Mid-year is approaching.  I’m talking to a lot of people about where they are with quota performance.  With too many, their hands start waving around, the stories start, the excuses start.

“We’re still seeing the effects of the economy, customers aren’t buying….”  I know their peers in the same company are making the numbers, their competitors are selling, so I wonder.

“Our marketing programs and collateral are really insufficient, I don’t have the tools I need to be successful…”  Again, there are a number of their peers faced with the same thing who don’t let this stop them.

“”We just don’t have enough leads….”  I’ve never met a salesperson that has enough leads, so I wonder, what’s stopping them from prospecting.

“The dog ate my sales call plan…….”

I may be a little hardnosed about this, but there is only one thing sacrosanct in sales, it’s The Number.  Our job, our responsibility, our obligation to our companies is to do everything possible to make our number.  There are simply no excuses.

Everything else about sales is changeable, but we can’t change our obligation to make the number.

If we don’t have enough leads, then we have to do something.  Can we get referrals, can we go back to past customers to see if they have a need?  How do we start prospecting to find new opportunities?

If our customers aren’t buying, how do we find those that are?  Can we create a different or more compelling value proposition.  How do we find those customers that are buying?  Let’s invest our time in those that are.

We don’t have the right materials and collateral—-well create it yourself!  Never let materials, tools, collateral stop you.

There are simply no excuses to do everything you possibly can do to make your number!

Does this mean you’ll be successful?  Well you won’t be successful if you don’t, that’s virtually guaranteed.  But doing everything you possibly can may still mean you don’t make the number.  But at least you have learned, you have solid data about why and you can leverage that data to improve.

Sales success is about leaving no stone unturned.  It’s about figuring out what it tales to win and owning the responsibility for that.  It’s about determination–not letting anything to keep you from achieving your goals. Sometimes it means we have to change our approaches.  What has worked in the past may not be successful, so we have to figure out what creates success.  We may have to develop new skills, we may have to change our process, we may have to go after different customers, we may have to be clearer about our value proposition.  Everything in sales is open to change—except for making the number.

Are you prepared to change everything to achieve your goals?  Are you totally committed to achieving them and will let nothing stand in your way?

As sales professionals, we’re all very goal directed and measurement oriented.  Managers leverage numbers heavily in managing and coaching performance.  But there’s a fine line in using the numbers appropriately in coaching.  Too often, coaching becomes about the numbers and not about what they mean.  The real secret to effective coaching is understanding is causing the results, getting underneath the numbers.

Most of the time the number are just symptoms of something else–an underlying problem of challenge..  None of us would feel comfortable if a doctor just treated our symptoms, rather than examining and trying to understand what creates those symptoms.  Yet too often, we totally ignore this in coaching our people.

The numbers are just symptoms or alerts.  They tell us that something’s happening, they draw our attention to a potential issue.  As managers and coaches, it’s our responsibility, with our people, to drill down understanding what they mean—what underlies them and what do we need to do about it.

Too often, the coaching goes something like this:

Manager:  “You aren’t hitting you numbers for prospecting calls, what are you going to do to fix that?”

Sales person:  “Make more calls????”

Manager:  “Absolutely, you need to hit your numbers!  Make sure you are making the calls!”

What an enormous waste of time!  What has the sales manager learned in this exchange? What has the sales person learned?  Absolutely nothing, yet the manager can “check the box,” having coached the person.  Too many coaching sessions look like this, with the discussion focusing on the wrong issues.  The manager takes no time to understand what’s going on, why the sales person might not be achieving the goals, what it means, or how to improve the ability of the sales person to meet the goal.  There’s no problem solving with the sales person, no conversation about what might be done, no skills building.  It ends up being a lost opportunity.

It is worse, the manager may not understand why the goal, in this case a certain number prospecting calls, was established in the first place.  The number was established for a reason, presumably a certain number of calls result in a certain number of qualified leads which result in more opportunities in the pipeline, which ……….  But too often,managers and sales people lose this connection, so the number becomes an end in itself, disconnected from why it was established in the first place.

