But here’s the problem: most win-loss reviews are little more than self-congratulatory fiction. They’re not telling you why you win or lose. They’re telling you what you’d like to believe.
The culprit? Survivorship bias.
What Survivorship Bias Really Is
The classic example comes from World War II. Engineers studied returning bombers riddled with bullet holes and decided to reinforce the areas most often hit. Sensible, right? Except statistician Abraham Wald pointed out that these planes had survived those hits. The ones that didn’t come home—the real data—were silent.
In sales, we make the same mistake. We obsess over the “planes that came home”: the deals we won. We polish them into case studies, tell ourselves it was our genius strategy or our dazzling product. But the truth lies in the planes that didn’t come back—the prospects who quietly walked away, chose a competitor, or decided to do nothing at all.
How Survivorship Bias Warps Win-Loss
Most win-loss conversations sound like this:
“We won because they loved our features.”
“We won because of our relationship.”
“We won because we discounted just right.”
Lovely stories. But they only explain why a tiny subset of customers said “yes.” They say absolutely nothing about the much larger group who said “no.”
A few examples:
Your buyers say, “The demo was great.” So you assume demos are working. But those who ghosted after the demo? They found it confusing, too technical, or irrelevant.
You think, “Price isn’t an issue.” Because the ones who bought didn’t object. Meanwhile, a dozen others quietly left because the price was the issue.
You conclude, “Our sales process is frictionless.” Sure—for people who made it through. For the ones who bailed in procurement purgatory, your process was a nightmare.
This is the danger: you start optimizing your strategy around the people who already liked you. That creates a vicious cycle:
You get better at closing the same type of customer.
You ignore entire market segments who could have bought from you—if only you’d bothered to ask why they didn’t.
It’s a little like deciding your car is reliable because it made it back from one road trip. Meanwhile, the one broken down on the highway isn’t there to give you feedback.
How to Avoid It
Escaping survivorship bias isn’t complicated—but it does require discipline (and a little humility):
Interview the losses. Not just the big competitive ones, but the deals that never returned your calls. Silence is also data.
Segment your “no’s.” A loss to a competitor means one thing; a loss to “do nothing” means something else entirely. Both matter.
Treat salespeople’s explanations with suspicion. They’ll tell you losses were about “price” and wins were about “our brilliance.” Neither is the whole story.
Look for the missing planes. Where in your funnel do opportunities die? Which accounts never even considered you? That absence is a flashing neon sign you’re ignoring.
The Payoff
When you finally look at both sides—wins and losses—you get the real story:
The hidden objections that kill deals before they start.
The segments you’re unintentionally excluding.
The gap between what customers say and what they actually buy.
And perhaps most importantly: you stop mistaking survivorship bias for strategy.
Final Thought
In The Competitive Intelligence Playbook, I argue that most corporate “intelligence” is little more than cheerleading on your own scoreboard. Survivorship bias is exactly that. Studying only the wins isn’t analysis—it’s therapy.
So yes, when your team closes a big deal, raise a glass. Celebrate the win. But when it comes time to learn, spend at least as much energy on the ones that got away.
Because the real strategy—the kind that wins markets, not just deals—lives with the planes that never came home.
Simon Dudley is a technology strategist, bestselling author (The Competitive Intelligence Playbook, The End of Certainty, Who Put That Idiot in Charge), and former senior executive at Logitech, Lifesize, and Polycom. He is the Founder & CEO of Excession Events, a consultancy that helps companies compete more effectively in a world where products look increasingly similar.
Suggested Visuals/Slides
WWII bomber graphic with “bullet holes = customer feedback” and “missing planes = lost deals.”
Slide: Win-Loss Through the Lens of Survivorship Bias (Wins = noisy survivors, Losses = silent truth).
A pipeline diagram showing where “ghost deals” fall out unnoticed.
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