What Have You Learned from Your Failures?
With great failure comes great learning
Just because something does not work, does not mean it is a complete failure. There are great learning opportunities with all “failures”.
What failure can you learn from today?
So you had a bad customer call or meeting, what will you change next time?
Can you change the verbiage you used?
Can you prepare better?
What information do you need?
Take a moment after each “failure” to reflect. There is something that you can learn from this. When you do learn from your “failures” you will succeed next time. It may seem overly simple, but really just take 5-10 mins after each customer call or meeting to reflect on what went well and what you can improve next time. If you had a particularly bad experience maybe you need 30 mins. It can also be helpful to wait 24hr to complete the review. That way you have time to thing through everything and let the pain of the bad meeting dissipate a little more. No matter what make sure you review the bad meetings, or calls, there are learnings to be hard in all of them.
How do you follow-up on a bad call?
So you had a bad call and now you have learned something. It is time to try again with that customer. How do you proceed? I would just call out the elephant in the room. You get the next meeting that is a great step, but both of you are thinking about how bad that last call was. So just call it out at the beginning. “Man, I was really unprepared last time, hope I studied harder for this round.” Haha Or maybe something more professional, “I remember there were several questions that I did not have a good reply for last time here are those answers….” Also, do not be afraid to from in help. Maybe you struggled with an operations question, bring your operations manager. Customers do not expect you to be the keeper of all knowledge. We all understand that we all need help, so just bring them with you. Do not let the elephant sit in the room with you, just call it out at the beginning and then let it go on about its business.
So remember:
There is something to learn from every “failure”
Do not hesitate to call out your failures of the past with customers.
I put failure in “” because it is not truly final or a failure so, keep fighting.
Thank you for your time reading this post. I hope it had at least a small amount of helpful information for you. If so, please share it with a friend or 15. :-)