I had the opportunity to attend a webinar yesterday that really resonated with my personal business beliefs and attitudes, as well as many aspects of what I do as a sales coach and business consultant. Last night I had an opportunity to reflect upon this webinar as well as several recent coaching opportunities. When doing so, several blog topics came to mind that I’d like to share with you.

Let me start by asking you as a business or sales leader, when was the last time your team or business associates has had a discussion around a failure? This could be a marketing plan that didn’t work, a bad sales call, some new sales scripts that aren’t working, or really anything regarding your business. Interesting question isn’t it? As a leader of a sales team our job is to help our team meet business goals and objectives. With all the executive surveys concluding that the top objectives are increased sales and increased market share, our leadership marching orders are pretty clear, right?

So let’s look at my question and the various possible answers a little closer. If your answer was that I can’t remember or we haven’t had any failures, we need to really dig deeper because this may be a problem. Have you not heard or discussed failures because; 1.) Nobody wants to talk about this with you out of fear of losing their job or even of you, 2.) The people around you are all “yes” people, 3.) There are no failures because no one is willing to take a chance doing something different. I can tell you that in all three examples you are surely missing out on opportunities – opportunities not only to increase sales but also decrease your cost of sales. For example, let’s say you have six sales reps in your organization. One of your reps, Larry, creates a message regarding your newest product and sends it out to clients inviting them to a briefing. He gets absolutely no response. He doesn’t talk about this at all. Now Bill, your Sales rep in Florida, several weeks later does the same thing crafting using his own message. He gets a few clients to respond, but not enough to even cover the costs of the briefing.  You other reps have similar activity and response – but none of this gets back to you or even between one another. Your results – lot’s of costs with no sales.  As you can see from this example, not hearing or discussing failures openly had a very negative effect on the outcome. However, if there had been open communication and no fear of discussing failures, the results of Larry’s email campaign would’ve been discussed, possible reasons for the lack of success discussed by the team, then redone by Bill, with his results discussed among the team, and so forth. I know this is a very simple example, but you can see where the results would’ve had an opportunity to be much better through open discussion regarding failures.

Funny thing is that this type of attitude (openly discussing failures) really carries over to many other aspects of your life. Think about it and let me know your thoughts.

Good Selling,

Larry

Revenue Enhancement Strategies

ps. Almost forgot, if you answered you hear about failures all the time and use the opportunity to reflect and improve, then you’re probably already a great leader, so maybe you can give me some tips. All the great business people had failures somewhere along the way, the difference being is that they learned from those failures and were able to incorporate changes the next time.