Hey, guys, this is Steli Efti with Close.io.
Let’s talk about failure in sales.
One of the most important things that you have to do as a sales leader in your team
is to keep demonstrating that failure is okay.
Failure is actually a sign that you’re pushing outside your comfort zone and you’re really
going for the big, important, challenging wins.
A lot of times what happens, especially when you bring in new talent into the team or after
a while when you’ve kind of settled the dynamics within the team, is that you as a
sales leader want to look as good as humanly possible.
You want to demonstrate success and you want to demonstrate success all the time, which
is a bad idea.
I’ll give you a scenario.
You’re bringing in somebody new, you teach them the basic processes and the basic sales
pitch and then what you do is you might want to demonstrate how to do this and you’ll
selectively pick the easy wins in your pipeline and you’ll make a few sales calls where
your confidence level is really high, to demonstrate how amazing you are and how easy it is to
close deals.
Nothing against that, but if you do that and that only and you don’t pick a few sales
calls to make in front of the new hire that are really hard and are most likely not to
close and you demonstrate not just that you’re going for it even when it’s tough, but you
demonstrate to them how you deal with rejection or failure when it actually happens instead
of just telling them that it’s okay to get rejected.
You don’t tell by words and teach by words, but you teach by your actions.
They’re able to listen to a sales call that you’re in, listen to you failing and get
rejected and then look you in the eye and see that it’s okay.
More importantly even than that, see that you’re picking up the phone to make the
next call with more energy, more fun, more enthusiasm and more clarity and motivation.
Nothing is more powerful than that.
That’s about new hires, but what do you do with your current sales team?
Well, the current sales team at some point, or your current team, they will be in the
groove of things, everybody has their job, their responsibilities, their benchmark, their
goals.
You do, too, but what happens a lot of times is that you, just because you’re the leader
and manager, you’ll start adjusting your own goals to a degree that’s somewhat comfortable
or to the degree where you once in a while demonstrate how it’s supposed to be done
in front of all your team members, instead of showing them that you keep pushing the
boundaries and you keep going for things that are hard to inspire and to demonstrate that
that’s the standard you set for everybody else on the sales team.
If you only demonstrate success to your sales team and you never demonstrate how to deal
with failure and that it’s important and crucial to constantly go outside your comfort
zone so you have to consistently fail to know that you are actually pushing the boundaries
enough, if you don’t demonstrate both success and failure, your team is going to quickly
master what is easy for them to master and they will never go beyond that.
They will find and create a comfort zone and they will operate right in there because when
they look up to you, they see that you do the same.
Maybe they don’t think it verbally, but emotionally everybody is going to follow your
lead on this.
It’s crucial to do that.
I’m telling you, this is hard.
It is really hard.
I don’t like to do it.
I’m the big sales guru, when we bring in somebody new, I don’t want to make a sales
call that’s going to fail.
I don’t want to make a sales call where I’m fucking things up or where the person
tells me that they’re not going to buy from me, I want to demonstrate success.
I want to look good, I want to show them and inspire them that this is easy and this can
be accomplished.
That’s fine, but if I don’t also demonstrate to them that I’m pushing the boundaries
and how I’m dealing with failure and rejection and that it’s part of my day, they will
do whatever they can to as quickly as possible get to a point in our team where they can
avoid failure and rejection as much as possible because I do, too.
Fight that urge, set the standard in your team that you’re going for broke, you’re
going for rejection and that failure is part of your job description and not just success.
You see everyone’s game will consistently rise and everybody’s comfort zone and zone
of mastery will consistently expand, which means the growth of your team at a faster
pace than success alone could ever bring.