Soon we have sales people and sales managers going through the motions, with no idea about what they mean and why there were established in the first place.

Metrics are important, they help us understand whether we are on target to achieve our goals or not.  For the most part, the numbers aren’t the end–they are indicators of whether we are likely to achieve our goals or not.

For managers, make sure you understand what you are trying to achieve with each metric that you are putting in place.  Understand how they contribute to the numbers that do count, understand how they link and impact each other.  Make sure you can explain explain all of this to your team.  Give them a context to understand what it means and how it fits into the attainment of their overall goals.  Make sure you can understand and diagnose the problems your people might be having in achieving the goals.  It’s important that sales people understand how everything they do contributes to achieving their goals.

In coaching, think of the actual attainment of the metric as in and indicator or alert.  If a person isn’t achieving the metric, it alerts you to looking at what’s happening and why.  You may need to take corrective action.  All of this is a terrific opportunity for coaching and problem solving with your sales people.  Engage the sales person in looking at the issues and diagnosing them.  Make them a part of the process so they understand and own their role in taking the corrective actions.

This process is very powerful–it not only enables you to identify performance issues with your sales people, developing strategies to improve performance, but the process of working with your people in understanding what the numbers mean, gives sales people greater ability to diagnoze and address issues by themselves.

Do you know what the numbers mean?  Are you managing to the number or are you leveraging these alerts in identifying performance issues and working with your people to develop solutions.

Follow-Up, a simple concept, but one which too many managers fail to execute.   Yet is is probably one of the most important elements of successful coaching.

When we coach our people, one of the critical elements is establishing the next steps and actions to be taken.  They may be tactical–about a deal, they may be improving the person’s capabilities or performance.  We want to see progress and change. 

But it’s insufficient to drop it there, we need to follow up, both to see  the outcome and to leverage the outcome to reinforce the coaching discussions.  Coaching is an ongoing dialog, we want to continue to reinforce and build on our discussions.  We miss a tremendous opportunity by neglecting to follow up.  Rather than having an ongoing dialog, our coaching becomes a series of isolated discussions, often missing the progress that may or may not have been made.

Too often, managers simply neglect to follow up, more often, they just forget.  Follow up can be easy.  After each meeting, schedule a “To-Do” in your calendar — write a note to your self, schedule the follow – up.  If it’s something tactical, for example, checking the outcome of a meeting or some other activity, write an email to the person, copying yourself, and schedule it for advance delivery.  For example, if there is an important meeting in 10 days, schedule a follow up email for the 11th day–”How did it go?  Let’s talk about what happened.”

Follow up can be simple and easy if we schedule them immediately when we agree upon them with our people.  Follow ups improve the results we get from coaching, they improve our own personal effectiveness.

One of the biggest problems sales people face is their deals slipping.  We forecast a certain close date, then it slips, and slips, and slips, and ……..  Things keep coming up, we push the close date out, then more things come up and we get into this seemingly endless cycle until the deal closes.

Sometimes these slips in close date can’t be avoided.  The customer keeps deferring the decision, we have little control over it.  But too often, I think these slips are the result of bad deal strategies — and the sales person is responsible for managing the deal strategy.

Here’s what happens.  We tend to look at our deal strategies in terms of “what’s next.”  Based on where we are in the sales process and the customer is in their buying process, we identify the next steps or critical activities.  As we progress through these processes, things come up, requiring more work, more activities–and the deal slips.  We execute those, more stuff comes up, we generate new next steps, slipping the date yet again.

Or we may have thought the deal all the way through.  We have a clear plan mapped out, we are executing–then something slips, we readjust our plan, shifting everything back, something else slips, we shift everything again, and the cycle continues.  We finally close months after our original projection.

