Learn From Your Defeats
How often do you try to probe for information after you have lost out on a sale? If your answer is “never” or even “very seldom”, you’re losing out on a very good opportunity to learn something from your defeats and turn a positive into a negative.
No one can go through life without losing. Even Michael Jordon and Tiger Woods have suffered through plenty of losses in their lifetime. Yet they are both considered to be the best to ever play their respective sport. Napolian Hill says that “in every adversity, are the seeds of an equal or greater benefit”. Without exception, you can pick up any book on self-improvement and there will be a section on perseverence. Perseverence is the quality that seperates temporary defeat from failure. But perseverence alone will not suffice without the ability to seek out the benefit in the adversity, learn from your mistakes and refrain from repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
When I lose out on a contract to a competitor, of course it’s not a good feeling. It’s a blow to my ego and a hit to my wallet. But I can either wallow in my misery and kiss the time that I invested in the sales process good bye or I can try to spend a little bit more time trying to find out why I lost the business. I shouldn’t have to tell you which one of these choices are the most productive for your sales career. Any information that you can find out about why you lost out can be very benficial.
First and foremost you want to find out who did win the business. Second, you should try to find out why. 50% of the time price is probably the main factor in the selection criterion, but it’s not always the only factor. Other factors that can play into the decision are buyer-seller relationships, sales presentations, quality or perceived quality, financial options such as lease terms and credit terms, delivery timelines and design solutions just to name of few. The list of buying reasons is long, but the key is that unless you ask, you may never know why you lost the sale.
My contention is that we learn more from pain than we do from pleasure. Pleasure leads to a feeling of contentment and contentment leads to relaxation. Pain, on the other hand can lead you to either quit and give up or you can accept that losing is part of living, and living is all about learning. Get yourself off of the floor, dust yourself off, look for the lesson and make sure that you don’t make the same mistakes over and over again.
Ultimately, the lessons learned from you losses are worth far more than the commisions that you would have made from the sale. Money and commisions are quickly spent and forgotten, lessons learned from losses can last a lifetime and continue to pay dividends forever.
