You Don’t Make Mistakes. Mistakes Make You
THE MOVIE THE LAST WORD depicts the story of a retired successful businesswoman, Harriet Lauler. Due to a medical condition, Harriet has little time left before her imminent death. In her typical, take-charge fashion, she engages a young, local newspaper reporter, Anne Sherman, to write her obituary before she dies to ensure her life story is told her way. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. She engages the reporter before she dies. That is what I call pre-call planning!
In one of their many lively dialogues, Lauler gives a piece of advice to the aspiring journalist: “You don’t make mistakes. Mistakes make you.” Great advice for everyone, particularly sales professionals.
Most salespeople have heard the phrase, “You learn more from your failures than your successes.” It sounds good, but look around. Most people avoid failure like the plague. And often, sales managers and sales organizations send conflicting messages to their sales team around failure.
Walk into the reception area of an office and you will see a wall filled with plaques, trophies, and pictures touting the company’s successes. Vendor of the year, salesperson of the year, fastest growing company in the world. Now, look further in the office suite to see if you can find a failure wall—you know, the one that shows all the company’s failures and the invaluable lessons learned from failure.
If failure is our greatest teacher, why isn’t there some kind of wall devoted to listing the failures and the many valuable lessons learned that helped the company grow and improve?
I’m being a little facetious. However, sales managers need to examine how their actions—or lack thereof—deliver another message to their salespeople.
Implications from Fear of Failure
There are many implications to achieving consistent sales results when sales managers “fail” to teach their salespeople how to “fail well.” Here are a few I’ve observed and I am sure you will be able to add to this list.
1. Salespeople who fear failure take noes from prospects personally. They feel rejected, which creates the emotion of self-doubt and “I’m not good enough” self-talk. This in turn leads to limited risk-taking. Instead of calling on new and better accounts, the ones you discussed in your last coaching session, salespeople continue to work with safe, existing clients or pursue easy, comfortable deals.
2. Salespeople worried about failing don’t apply new selling skills received from their sales manager or sales training. They fall into the perfection trap and keep getting ready to get ready. Their goal (and fear) is to avoid looking and sounding stupid. The reality is, a salesperson can practice—a lot—but the sales rubber really hits the road only when the salesperson is demonstrating the new selling skill in front of live prospects and customers.
3. Salespeople worried about failing turn into professional people pleasers. They go-along-to-get-along, trying to say and do what will gain acceptance from prospects, many times at the expense of a sale. A professional people pleaser avoids asking difficult questions during a sales meeting for fear of not being liked. They believe if they please people all the time, it will help them avoid the pain of rejection (failure). Professional people pleasers over-promise and then get stuck with the mess of trying to explain why the company couldn’t deliver.
4. Fear of failure salespeople push back on feedback. They fall into the performance, perfection trap. Their self-worth is based solely on their performance in life, not on their character or values. You’ve probably been a part of this drill if you’ve been in a sales leadership role long enough. You accompany a salesperson on several calls, in person or on the phone. A few selling mistakes are made and you give well-intended feedback. The fear of failure salesperson takes the feedback personally and reacts with, “Yeah but . . .” excuses instead of thanking you for the help.
5. Failure-averse salespeople don’t set goals. If they set a goal, they may not achieve the goal, which in their eyes equates to failure. These salespeople subscribe to the crazy thinking of, “I don’t win big so I never lose big.” Research shows that people who write down goals, review goals, and share goals have a much better chance of achieving goals. I have seen really talented salespeople not hit their full potential because they avoid setting goals in order to avoid feeling like a failure. There is a great scene from the movie Chariots of Fire. Harold Abrams, the English runner, competes against Eric Liddell, the Scottish champion, and loses for the first time in his life. He takes the loss personally and the pain of failure is so great he decides not to run again. His girlfriend, Cybil, challenges Harold on his decision not to run, to which he replies, “I don’t run to take a beating—I run to win!” Cybil’s response is perfect. “If you don’t run, you can’t win.”
Failure-averse salespeople adopt a similar philosophy. They don’t even show up to the race. As a result, you dread giving feedback and start avoiding the crucial sales coaching conversations. You logically understand it’s your role and responsibility to help this salesperson grow. All the sales management books tell you that feedback is the breakfast of champions. (No thanks, you would rather wait for lunch.) Without feedback, the salesperson settles into “good enough” selling behaviors, which creates good enough sales cultures. The problem is, good enough isn’t good enough to win and retain business in today’s competitive environment.
