DWELLING ON DEFEAT? ~
When you give up in your mind, your mind gives up on you.
We must believe and be totally convinced there is an opportunity with every prospect we see instead of dwelling on defeat and failure. It is our responsibility as sales professionals to ask the right open questions to find the angle that leads us to the path of opportunity to become an
Sometimes when those open questions have led us to a dead-end, it can be challenging to pick yourself up and start again, especially when you’ve found the same dead-end seven times in a row. Your mind can easily start to believe that every path leads to failure and you start dwelling on defeat.
But what is failure and when does it happen? Is there really such a thing as failure?
Was the first ever motorcar designed, built and driven without fault first time round? Was the first ever computer assembled then functioned immediately without a single error? Of course not!
Projects like these became globally successful by their inventors finding the challenge, understanding why it happened and then trying new ideas and initiatives to overcome those challenges. They learned by their mistakes and grew because of those mistakes made. We wouldn’t have the caliber of cars and computers today if lessons were not learned from mistakes made in the past while they sat dwelling on defeat.
With this in mind, we can replace the word Failure with Outcome. When you try something you will always have an outcome. That can be worked on until you have an outcome you’re happy with. To get the one you would be happy with, you must implement and adapt new ideas from the lessons learned along the way that resulted in your first outcome.
Failure only happens when you accept the outcome you have not been successful with. Dwelling on defeat is not an option.
Sales is all about continual performance improvement. If something is not working and you keep finding that same dead-end, accept that outcomes can be changed and it is your responsibility to initiate new ideas. Think about what worked in your last presentation and what didn’t…..
What could you do differently?
What could you develop?
Could you have asked more open questions?
Are your responses as clear to your prospects as they are to you?
If you continue trying to change and improve the outcome, you will never fail.
Find out how to improve your sales outcome!