You’re A Loser—-And That’s A Great Start!

“WTF! What’s this guy talking about???? We don’t want losers, we want winners……” A lot of you are scratching your heads, thinking, “Dave’s really gone off the deep end, this time!”

Hang in there, let’s talk about losing!

But first, let’s talk about winning. We put winners on pedestals. we revere them, we aspire to be like them. But there’s a problem with winning. It never forces us to stop, rethink things, change and adapt. We keep doing the same things we’ve always done………. until, suddenly we realize the world and our customers have changed. And we become losers!!

Welcome to the party! Now’s the time for the real work!

Losing forces us to change! At least if we are paying attention.  If we are driven to compete and figure out how to win, losing forces us to rethink everything. And if you are the kind of loser that shrugs their shoulders saying, “It wasn’t my fault…..” Stop reading here, you are wasting your time.

I started thinking about this concept talking to a friend. He’s the CRO of a highly successful sales team that continues to outperform it’s competitors.

As we were talking, he said, “Dave, all of us are ultra competitive. We are driven to win! We want to beat all our competitors, we want to be the leaders in our markets! And we have a great track record of success!”

“But the most important thing in our performance is not how we win. We think we know how to do that consistently. We really pay attention to how we lose. We know that something we did didn’t resonate with the customer. We want to understand those reasons, why we lost, what we need to change so we never lose in those situations again. How we deal with losses is critical to our continuous improvement. It’s critical to helping us understand how things might be changing and to figure out how we must change to continue to win.”

He went on to discuss their culture of understanding losing. Some things:

• There is never any assignment of blame. We never say, “It’s your fault, it’s our product, it’s our pricing, it’s the competition, it’s the customer.” Assigning blame is a waste of time.
• We bring everyone together and dive deeply into what happened, why it happened. We always try to do a debrief with the customer to understand why they chose to do something else. We look at what we might change, how we improve and get better.
• We roll it out to the whole organization, it is a cornerstone to our continuous improvement program and has led us to innovate in our GTM strategies.
• A cultural underpinning is, win or lose, we have each other’s backs. Sometimes when people lose, they feel isolated and alone. As a result, it prevents them and us from learning how to improve.
• With this approach, our people constantly stretch themselves.  They try new things, they experiment about getting better.  They know if it doesn’t work, the team will support them in figuring out how to correct things and improve in the future.
• As a result, our teams are constantly and intelligently pushing the limits, changing, adapting, innovating, and winning.

None of us ever likes to lose, we never purposely set out to lose.  We enter every situation committed to doing our best and winning.  But each of us will lose. It’s what we learn and how we grow from each loss, that makes us winners!

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  Enjoy!