There’s a simple, irrefutable truth in sales: At some point, we all fail.
But what makes failure especially hard to deal with for a sales pro?
It’s the fact that often your failure is beyond your control.
You’re left feeling helpless. No matter how much effort you invest, how well you know your customer or how polished your performance – you might still miss out on commissions because of something you just can’t change.
Most other jobs have a direct correlation between effort and results.
How many times have you heard an athlete, a coach, a parent, a teacher or even a friend use the hard-work-gets-results cliche in the last month?
Watch any post-game soccer conference and you’ll find a variation from the winners. Does that mean the losers didn’t work hard enough?
“You have to fight to reach your dream. You have to sacrifice and work hard for it.”
This quote is from the best in the world, Lionel Messi. If you asked him to give career advice to a salesperson – he would probably reply with something like this.
Why Lionel Messi’s Mentality Wouldn’t Work in Sales
Sometimes hard work is not even close to enough.
Sales is different.
In sales you may be doing everything completely right belgium telegram data and find that you still can’t close the deal due to forces beyond your control.
But the pressure to hit targets is so immense, and salespeople are supposed to be fearless to overcome this pressure – so we never talk about failure.
Talking about failure to hit objectives is a taboo in sales.
The emotional and psychological effects of failure on sales team members are often ignored.
Everyone just focuses on wins. If you don’t hit targets – just make sure you hit ‘em next month, right? Some sales managers would just send you a Messi-esque quote about knuckling down and working hard – and the salesperson is left to deal with the mounting pressure as the ax feels like it’s hovering dangerously overhead.
This would be fine if failure was a rare occurrence, but unfortunately it is not.
The Bridge Group, a sales strategy firm based in Hudson, Massachusetts releases an annual report that makes for some fascinating reading. The report is based on info supplied by 266 B2B companies, mostly in the United States. The 2017 report’s results mirror almost all previous years in one important aspect:
Only 67% of salespeople manage to meet their regular sales quota.
So you can bank on roughly a third of your team failing to meet their targets.
So we need to talk about this failure stuff more! If you can help your team members bounce back harder and faster, you can have a direct positive effect on your bottom line.
A good sales manager will learn how to spot important you should also take care of custom failure early, manage it proactively and provide the support, motivation and structure to help their team member get back on track. Let’s explore the taboo of managing failure and give you some practical advice to help you steer your team members through the psychological issues to minimize failure, but also to plan for it so you can focus on bouncing back quickly.
Pressure and Threats Won’t Break the Cycle of Failure
A bad run of sales can hit almost anyone, and it’s invariably the most successful salespeople who take failure the hardest.
As a Sales Manager – you need to look beyond the financial toll this takes on your business. Sales is commission based. Your team’s livelihood is directly affected by poor performance. There’s a genuine emotional toll that comes from a bad run of missing targets.
Studies consistently show that people who have been successful before experiencing a period of failure will start to doubt their own abilities. This leads to feelings of helplessness and an inability to take decisions. Prolonged failure may even lead to self-sabotage, where failure becomes so ingrained and expected that people subconsciously engineer it themselves.
Managing failure is one of the toughest challenges any sales manager will face.
Often, the reflex reaction is to blame, isolate and eventually fire the failing team member.
This does absolutely nothing to help you reach your targets in the short term, as you have one less team member closing deals while you engineer their exit, and will almost certainly serve to demoralize the rest of your team.
The feeling that failure to meet targets will be met with immediate china data punishment does not engender loyalty or trust. Support, help, and a clear recovery plan will.
Fear may be a great motivational tool in the short term, but it almost always backfires in the long run.