How to Succeed by Failing More | Sales Management Training
You know the old story about the youngster who asked how to be successful. The successful professional said you need experience. And how do you get experience? You try and fail. The error of the past is the success of the future.
Encouraging Effort
How can you encourage your partners and professionals to fail more in marketing so they can succeed long-term? Can you create a forgiving or “brainstorming” attitude? In doing so, you will make your firm more dynamic.
A mistake is evidence that someone tried to do something. Nowhere is this truer than in selling accounting and legal services.
As professional firms are becoming more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, great managing partners and CEOs are encouraging experimentation and risk.
Business is too competitive to wait for perfection. In order to succeed in sales, you must risk failure time after time. All advertising, public relations, and direct mail programs have failure rates (nonresponse) that exceed 95%. But the 1%to 5% success can create excellent leads and pay for all your efforts.
Redefining Failure
“Setbacks are not to be considered failures. Instead consider breakdowns as break- throughs, and disappointment as opportunity. This requires guts and self-confidence. Day after day, as a leader, you must re- assure people of the benefits of failure until everyone in our firm learns to embrace setbacks as windows to learning.” I believe you will succeed even more by learning from experimentation.
Networking can often seem fruitless. But the most powerful rainmakers have built a Rolodex of powerful people by sorting through the one-in-a-hundred odds at networking events.
Conclusion
In high-growth companies, failure is prized, not scorned as it is in many firms. In fact, almost all successful entrepreneurs have failed multiple times. This is how they learned how to succeed. It’s not that you fail, it’s how you deal with the failure that counts. Do you stop? Do you not try again? Only then do you fail.
If you are undaunted; if you learned from the failure; if you keep trying to obtain that impact client—then your “failures,” mistakes, or experiments will ultimately lead to success.