These slips happen because we approach the opportunity planning process all wrong.  The slips need to be unacceptable–slipping causes the customer to miss some of their internal deadlines.  Slipping creates create opportunity losses for the customer–the benefits they had hoped to achieve reduce with each slip of the close date.  It creates havoc within our own companies, we, our managers, and others want some predictability in the revenue streams. 

We need to begin thinking of the “targeted close date” as sacred.  We need to think of it as immovable.  Establishing the targeted close date must be driven by the customer buying process—when do they intend to make a decision, is there a critical deadline or a compelling event that requires a decision by a certain date?

Once we have established the targeted close date, we need to develop our opportunity plans and strategies to fit with that date.  The sales and buying processes are the foundation to maintaining the integrity of the close date.  We have to look at all the things both we and the customer must accomplish to achieve the deadline we have established.

As things progress through the selling and buying process, new things come up, things change, we have to revise our plans.  Rather than just slipping activities, we have to revise the whole plan and schedule to fit within the time left with the original close date.  By keeping the targeted close date fixed, we reschedule all the things we must accomplish to meet that date.  Likewise, we work with the customer to help them reschedule their activities to continue to meet the close date.

This requires great discipline on the part of the sales person.  It’s so easy just to let things slip, to go with the flow.  But if we want to maintain the integrity of the targeted close date, we have to continually be looking at and revising the plan so that we re-align everything that needs to be done around that date.

Do you keep the “targeted close date” as sacred?

Do you continue to revise your plan and help the customer revise their plans to maintain the integrity of that date?

I had a conversation with an interesting individual today.  It was a fascinating conversation–different from so many that I have with sales people.  I was interviewing a candidate for a client.  On paper, the person didn’t seem to be a natural fit, but I was taken by this individual—at least his mentality and attitude.

Too many people I speak with have a sense of entitlement-that they are owed something.  Whether deserved or not, there is an arrogance about their jobs and (always) compensation.  They often refuse to recognize the need to change–even if they see things aren’t working they continue to do the same thing.  Or they feel they are owed a job, it’s benefits, and compensation because they are putting in the effort.

This gentleman was completely different.  He told me his story–started as a technical support person in technology companies.  Several years ago, was laid off.  He shared his struggles in finding someone that would hire him.  He said that he decided to take a different approach, if he couldn’t find someone to hire him for “40 hours a week,” he would find “40 people who would hire him for an hour a week.”

In looking for a job, he came across an advertisement for a sales job.  I won’t go into the details of the job, but in interviewing, he was told he couldn’t do it, that he didn’t have any sales experience.  He convinced the company to give him a chance–he said he was willing to work for 100% commission.  To make a long story short, he struggled building his business.  It took time, he didn’t have a whole lot of support from the company, but they let him act as an independent agent.  Over a couple of years he built a business from absolutely nothing.  He got the most difficult territory.  Because he was an independent agent, he didn’t get a lot of support — so he had to figure things out for himself, create a lot of his own demand generation programs, and drive the business.

In a couple of years, he had built a pretty nice little business.  His results weren’t stunning, but they were good.  He was making a living, paying for his family.  He was looking to the future.  He was investing in himself and his business—hiring some subcontractors to do work that wasn’t a good use of his time.

I talked to him about the job he was interviewing for.  I said, “On paper, you don’t look like a great fit.  You don’t have any experience in the industry and these types of solutions……”  His response was simple, “I’ll figure it out.”  He went on to explain exactly what he would do–he had researched the company, the industry, and had some ideas.  Some of them weren’t right, but his thinking and approach were sound.  He went on to say, “I’ll do it for 100% commission.”  Our conversation went on for a few more minutes. There was no boasting, just a straightforward approach on what it would take, what he would do, and appropriate examples of how he had done similar things in the past.

