Changing one’s perspective is often the most effective way of changing one’s enthusiasm and desire. In fact, looking at a common event in sales – failure – from a completely different perspective is probably the most effective way to overcome the various challenges, roadblocks, and rejections that are thrown at you on a daily basis.

In football, accolades are not reserved for the running back who makes one good run. Or twenty. Or a hundred and twenty. No, running backs in the Hall of Fame – men like Barry Sanders, Walter Payton, and Emmitt Smith – land there because they perform at a high level for years. For example, Barry Sanders carried the ball over 3,000 times in his ten-year career, never finishing with fewer than 1,115 rushing yards in a single season.

However, Sanders also leads the NFL in the most negative rushes in a career – 336 carries for a loss of 952 yards! Although he scored 99 rushing touchdowns, those TDs accounted for less than 3 percent of his carries. He lost yardage more than three times as often as he scored, and he was knocked down almost every time he touched the football. Clearly, from one perspective, success in the NFL is impossible without repeated failure.

The same idea applies to the NBA, where the game’s greatest players routinely miss over half of the shots they take. And to Major League Baseball, where the game’s greatest hitters fail almost 70 percent of the time.

And, the same idea applies to sales. Failure after failure. One “no” after another. Rejection after rejection.

• “You’re price is too high.”
• “I’m not interested.”
• “We decided to go with the other vendor.”
• “My current product works just fine.”
• “We tried your company once and it didn’t go well.”
• “I can get a better product from your competitor.”
• Your company is too difficult to work with.”
• “It’s not in the budget.”
• “We’re cutting back.”

Learning to Fail

When I first started selling, one of the first books I read was “How to Master the Art of Selling Anything” by Tom Hopkins. Good thing, too, because failure was definitely not my strong suit. I didn’t handle it well at all – in any aspect of my life. Hopkins, however, gave me a totally different perspective. “Failure isn’t failure,” he wrote, “it’s simply an opportunity to learn what doesn’t work.” In other words, failure can be a great teacher – or a performance-killer.  Your choice.

When you consider that sports fame is reserved for the person who fails more often than not, it should change the way you look at failure. When you realize you have to fail to get to the big paydays, it should put all of that rejection in a completely different light.

The truth is, the mathematics of selling is clearly based on failure. If it takes ten calls to get one appointment, you have to fail nine times. If it takes ten appointments to get one presentation, you have to fail nine times. If it takes ten presentations to get one sale, you have to fail nine times. That is a lot of failure! But one time out of thirty, you get rewarded. Now, the idea is to learn how to improve your average. Using your failures as a teacher, improve your skills to the point where you win twice in thirty tries. Then three times in thirty tries….and so forth.

When you encounter failure, the most important question is, how do you respond? Do you make excuses, or do you learn something? Do you blame the economy, or assess your own performance? Do you have the discipline to change your approach, your sales presentation,  your sales process, in order to improve?

Or do you lay on the turf, defeated?

Tagged as: Discipline, Excuses, Failure, goals, Success

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