The Sales Nightmare-Making A Loss Serve You

Failure may seem like an unusual step to success but there are some businesses and professions where failure actually can lead to success. Sales is one of those professions. In fact, one way you look at it, you actually get paid for your ability to handle failure. Especially in outside selling you may go several days with out selling a thing. This requires a special tough minded optimism. Many people can’t handle this and quit. If most calls resulted in a sale anybody could sell and there would be no demand for salespeople. Be grateful each time someone says no. Your ability to keep going to the next call is part of what makes you very valuable.

You actually want to fail faster. The more people that say no, the more opportunities you will have for people to say yes. Make more calls, visit more potential customers. Your failures will increase but so will your successes. It’s just a numbers game. If you call on 15 accounts and only get 1 yes, you can probably call on 30 accounts and get 2 yeses.

Sales is also a learning game. The more you fail, the more opportunities to learn. You really don’t learn that much from your successes. You build confidence. But in your failures are great opportunities to learn, to grow, to get better. Of course the learning is not automatic. You have to analyze each failure and adjust your behavior to get any benefit. As you learn you change the numbers game in your favor. Maybe now you can call on 15 accounts and get 2 yeses. By selling smarter you’ve doubled your success rate. But you only get smarter with experience and failure.

Every sales call is a potential opportunity to learn how to better serve your client base. Remember yesterday’s story and moral. Losing a sale doesn’t have to be bad luck.