He was probably the least “qualified” candidate, but he stood out.  Others came from more traditional backgrounds.  They were concerned about their territories, quotas, commission plans.  They were worried about the marketing programs and would they be getting leads.  They had lists of concerns and reservations.  Most had good track records–not outstanding, but satisfactory track records.  They asked the usual questions, and, in the end, none of them struck me as much as this one gentleman.

He didn’t know all the questions to ask.  He didn’t know what other candidates knew, he didn’t have any experience in the industry, he knew he wasn’t a fit.  But he stood out.  He didn’t hide these, he didn’t try to pump up his experience, he didn’t have any unrealistic expectations.  He just had a commitment to do whatever it took to be successful and to figure it out.  His past experience indicated it wasn’t a hollow claim.

Somehow I knew he could figure it out.  Success in the job actually required that.  Somehow, as much experience as the others brought, I wasn’t comfortable they would figure it out.  They needed to much, they had too many concerns—about themselves and their needs.  They were too concerned about the risks and focused on the possibilities and figuring out how to get there.

I don’t know if he’s the right guy, whether there will be an ultimate fit.  There are assessments and other things to go through.  But attitudinally and based on what he had done, he was head an shoulders above everyone else.  There’s something about these people that you have to really respect.  Their willingness to do what it takes, the absence of pre-conditions, the willingness to take risk, the total absence of a feeling they are “owed something.”

Sales management is one of the toughest jobs around—particularly that of the first line sales manager.  Fundamentally, our job is to maximize the performance of our sales teams–both tactically and strategically.  I read a post, How the VP of Sales can Inspire their Sales Team with 4 Simple Habits.  It got me reflecting on how managers maximize their impact, and where managers should spend their time, not just the Vice President of Sales, but all levels of sales management.

The post offers some interesting suggestions, frankly a number of them I disagree with very strongly.  Let’s start with the areas in which we are in real alignment.

The biggest impact a sales manager at any level can have is by being out with their people in front of customers.  Yet too often, exactly the opposite thing happens–managers spend too much of their time internally focused.  They are chained to their desks, conducting internal meetings, conducting internal reviews, spending time reporting on what’s going on.  Some of this is necessary-we need to communicate to the rest of the organization, we need to get resources and support for our people, we need to get help for our customers.  But too often, managers are consumed with this.  They stop visiting customers, they stop visiting their people.

Being chained to the desk, being focused on reporting, staying internally focused on internal politics do not produce revenue or improve the capabilities of sales people.

Without a doubt, the number 1 and the number 1 priorities of sales managers are Customers and Your People!  If the majority of your time isn’t spent in the field working with your people and visiting your customers, you are prioritizing things incorrectly.  Nothing trumps spending your time here–period.  A number of years ago, I was EVP of Sales for a large organization.   I was scheduled to do a presentation at our Board of Directors.  It was an “important” presentation.  As the day approached, a critical customer situation arose.  It was clear that my involvement was needed and, unfortunately, the only time available with the customer conflicted with my ability to present to the Board.  The decision was easy for me–I conveyed my apologies to my boss, the CEO, and to the Board Members, saying Customers and this situation were more important.  Fortunately, my boss and the board applauded that decision–and we did get the order.

So managers need to prioritize time with customers and with their people.  We need to unchain ourselves from our desks and spend the majority of our time in the field.  Take a moment right now and look at your calendar for the past 30 days.  If you haven’t spent a minimum of 50 percent of your time in the field with your people and with customers, you’re not maximizing your impact.

Now once we’ve committed to spend our time in the field, where do we have the most impact?  This is where I think the article is dead wrong.  It suggests that managers spend the bulk of their time with A players and calling on their customers.  I don’t want to ignore the A players, but this is not where the problems are, this is not where managers have the most impact—both in driving performance of sales people and in contributing to closing business.  By definition, the A players really don’t need your help, so it’s irresponsible to focus the bulk of our time with them, unless all you want is “feel good” meetings.

