Lee Salz is a Featured Columnist for The Business Journals.
No one likes to talk about the one that got away, except fishermen.
When a deal that was supposed to happen somehow doesn’t, it’s painful. However, don’t let your salespeople simply dust themselves off and move onto their next conquest. There is much to be learned from a lost sale.
And, it’s not just salespeople who learn from these experiences, but also sales leaders and senior executives as well.
In the 1980s, there was a hit television show called “Quincy, M.E.” about a coroner who solved murders. Rather than quickly sort through corpses that came into the morgue, he would investigate deaths that appeared to have occurred due to natural circumstances to truly understand their causes. When he determined that a murder had taken place, he set out on a mission to solve it.
To extend that analogy to business, if the deal is dead, it’s your job as sales leader to find out what caused it.