Practicing sport and business results: Finding excuses not to perform

This morning I woke up at 4.30 to participate to a run called 5:30. It’s a short run (5.5Km) with thousands of participants in most of the cities of the world.

In Milan there were 3000 official participants, but on top of these there were plenty of other people without ‘official’ t-shirt joining the group. Main idea is that if the lack of time is the reason not to run, it’s enough to wake up earlier and find the time. This morning I managed to run at 5.30 and at 7.00 I was ready to go to the office for a full working day. The most used excuses to justify the fact that people are not doing sport is the lack of time.

In business (and even more in sales) is exactly the same. Whenever you lose a deal, there are plenty of excuses you can find to explain why you have lost and why it was impossible to win. Having been in sales management roles for many years I would say that the most used excuse is about corruption and/or products given for free. How can you win if your competitor is giving product for free? Being ethical company you cannot behave like others…. The most used excuses to justify a lost deal is either corruption or competitor giving product under costs (even for free)

In order to be succesfull in business (and in sport) it's important not to focus on the excuses but to focus onthe solutions. Setting up early wake up call it's very important both for sport and even more for business. Wakeing up and realising that the deal you have been working on for few months is going to be lost is the first step to counterfight. Understanding the value for your customer of your solution is much more important than discounting products. Having good relations (human to human) with key decision makers is much more important and have much bigger impact than giving money to some influencer.

Interesting enough, very often the same sales person that lose deals due to competitors giving for free their products to corrupted customers…. are the same that are too busy to find the time in the morning for a good run before going to the office :-)