Rest assured I’m not turning into a negative person.
No, I’ll always be the optimistic person who is determined to find a way to make things work. However, I will say it’s okay to fail on a sales call.
Look at things this way: If you were to win on every sales call, shouldn’t that tell you you’re not asking for enough in one way or another? If you win on every sales call, then I’d say what you’re really doing is merely taking orders and providing customer service.
If that’s your goal, then that’s fine, but then your compensation should reflect that of a customer service rep or order taker and not that of a salesperson.
The beauty in failing on a sales call is what you learn from it.
If you fail on a sales call and don’t learn anything from it, then you’re destined to fail again — unless by something beyond your control you merely happen to wind up with different types of customers to be calling on.
Having a sales call you fail on does two things for you.
First, it gives you an opportunity to assess what happened, why it happened and what you might need to change to prevent it from happening again. Key word is “might.” Just because you fail on one call is not reason to change what you’re doing. Many times a failure on a sales call is due to the other person and how they respond to you.
Yes it is true that the behavior of the customer is partly your responsibility, but let’s not kid ourselves — there are simply too many different customer styles for you to think you’re going to be able to master every situation before you see it. We learn to master something by trying; therefore, failing with a customer allows us to learn so we can respond to that type of customer better the next time we encounter them.
This is why I say it’s not always changing what we do that is important. I like to view it as tweaking or slightly modifying what we’ve been doing.
Second thing we gain from failing on a sales call is getting the chance to get back on the horse and try it again. Failing is not permanent. It’s only a period of time and the sooner you engage yourself in another sales call, the shorter that period of “failing” is in your mind.
Copyright 2012, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
One Response
If we never fail we probably were never on the horse to ride anyway.