Moving Failure beyond Lip Service
What can sales managers do to improve their team’s resiliency and ability to power through mistakes and setbacks? How do the best sales leaders create risk-taking, failure-loving, lessons-learned sales teams?
Develop the emotional intelligence skill of self-regard with each member of your team. Self-regard is the ability to admit strengths and weakness. And when salespeople can admit and accept their mistakes, then and only then do they learn the valuable lessons gained from risking and making mistakes. Salespeople with high self-regard have more success because they have the ability and confidence to learn from their failures, rather than get defeated by their failures.
The number one concept I teach salespeople and sales managers is the importance of separating their role performance from their self-worth, the person they are.
My first exposure to this concept was working as an associate for Sandler Sales Institute. The founder, David Sandler, preached the importance of separating your identity in life from your role in sales. Since then, I have heard ministers and personal development gurus deliver a similar message. Separate what you do in life from who you are. Separate the person from the actions. You know this is a powerful concept when sales trainers, ministers, and motivational gurus are teaching the same message!
Without this separation, salespeople confuse their role performance with their self-worth. When they fail in their role as a salesperson, they take the failure personally. They allow that failure in their role as a seller to affect their feelings of self-worth and importance. Teach and remind your team that when they make a selling mistake, they failed in their role as a seller, their do, not their who. They ran a lousy sales call. Period.
Don’t Confuse Your Do with Your Who
It’s great to teach this concept; however, I will give you a warning. Salespeople don’t embrace or own this concept overnight. Like any good habit or skill, it must be revisited and practiced. Your sales team has been conditioned that their performance in their sales role equals their self-worth. It’s the reason we have titles on business cards. My role, my title, tells others my level of importance in the world. I’ve yet to see a business card that states: honest, compassionate, and loyal human being.
You can spot people who measure their self-worth by their do fairly quickly. They are experts at name-dropping, telling you about their fourth home and their W-2 earnings. Their role as a successful businessperson defines their inner feelings of self-worth. I remember meeting a consultant and was fascinated by how quickly he was able to inform people about his villa in Italy. “Oh, you like coffee. My villa in Italy has a great coffee maker.” His who was definitely defined by his do.
When conducting coaching sessions, incorporate language to remind your salespeople to take your feedback on their do, their role as a salesperson, not their who, their self-worth. It can be as simple as saying, “I want to give you some feedback and also want to remind you that my intent in giving this feedback is to make you better in your role as a seller. Please take this feedback, this coaching, on your performance as a salesperson, your do not your who.” Gain agreement on this concept and create a better coaching environment to give well-intended and important feedback. Help your sales team fail well, fail fast, and move forward.
Develop a salesperson’s who, their inner confidence. The result is a sales team that bounces back from setbacks and is comfortable with continuous evaluation of skills and attitudes. As Reverend Bacon, well-known faith leader, once said, “We make mistakes but we are not mistakes.”
Get Fierce about Learning the Lesson
Like most salespeople, I am competitive. I have failed as much as I have won. Over the years, I have learned to use my competitiveness to embrace failure for good. Because if I am going to fail, I’m fierce about learning as many lessons as I can from the failure.
Here’s a great exercise to help your sales team move beyond the rhetoric and motivational speeches around failing. Help your team discover for themselves how failure really does help them win more business.
Slow your fast-moving sales team down and have them apply the EQ skill of self-awareness. Help them discover and believe the priceless lessons gained from trying, risking, and sometimes failing.
This exercise helps your sales team see the reality of life and sales. We’d all like to succeed at everything we try. The reality is, sometimes a person just can’t learn something until they’ve failed at something.
Fierce Lessons Exercise
1. Have each person on your sales team write down a failure they’ve experienced in business or sales.
2. Ask them to answer this question. “Did you fail in your role, your do, or your who?”
3. Next, have your team write down at least three lessons learned from the failure.
4. Have them circle the lessons they could have learned without the failure or learned as quickly without the failure.
5. Ask your team to describe specifically how the lessons learned have positively affected future sales calls. What did they do better? What selling mistakes did they avoid?
I have conducted this exercise hundreds of times and each time I hear mini epiphanies. Salespeople finally believe they learn more from failures than successes. It’s no longer just a cute motivational quote on the wall.
As you facilitate this important topic, ask your sales team to do some math. Ten lessons learned from each failure multiplied by ten failures equals a hundred lessons. Salespeople who are willing to risk, fail, and learn are likely to be a hundred times smarter than their competitors!
Incorporate lessons-learned language into daily and weekly sales conversations. With any type of setback, adversity, or failure, ask, “What’s the lesson learned? How will this lesson serve you moving forward?”
