Can you really learn from failure? Or are you missing an opportunity?

It’s a tried and tested technique for many businesses (although there are many more who should be doing it) – taking time to reflect on our failures to help us determine how we could improve in future. 

But why don’t we look at our successes? This is something that billionaire investor, Ray Dalio, addresses in his book ‘Principles: Life and Work’ – and since reading it, I’ve become a real advocate of using success critical appraisal to help shape future activity. 

From a sales perspective, I’ve always been a master at learning from my own mistakes, as well as learning from the ones other people make. But since reframing my thinking, I now recognise the huge opportunity that evaluating success presents. 

Take sales as an example. If there’s a 60 – 70% conversion rate (which is already way above average), if you only look at why you lost the other 30 - 40%, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to learn and improve. 

Rather than dance down the path patting each other on the back, stop for a moment and really think about some things. Did the deals you won have the potential to be larger orders? What was the order process like for the customer? Could you have closed the deal quicker? 

A sale is obviously a success, but really unpicking the reality will help you to determine how you can make future sales an even bigger success. 

The culture we’ve developed here at BluprintX has always been a very self-critical one. Because we know that this is fundamental to continuous improvement. We’re now taking this to the next level by interrogating every success and failure, to give us a truer picture of how we are really performing and where we can improve. 

How do you manage critical appraisal in your organisation? Is every sale deemed success or do you always look for ways to do better? Do you even look at mistakes and failures to identify what went wrong and how you could overcome this in future?