Failing forward, part 1

No one wants to lose, and no one wants to talk about losing. It is like talking about death. But, failure can be an effective teacher. Many sales are losing sales—a statistical fact that is often ignored. However, this does not mean the participants are losers. Consider the career of Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K), a basketball legend who inspires his players to greatness. Under his direction, the Duke University basketball program has become one of the most successful in the history of the sport. Coach K has been selected as National Coach of the Year 12 times and has been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

By any objective standards, he is a winner. Yet, 31 of his 34 seasons at Duke have ended with a losing game. After all, at the end of any season, only one team wins. In proposals, as in basketball, there is just one winner. Even in the case of large contract competitions, which sometimes do result in more than one winner, the subsequent delivery or task order competitions narrow the field down to one.

The reasons to study losing are numerous and compelling, as many deals are lost. Therefore, all sales professionals experience a loss at some point. In fact, corporations already accept the fact that losing is inevitable, and that is why the values of opportunities in the pipeline are weighted according to win probability. No one would believe a forecast if it assumed a 100-percent win probability for all opportunities in the pipeline. Of course, at the level of the individual deal, everyone involved has to believe that winning that particular deal is at least possible, if not likely.

If losing is inevitable, it is imperative that sales professionals find a way to deal with it and ultimately benefit from it. Instead, many sales professionals—and managers, executives, subject-matter experts and support staff—bypass the opportunity to learn from a loss. Individuals and the organizations they work for try to forget about it, deny it, rationalize it, blame it on something, or engage in unyielding self-criticism.

Moreover, losing is important because, for both psychological and cognitive reasons, failure is a better teacher than success. Most people know this instinctively from their own experiences. In the final analysis, proposal professionals are lucky because the events from which people learn the most—losses—are ones that they will inevitably experience.

Finally, losing merits attention because learning from failure is difficult and must be approached in a careful and sometimes counter-intuitive way to be successful.

This series of posts suggests four steps to facilitate learning and growing after a loss.

Sales teams need to go through four steps to benefit from a loss. These steps are based on common sense and observation of how sales teams behave.

1. Find out what happened.
2. Determine causality (i.e., determine which events, decisions or thought processes were actually responsible for the loss).
3. Take action, if appropriate, based on lessons learned.
4. Let go and move on.

Each step must be performed sequentially to be effective. When teams rush the process, they are likely to err in either their analysis or their corrective measures.

Stay tuned for the next installment!

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photo by Mike Saechang