How to Fail Forward

December 8th, 2009

By Tom Reilly, author of “Crush Price Objections”

There is a right way to fail and the wrong way to fail. The one thing you do not want to fail at is failure. Consider the following:

• In a study of more than 1,000 successful people, the researchers found that successful people failed more than twice and often as less successful people.
• In our Best Sales Practices Study, we found that top-achieving salespeople do not quit on a piece of business until they receive on average 5.3 rejections from the customer. The rest of the sales population quits after 3.7 rejections.
• Michael Jordan said this about failure: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeeed."

Here are some tips for failing forward–extracting value from failure:

• Always view failure in the short term and success in the long term. You are on a path of long-term success, littered with short-term failures.
• The sale is never over until you or the customer calls it quits. Sometimes, the customer may quit before you do, but don't let that slow you down.
• Treat failure as feedback. It teaches you what not to do. If you quit too early, you lose the benefit of learning what did not work.
• Failure holds no power over humility. A humble person says, "Look what I learned."
• Feel the sting of defeat and use it positively to prepare for your next opportunity.
• Failure need not be final. It need not describe you as a person. It is commentary on your outcome in a specific area.

From a Theodore Roosevelt speech delivered in Paris at the Sorbonne, 100 years ago: "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Get the latest Sales Bytes from Tom Reilly by subscribing to our RSS Feed.