Where we as managers have the greatest impact and leverage is with our B and even C players.  Maximizing the performance of that huge middle range of our people—the B players has the highest return on a manager’s time.  Working with them, we have so much more impact, so much greater room for helping them improve.  Likewise, the impact we have working with them, on their deals, helping strengthen their competitive positioning and moving the deal through the customer’s buying cycle.  (For a different perspective the value of focusing on your B players, look at what the authors of Challenger Selling have to say.)

It may be more fun hanging out with A players and their customers, but that’s not our job as sales managers.  Our job is to maximize the performance of our organization.  We have to invest our time where it has greatest impact, and frankly where we’re needed.  By  definition, it won’t be with our top performers.

This doesn’t say we ignore our C players either.  Our job is to maximize performance, this includes dealing with performance problems.  Coaching our C players–either getting them to be B’s or A’s, moving them into roles where they can be B’s or A’s (and that may be out of the company) is our responsibility as managers.

Whatever level of manager you are, spend your time where you have the greatest impact–it’s always with customers and sales people.  Once you get out to the field, don’t hide out–head straight for the people and customers where you can bring the greatest value and impact, and where you are most needed.  Don’t ignore your A players or your great customers, but they don’t really need you as much.  It’s your B and C players that need you and your attention.  It’s the tough customers where you can help both your people and the customers the most.

Serve your people, serve your customers, the rest takes care of itself.

One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism.  It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person.  After all, we face rejection every day.  We face challenges and obstacles in every situation.  Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges.  Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies.

It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling.

But sometimes that optimism hurts us.  Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not how we want them to be.  This is, perhaps, the most dangerous challenge sales people face.  It’s one of our own creation.  And it’s funny, it sneaks up on us–it never smacks us in the face, it kind of creeps in.  All of a sudden we find ourselves mired in a very difficult situation, struggling to understand and work our ways out.

It happens all sorts of ways.  Our pipelines aren’t as full as we want.  Our managers may be pressuring us to increase the numbers of deals in the pipeline.  We relax our qualification criteria to get more deals—but because they aren’t in our sweet spot, our ability to win is threatened.  All of a sudden our win rates go down.  This makes our pipelines look worse, we relax our qualification criteria further…. you know how this story ends.

Or it’s the deal we just can’t let go.  We’ve invested a lot of time and resource.  We believe if we just do a few more things, we can persevere.  We do those, it’s not sufficient, we do a few more…… it goes on forever.  The deal’s dead, but we can’t let it go.

Or we are busy, our days our filled with meeting after meeting, call after call.  But we aren’t making progress.  We confuse busyness with progress and accomplishment.

Facing reality is critical to our success.  If our pipelines aren’t full, we mask the real problem by filling them with junk.  If a deal just won’t move forward, continuing with wishful thinking doesn’t change things–it keeps us from really understanding what it takes to win–or even if it is winnable  And busyness masks everything.  We don’t have the time to reflect, to understand if we are making progress or just filling our time.

Facing reality is tough.  We may discover things we don’t want to confront.  We may not be as strong as we had hoped we were.  We may discover we need new skills to improve our ability to compete.  It may tell us we’re spending our time with the wrong customers–that we may have to find new customers.

Facing reality is important.  Good or bad, it provides the ability to understand the issues most impacting our performance.  It helps us identify and solve our problems.  It allows us to improve or fix things that keep us from achieving our goals.

It’s easy and tempting to fool ourselves, to the point of hiding our heads in the sand.  But that doesn’t fix the problem, it makes it worse.

If you aren’t achieving your goals, are you really looking at what’s happening.  Are you seeing things the way they are or the way you want them to be?  Facing reality is the only path to performance improvement.

Over the past few months, I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions on sales compensation.  Last quarter, the conversations focused on commission and bonus plans people were looking to put in place for this year.  Last week and this week, I’m involved in a lot of discussions about people being disappointed in the bonuses they received or didn’t receive for last year, how to manage the issues and so forth.

