Failure is the number one fear and enemy of a sales person. More so than any other profession, salespeople hear the word, “no.” Like a baseball player, failing 70-80% of the time makes you a rockstar. But what do all those failures do to your confidence? Being a sales person is a tough profession.
Today I want to encourage this failure. I want you to do it more often (i.e., faster). And I want you to make it more productive.
The Benefits of Failure
In business, like life, those that accidentally succeed are the least likely to reproduce or even scale that success. People that have missed the experience of failure have less understanding of what works and what does, or even why something worked.
That makes your failures valuable-embrace them as cheap education.
Fail Faster
Like I mentioned earlier, failure induces fear into a sales persons heart. This fear makes us avoid. Avoid the phone, the meeting, and the networking. We are afraid someone will reject our connection.
Guess what? They will, but that is okay.
Remember sales are fundamentally the product of large numbers. The more no’s you get the more yes’s come. The more and faster you push through the rejection the more likely you are to hit big success. All those failures mean that you are doing the hard work to make the calls, schedule the appointments, and add to your network.
Making Failure Productive
The real secret to making failure easier and more productive is setting up a process to learn from each one. Here is a useful framework to improve the productivity of your failures-after each call or meeting:
- List what kind of buyer or decision maker it was
- List objections you heard and how you responded
- Highlight objections you struggled countering
- List ideas that would have improved the interaction
At the end of the day use these notes to practice overcoming new objections, improving your sales script, or tweaking your pitch for a new type of prospect.
Ultimately, failing faster is going to get you to success quicker. Are you ready to learn from today’s failures?
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