Is Your Team Learning From Past Failiures?
Today I attended a Global Sales Training where we did collaborative studies on our lost pursuits over the last couple of years. I found this to be an extremely valuable learning exercise. It has been the best sale training exercise that I have been a part of during my 25+ years in business. The exercise was conducted in such a way as to solicit great candid feedback from our team members
The exercise revolved around each team member being responsible for providing one lost sales pursuit for his group to review and dissect. It was impressive to see all the different perspectives thrown at these lost pursuits and the ideas that came out of our discussions. The atmosphere was safe and non-accusatory. This allowed each team member to freely share his experience of losing a sales pursuit and detailing the sales process that took place. Known missteps were laid out by each sales person and additional challenges and mistakes were then brought up by the team members.
Keep Learnings About Using This Process:
1. All of our minds used collaboratively are far better than any one of us as individuals. Collaborative learning can energize your team and provide great insights into past mistakes and help establish better methods for facing future challenges.
2. Examining our failures can provide great learning opportunities for how we proceed in the future.
continuous Improvement Processes are fundamental for our organization’s future success.
3. Use the process to determine repetitive issues that are common across all the organization’s failures or missed opportunities.
4. Having a safe culture where candor is welcomed and rewarded is essential for confronting the brutal facts of our past failures.
High Level Learnings For Our Sales Team:
1. Better Preparation: One key finding for our sales organization was the need to do more effective homework in preparation for pursuing prospects. A number of blind spots were uncovered during this process that could have possibly been eliminated if the sales person had done a better job of researching the company he was pursuing. Frequently our missteps were due to incomplete or incorrect information about the customer.
2. Pain Points: It is imperative that we learn what our customer’s pain points are in order to provide the correct solution from our portfolio of products and services. Too many times we focus on presenting our attributes in a shot-gun approach versus accurately understanding the customer’s specific needs and providing targeted solutions that will eliminate their current pain points.
3. Decision Maker: Make sure you are investing your sales pursuit with the actual decision maker. This may seem obvious to any sales pursuit but it is surprising how many times we found out deep into the pursuit that the people we have been selling don’t actually have the “pen power” we had perceived them to have. This is critical to very large and complex sales that involve multimillion dollar decisions. Make sure you are talking to the person that has the “pen power” to sign the deal.
4. Value vs. Cost: Concentrate on selling the value you bring to the customer versus getting dragged down into one dimensional cost discussions that commoditized your products.
Some questions to consider for organization:
- Does your organization have a methodology for examining your past failures?
- When was the last time you took a hard look at your failed programs, lost sales pursuits and/or other blown opportunities?
- How does your organization view failure? Is failure seen as a stepping stone for future success?
- Does your organization have a culture of candor that supports such discussions effectively?
- Do you have examples of similar processes for examining past failures in order to better prepare for future success?
Grab Your Free
Leadership Reading Guide
©2025 Learning To Lead | Helping Good Leaders Become Great Leaders