Sales advice regarding failure. Failure is your best teacher. Success teaches little. This concept is foreign to many and hard to accept by most. Doesn’t make it any less true. Quantum leaps in anything demands a willingness to fail.
An unwillingness to embrace and accept failure as part of the learning process results in stagnation and little or no growth. Failure allows you to test the limits of your ability and provides feedback on what you need to work on or improve.
If you are not currently experiencing anxiety, fear or concern, you are aiming too low and will remain mired in the status quo. Failure to embrace failure means that your current situation is about as good as it is going to get. If you are OK with this fine. If you are not, you have to change your beliefs about how you view failure.
Failure is a resource. It helps you find the edge of your capacity.
Embracing failure means deliberately destabilizing yourself and breaking thought patterns and habits that keep you stuck in mediocrity.
Unfortunately, our parents, our teachers and our culture have taught us from birth to avoid failure. It is deeply rooted in our psyche and we will go to great extremes to psychologically protect our self and avoid harming our fragile egos.
This self-limiting belief is the primary reason that we avoid learning new things or trying new practices that make us uncomfortable. The reality is that more of the same always producing more of the same.
Best Sales Advice
If you want to increase your sales, the best sales advice I can give you is….
change the way you sell. Quit giving free presentations. Make prospects qualify to see your stuff. Better yet start charging for your proposals and presentations.
I can hear you now, “that’s crazy, my prospects want go for that. Our industry has never done that and besides buyers expect us to give them free proposals”. I thought a similar thing until I started charging for proposals and it worked.
Like you, I was scared to try it. Just the idea started my heart to pound and my palms to get sweaty, but I pushed on knowing that this was a physiological sign that I was leaving my comfort zone in an attempt to find a better way to sell.
When I first tried it, I screwed it up pretty badly and I lost a few deals that maybe I would have gotten if I had done it the traditional way like most salespeople still do. But after a few times and some lessons learned it started to work.
My sales advice to you is to examine your sales process and be willing to try new ways of selling even if, especially if, it makes you uncomfortable.
Your previous sales mentors have unwittingly given you bad sales advice that if followed will keep you broke and mired in mediocrity
If you insist on following their bad sales advice and keep selling the way you have always sold, you will remain in the status quo. If you choose to do that, don’t complain when your income doesn’t change.