We talk about pay for performance all the time.  Everyone likes pay for performance when there are great years.  When we’ve blown out the numbers or overachieved our goals, people are excited about pay for performance.  But when we have had a tough year.  When business is down or we haven’t met our goals—despite how hard we worked and how much we tried—we don’t like pay for performance.  I can’t count the discussions I’ve had about, “my people think they should be paid for their hard work and effort.”

I have to admit I’m a little hard nosed about this topic.  We can’t have it both ways, it’s just an insane argument.  When we perform well we should be compensated for it.  When we perform poorly, we should be compensated for that performance—not our effort.  If our performance has been down from the previous year, our compensation should be less than the previous year.  We’ve produced fewer results.

I suppose it’s human nature to focus on ourselves and our compensation.  It’s natural to always want to see progression and increases.  But failing to produce results impacts more than our compensation.  It ripples through the entire company, it impacts shareholder perception, suppliers and others. 

If the sales organization as a whole doesn’t produce results, people lose jobs.  Even though we have worked very hard, even though we have put in long hours, we haven’t produced the results.  We can’t pay the bills in the organization, we can fund new projects and programs through good intentions and hard work.

Accountability is tough.  There are upsides and downsides.  We can’t choose to be happy with the upside only and not have to bear the consequences of the downside.  Accountability is blind to that.

I’m tough on this.  People say, they should be better compensated.  My answer is very simple, you can be better compensated.  It is totally in your control.  Meet or overachieve your goals.  Your compensation will increase when that happens.

Perhaps my view was shaped many years ago when I was having a similar discussion about my compensation with my manager at the time.  I thought I deserved an increase because of my dedication and efforts.  His response was succinct and clear:  “Your increase will become effective when you become effective.”

Are you being effective?  Are you achieving your goals and producing results?  If you aren’t you have no basis for any discussion on your compensation.  Sales is a job in which we are compensated for our performance, so it’s our responsibility to perform.

I’ve been writing this series of posts on metrics, and how sales people and managers leverage metrics to help maximize our performance for a number of months.  I’ve never written about Quota measurements–the “grand-daddy” of all sales measurements.  Part of the reason is that it’s something that’s pretty well understood (or so I thought), the other is that it’s a trailing or historic metric.  It’s difficult to use on a day to day or week to week basis to monitor and improve our performance.

I thought I’d write about Quota for a couple reasons.  As we approach the Fiscal Year End for many businesses, people are consumed with getting those last minute sales (some customer are consumed with spending money they might have left over–kind of serendipidous.)  Also, there’s an important aspect about Quota too many sales people overlook.

Quota is usually measured in Revenue or Orders.  Often, we may have multiple quotas, they may include certain product line quotas, customer or account, or some other measure.  Historic measures tell us what we have done, how we have performed, but they aren’t helpful on a day to day basis.  By the time we find out that we are under performing, it’s difficult to do anything about fixing it.  For example, if we are really off in our quarterly Quota performance, it may take us more than a Quarter to fix it.  That’s why we want to look at leading measures that are tightly linked to historic or trailing measures.  For example, we know the number, quality, and flow of deals in our pipelines is closely tied to Quota performance, so that’s why we spend a lot of time on funnel/pipeline metrics.  If we don’t have enough deals, we aren’t going to make our Quota—so we prospect for new deals.

But salespeople lose track of something important about Quota.  Quota is about jobs!

“Well duuuhhh Dave, tell me something I don’t know.”

Yes, we all know our jobs are at risk.  Fail to make Quota for a long enough period of time, and you find yourself looking for a new job.  But there’s something equally important, that sales people don’t think about (not unusual, because we usually think about ourselves).

Quota attainment is about the people in our company–ultimately the people in the entire supply chain, and their ability to keep their jobs.  We don’t bring in the orders, factories get shut down.  Engineers and product people are laid off, marketing budgets are cut, the list goes on. 

