SALES LEADERSHIP SUCCESS: How & Why to Embrace Failure in Sales

In today's Sales Leadership Success newsletter, you'll learn about the importance of embracing failure in sales...

Plus, if you want to improve relationships with clients and prospects, there's an invite to today's Linkedin ??Renegade Sales Live?? show at 2pm UK time, where you'll get insights into understanding your, and your customers', communication style. Click HERE to join.

Good selling! ????

1). How & Why to Embrace Failure

Learning to embrace failure has to be one of the toughest lessons in sales. But the truth is, everyone’s going to fail at some point in their sales careers, the same way that everyone fails at different points in life.

You failed when you were a kid learning how to ride a bike. If you hadn’t fallen down while you were learning to ride a bike, you couldn’t have mastered the art of cycling.

We all fail, occasionally, in all the different roles we perform. It’s going to happen. The big question is not whether we will fail; it's whether we're going to learn, grow, and adapt, based on what we’ve learned from the experience?

When we run away from failure, when we pretend we’re not capable of it, when we avoid thinking about it or talking about it, what we’re actually running away from is growth and success.

Human beings fail. That’s reality. The successful ones are the ones who embrace and learn from their failures.

Managing failure as a sales leader

If you're managing salespeople, you've got to make sure you protect their self-esteem when they inevitably fail from time to time.

Sometimes people on our team will confuse a temporary failure in their role as a salesperson with their identity as a person. We have a responsibility to make sure they know that any given role failure – the failure to prospect effectively or the failure to close a deal – is not a failure of the self. It’s simply a role failure, nothing more or less. It’s not who we are.

We may fail within a role, but we are always perfectly imperfect and complete as human beings. We want to understand, embrace, and live that reality as leaders on a daily basis. And we want to do our level best to help each member of the sales team does the same.

When you see yourself as 10 out of 10 in terms of your identity as a person, that doesn’t mean you’re arrogant. All it means is that you have a healthy self-concept.

The role of self-concept in failure

Your self-concept –?your sense of who you are –?can stay at 10 out of 10 no matter how well or poorly you are performing in any given role you’ve taken on in life.

If you allow the role failure to drag down how you see yourself, then you’ll be less willing to take risks, less willing to fail, less willing to learn from failure, and, ultimately, less able to succeed.

Our capacity to grow, learn, and succeed is directly related to our willingness to get outside of our comfort zone, take risks, and fail now and then.

This really is a critical lesson for sales professionals, and it’s a particularly important one for sales leaders, who have the opportunity to model it on a daily basis.

2). Want to communicate more effectively? Join today's Linkedin Live show!

If you want to improve your communication skills, make sure you join me and Dionne Mallens in today's Linkedin ??Renegade Sales Live?? show at 2pm UK time today (Monday 19th August 2024).

During the 30-minute live broadcast, you'll learn:

? The basics of different communication styles and why they matter in sales.

? How to identify your communication style –?and its opportunities and challenges.

? How to match your communication to your buyer's to build rapport and avoid conflicts.

If you want to learn more about effective recruiting and hiring, register for details >>> HERE .

3). Sales Insights to Power Your Week

Here are three quotes to fuel your motivation for the week ahead:

"Success looks a lot like failure up until the moment you break through the finish line." - Dan Waldschmidt

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself." –?Eleanor Roosevelt

"Sales is no longer about interrupting, pitching and closing. It's about listening, diagnosing and prescribing." –?Mark Roberge

Find your nearest Sandler training centre

Wherever you are in the world, there's a Sandler trainer near you. Click HERE to search the global network of Sandler training centre's and find your nearest Sandler office.

Don't forget, take the Sales Growth Readiness Quiz!

Are you ready to scale your sales success? Do you know what’s standing between you and a sales team that delivers profitable, stress-free revenue growth?

Take the Sales Growth Readiness Quiz to find out. Simply answer 24 questions and you’ll get a personalised report showing you where you need to focus to start accelerating your sales growth.

>>> TAKE THE QUIZ NOW <<<

Until the next time, good selling!

Your friends in sales and marketing,

Dionne & Tom