Resilience: The Antidote to Failure

In sales, you are constantly faced with challenges, with your customer, a prospect, or within your own company. Sales professionals are quarterbacks. They take blame for what happens, no matter what the issue might be. When the customer has an issue, it is the salesperson who gets the first call.

Resilience is a key attribute of successful salespeople. Those who are resilient are able to learn from their mistakes. They welcome change. They face challenges head-on and take ownership and accountability of any situation that arises with a customer or prospect.

Resilient sales people bounce back from failure, and here is how they do it:

  • They understand that failure is a necessary part of trying to do better
  • They put failure into perspective as a normal part of the sales process
  • They realize that failure has an upside, in providing an opportunity to learn

An occasional failure is the price of entry to growth. As Edward Phelps said, “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” Freedom to make mistakes, and learn from them, must exist everywhere in the company, not just at the CEO level.

From a sales perspective, it sometimes seems that the word “no” is the most common word in the customer vocabulary list. Resilient salespeople expect to hear that word often. They have developed a sense of proportion about rejection. To them, “no” from the customer means “not right now, but keep trying.”

Experience, when you come right down to it, comes mostly from working out what we did wrong and avoiding it in the future. Salespeople can only get better at assessing customer situations through successive learning experiences. As much, if not more, education comes from losing than from winning. In today’s selling environment, the game is never really over. If your competitor is not paying proper attention to the customer, even a “done deal” can be reversed. If you lost gracefully, you could have another chance.

Attitudes that fit well with resilience are a sense of values, an eagerness to learn new things, ambition to make progress, and a sense of proportion about the importance of work when set alongside family, friends, and non-work activities.

Resilience, like every other OPERA attribute that I address in my book Don’t Just Stand There, Sell Something, is a type of behavior that flows from a certain positive attitude. People who lack resilience can still sell. But people who have high levels of resilience sell better, and bounce back when others wallow in despair.

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