Too often, as sales people, we live in our own worlds.  We forget that if we fail to achieve our objectives, that has a ripple effect through the rest of the organization.  If we aren’t generating revenue, managers have to reduce spending to a level that is supported by the revenue that’s being produced.

In a large organization, sales people can “hide.”  There can be the mentality, “My quota is just a small part of the overall quota or the sales goal of the company.  It can be made up by other sales people in the organization.”  There’s some truth to that, but you get enough sales people doing that, there’s a significant shortfall.

In smaller organizations there’s no hiding.  Don’t make your quota, you start seeing empty cubicles around you. 

The funny thing, is often sales people can survive bad performance longer than the other people in the company can survive sales people’s bad performance.  So often, other people go before a bad sales person goes.

The global economy is struggling.  There are some bright spots, but there are lots of troubled spots.  We get upset with our elected leaders and other prominent people for not providing the leadership to help the economy recover.

Yet sales people are in a unique position–we can contribute to the recovery.  We can contribute to keeping and creating jobs, albeit in a small way.

There is no magic, if customers aren’t buying they aren’t buying.  But perhaps we can go that extra step to help create reasons to buy.  We can show them something they haven’t thought of before.  We can show them new opportunities or ways they can improve their business—helping them grow and improve their revenue (you can see where I am going).

Sometimes we do everything we possibly can, but we just can’t create the sales.  I get that.  I look at top sales professionals–they are constantly stretching doing everything they can, making no excuses.  They know they are working not only for their own job, but to grow the company.

But then there are the rest.  They complain about the thing the company is doing to them, they whine about what they don’t have, they are busy, they are “trying,” but they aren’t producing results.  It’s never their fault, but it’s the stupid customer, the bad products, or something else.  They worry about themselves, and are blind to their impact on other people’s jobs.  They work for themselves–not realizing they are working for other in the company.

Over the Holidays and New Year, we have a chance to regroup and think about what we need to do in 2012.  Perhaps if each sales person started thinking about their own “economic recovery program,” collectively we might have an impact on the recovery.

For those readers celebrating the Holidays, Best Wishes To You And Your Families!

I’m writing this with some trepidation, I worry that my message will be misunderstood or used by poor sales people as an excuse.  With that as a disclaimer, there’s real value in losing—but we have to take the time and extract the value that losing provides us.

We never want to enter any sales situation to lose it.  We have to compete vigorously, doing everything we possibly can to win!  It’s our job, it’s what makes us successful, and it’s what professional sales people live for.

However, recently, I was engaged in a conversation with someone claiming his organization’s win rate was in excess of 99% (let’s put aside definitional issues, under virtually every definition, 99+% is very high).  My immediate reaction was, “That’s too bad, it must mean you  are missing lots of opportunities.”

Winning is great, but we really don’t learn much from winning.  We don’t learn where we can do better.  We don’t learn what we are missing, We don’t learn how to stretch ourselves to achieve more.  Winning too much means we are playing it safe–we aren’t taking risks.

There’s a danger in winning too much, we become arrogant, we become blind, we stop listening, we stop improving, we start believing we are unbeatable, we get comfortable and complacent.  Ultimately, we set ourselves up not just for losing, but for massive failure.

Losing is tremendously powerful.  The problem is too often we don’t take advantage this power.  It’s through losing that we really learn.  If we’ve lost because we have stretched ourselves, if we have tried something new, if we have pushed ourselves outside our comfort zone–either trying something new with our customers, going after new markets and new customers.

Losing is the most powerful way of learning something new–but we have to take the time to understand and learn.  We have to apply what we have learned to winning the next time.  Losing shows us where we can improve, how we can grow.  Winning can never teach us those lessons.

Wasting the opportunity to learn and grow through losing is just wasteful–it’s a failure in your personal professionalism or of management.

Losing isn’t something we try to do.  We shouldn’t make excuses when we lose, but we take the opportunity to learn, grow and move forward.