Ideas!

“Learn from the mistakes of others - you can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Everyone in sales remembers bits of wisdom from their very first sales manager.  I was fortunate enough to be assigned to an old pro named Charlie Aimone who is the source of this month’s idea. 

For the last 15 minutes of each monthly sales meeting, one of us was assigned our turn “in the barrel”.  What we had to do was tell our peers about a tactic that backfired, a really poor call we had made or some other failed attempt at moving toward a close. 

Several things happened (every month!!!).  First, the “victim” thoroughly thought through what led up to the failure, how it occurred and what follow-up was needed to repair any damage.  Second, sheer empathy pushed the rest of us to think hard and make a genuine effort to offer suggestions that could have reversed the situation’s outcome.   Third, failure – which is inevitable in our chosen profession – became a game …a challenging game.  That’s the part that really had an impact.  We all developed the habit of turning mistakes into assets.  We all got quite good not only at bouncing back from, but also exploiting, the learning value of our errors.  We all became students of sales tactics and strategy.

More than twenty years have gone by, and last time I checked, each of the old crew is still bringing an amazingly productive barrel to the monthly meetings.

Buy a barrel!  Do it now! 

Think about it…