[This is the sixth in a series of posts about how to recover from the setbacks we all face in sales. For the first in the series, click here.]
What the opposite of failure? Most of us would say success.
That’s logical. But what does your own experience say?
Were you ever really good at something the first few times you did it and then got much worse as you did it more often? Probably not unless you stopped caring.
Failure usually precedes success, and some degree of failure is often necessary before you can succeed.
Thomas Edison famously tested more than 6,000 materials before his laboratory arrived at tungsten as the best filament for the incandescent light bulb.
Anything worth doing, is worth doing wrong at first. That’s my own twist on G.K. Chesterton’s statement that “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”
The key issue is not how wrong you got it at first, but how well you’ve learned from getting it wrong.
You can’t be open to learning when you’re preoccupied with fear of failure, your head is full of self-criticism, or you can’t stop thinking about what other people may think.
Why are we so afraid of failing when we know it’s an essential step toward real success? Maybe you work for a company that’ll fire you for a high-profile failure. Most won’t if you’ve also delivered some solid successes.
Often it’s not failure that scares us. It’s the fear of looking stupid or naïve in front of our family, friends and peers.
This idea comes from Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes in their liberating book The Innovation Paradox: The Success of Failure and the Failure of Success.
Good salespeople learn to be attuned to what other people are thinking. That sensitivity may make us extra susceptible to social pressure and fear of embarrassment.
That’s not entirely bad. Social pressure often pushes us do the right things. But it can also prevent us from doing remarkable things that could help us achieve our greatest victories.
Fear can be a great driver toward success provided we don’t let it bully us into inaction.
To avoid inaction, try a simple exercise that can help you take advantage of what you’ve learned from a failure or setback. It avoids personal criticism and points you in the direction of greater success next time.
Here’s what you do. Honestly and unemotionally list what went right, what went wrong, what you would do differently next time.
Write it down. If you haven’t worked an idea out on paper, chances are good you haven’t thought it through clearly enough. The higher the stakes, the more important it is for you to put this on paper.
Make four sections:
- What went right?
- What went wrong?
- What would you do differently next time?
- What have you learned?
Now in each section, jot down your thoughts as they come to you.
If you want to learn as much as you can from a setback, ask people who are familiar with the situation to contribute their perspectives too.
Maybe this process sounds simple-minded.Please don’t judge it till you’ve tried it.
In my experience almost no one ever does this. We just don’t learn as much as we can from our disappointments unless we take time to organize our thoughts on paper. And we remember our lessons much better we do so.
A company I worked for spent almost half a million dollars (or about 10% of revenue) on a product that never brought in as much as $10,000. Yet our leadership never analyzed what went wrong, and they never documented what they’d do differently next time.
The people responsible for the project glossed over its failure. They concluded that it wasn’t so bad because our developers learned a lot about new technologies they could apply to other products.
That much is true.
What they ignored was a key lesson that could help them avoid a lot of pain in the future: They shouldn’t invest so much in developing new products until they’ve proved the market wants them and they can sell them profitably. Like a lot of engineers, they developed a product looking for a market. And they’ll continue doing so at great cost and risk to their company, their employees and investors.
Do you have similar habits or behaviors that have sabotaged your success in the past? If so, what are you doing to understand and overcome them?
– Scott Silverback