Business development can breed insecurity. Often times, professionals get uncomfortable or embarrassed over business development mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes and lamenting about it won’t correct it. Identifying a mistake and remaining objective about it allows a professional to analyze what went wrong and take a lesson learned from the error.
During a training session a client, Cliff, told a story, “Going into the meeting, I was convinced this person would be our next client. After briefly catching up, the buyer told me he awarded my fiercest competitor the business. The buyer looked me square in the eyes and told me he really liked me and my company. Said I was so close that if the final say was his, I would have won. Then he promised me it wouldn’t be long before I got my chance. He loved my presentation.”
All the potential client's reassurance didn’t help Cliff feel any better, “Then came the bombshell. He said I helped them immensely, that without my expertise and competitive (lowball) pricing, they wouldn’t have gotten as good a deal from my competitor. The buyer told me he admired me for my skill and business savvy. On the way out the buyer told me to ‘Stop by anytime, I could buy him lunch.’”
Cliff was clearly embarrassed admitting this story. He told us he had really been beating himself up about missing the mark so badly. But what doesn’t kill a professional makes him better, right? Not necessarily. To get stronger a professional needs to keep the situation in perspective. So we asked what Cliff had learned. His answer was, “I screwed up.”
Cliff was internalizing the embarrassment but not the lesson learned. This was a business development mistake, not a personal embarrassment. Professionals shouldn’t react with embarrassment, they should react with self-analysis. Cliff wasn’t a screw up for not getting the deal. He just made some mistakes along the way. Specifically, he rushed to present features and benefits and tried to win a deal by “sharpening his pencil” rather than really understanding the buyer’s needs.
Of course we all experience embarrassing moments in our professional lives like spilling coffee on your lap right before walking into a meeting. Or when the hotel computer corrupts your PowerPoint document leaving you to improvise a presentation without materials. Or when a colleague inadvertently forwards a confidential in-house email to your top customer and you have to go through a process of remediation. These are embarrassing moments spawned by bad luck but not necessarily situations that result in a tangible lesson learned. There’s not a consistent process to avoid these moments in the future other than general guidelines like "pay more attention" or "be more careful". Embarrassing situations just have to be dealt with to the best of your ability and move on. There’s not a professional alive who hasn’t had an embarrassing moment in their career.
Embarrassing moments are different from business development mistakes because mistakes provide a identifiable improvement moving forward. How you handle an embarrassing moment reflects your level of self-esteem. How you handle the adversity of a business development mistake reflects self-analysis which is your willingness to accept blame, identify specifically what went wrong, learn from it, and improve.
Business development is chock full of interesting experiences. Embarrassing moments make humorous war stories but fail to provide an opportunity for tangible improvement. Business development mistakes might be more difficult to admit to but provide valuable lessons learned - important, necessary, lessons learned. Knowing the difference will keep you productive.
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Having personally tested and proved the Sandler Method to be effective, Tina is passionate about assisting clients in reaching their full potential through the Sandler sales methodology.