Nelson Mandela, the late great leader and revolutionary, said, “I never lose. I either win or I learn.” A great quote for all of us to teach our sales teams.
Reframe Failure
I was floundering my first year in this business of selling sales and sales management training. You think your prospects are tough. Try selling speaking and sales training services to the best salespeople in the world—CEOs and VPs of sales. Not an easy sale.
One of my early mentors noted my frustration, rising stress, and self-doubt. He strengthened my bounce-back muscle by changing my perspective. Instead of giving me several rah-rah, “Atta girl” speeches, he reframed my thinking. His advice was to get to a hundred noes from prospects as fast as I could. Now, that was a goal I was certain I could achieve! He shared: “By the time you’ve heard a hundred noes, you will have heard every question or objection possible in selling sales and sales management training.”
That advice was such a gift. My mentor showed me how to fail well, fail fast, and learn the lessons. He was right. By the time I had received a hundred rejections (yes, I achieved my goal), I was on my way to earning a hundred yeses.
Did You Fail Today?
Sara Blakely, founder of SPANX, is the youngest woman to join the Forbes world billionaires list without the help of a husband or inheritance. Her story is a classic one of working through failures and setbacks.
At age twenty-seven, Blakely moved to Atlanta and set aside her entire $5,000 savings to start a hosiery company. She cold-called on hosiery mills to make a prototype, only to be repeatedly told no. Finally, she received a call back from a hosiery factory in Asheboro, North Carolina, where she’d initially been turned away. The manager had two daughters and shared Blakely’s hosiery product, nylons without feet. They loved it and he agreed to manufacture her innovative product. What kept Blakely going in the face of so many “not interested” responses? Sara gives credit to her father. Growing up, her father would ask Sara and her brother the same question during dinner: “What have you failed at this week?” In several interviews she has shared, “My dad growing up encouraged me and my brother to fail. The gift he was giving me is that failure is not trying versus the outcome. It’s really allowed me to be much freer in trying things and spreading my wings in life.”
Sales managers, move beyond motivational rhetoric and add one more coaching question to your coaching toolbox. “What did you fail at today? This week?” Make failing and risk-taking part of your sales team’s selling process and journey to improvement.
Normalize Failure
I was asked to participate on a panel for our local National Speakers Association chapter a few years ago. The panel was comprised of successful, veteran speakers addressing a group of aspiring speakers. The moderator asked us to share a failure story from building our businesses. It was a great question and the stories shared were hilarious and ended up serving two purposes:
• Aspiring speakers heard stories of failures from what looked like a group of polished, never-had-a-problem, seasoned speakers. One speaker shared her story of falling off the stage right in the middle of a keynote. (I’m not making this up.) These stories of failure provided hope. “Heck, if these speakers can do it, maybe I can as well.”
• The stories gave the audience proof that repeated failures didn’t destroy our careers or self-worth. We all lived to tell our stories and lived to establish thriving businesses.
The Story behind the Glory
I was working with a group of bright, young financial planners. During my pre-event interviews, I interviewed one of their rising stars. This young man had me laughing as he shared the many sales activities he attempted to grow his book of business. Early morning breakfast meetings, after-work networking, cold calls, sponsoring events. Many were a waste of time and money, but to his credit he persevered. With his permission, I shared his stories of failing with the group. One young woman was listening intently and raised her hand. “So, what I’m hearing is that we often see the glory but we don’t see the story.”
She got it. Salespeople often see the glory but don’t know the story. They see a successful salesperson who seems to make his numbers with ease and no effort. What they don’t see or hear about is the fifty noes Mr. Success heard before receiving his first yes. Salespeople see their colleague and great speaker. What they don’t see is the salesperson putting in the time to attend Toastmasters because she bombed several big-time sales presentations.
Normalize failure in your sales organization. During your group sales meetings, ask members of the team to share stories of risk, failure, and lessons learned. Their stories normalize failure and help fellow team members recognize that failing is just part of the journey to becoming exceptional.
Make sure your sales team learns the story behind the glory.
Sales Leaders EQ Action Plan
1. Work on the right end of the sales performance issue. Does your salesperson lack selling skills or is fear of failure inhibiting the execution of selling skills?
2. Teach your sales team the power of separating their do from their who. Incorporate this language into your coaching conversations.
3. Create a lessons-learned sales culture. Get fierce about the lessons gained from failure.
4. Reward and reframe failure. “What did you fail at today?”
5. Normalize failure.