Sales Tip 1867: Planning to Fail – Jeff Bajorek

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Jeff Bajorek! Here he is:

Jeff Bajorek: Are you planning to fail this year? Why not? Now that I’ve got your attention, let me tell you where I’m going with this. I’ve heard Adam Grant talk about this a couple of times on podcasts recently, where every year he sets a goal for himself to fail at three things. Not that he’s going to go out and try to tank any particular project, but he knows he’s pushing himself far enough when he falls short of at least three goals in a given year. That’s interesting. Now let’s. Let’s take apart this trope of, well, if you’re failing, at least you’re learning there’s no real failure. We’ve got as salespeople a real complex around failure for lots of reasons that are very valid. But I want you to think about the level to which you push yourself on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis and whether or not you are selling yourself short by not setting goals high enough.

Last couple years for me have been interesting. I’ve failed a lot of times and I think where I have fallen short of serving myself is dismissing those failures as not being productive or trying to pass the blame on some of those failures to the environment or the other people involved. And look, all that stuff is valid. If we’re looking for confirmation bias that we were not the only ones responsible for our failures, we are not going to have to find or we’re not going to have to look hard to find it. But I want you to think about how you and your reframing of that failure might actually make a much more profound impact. What did you learn from that failure? What did you learn that held you back? Or what have you learned about what held you back? What have you learned about what got in the way? Are you really learning from those failures so you can chart a different course, or are you just writing that off as someone else’s issue and remaining ignorant to how you can do better? We’ve got a self esteem crisis in the sales community, there’s no question about that. But part of having a healthy self esteem is understanding where you are capable of getting better and then believing enough in yourself to recognize those shortcomings and then overcome them. So I’ll go back to my original question.

What are you planning to fail at this year? Or what are you setting for a goal for yourself? Or setting as a goal for yourself that you might fall short of. I’d like you to consider that and maybe go back to your goals and refresh them if you’re not pushing yourself far enough or hard enough. And then what I’d really like you to do is go back and think about the three things that you failed at in the past year, 18 months, two years, and and think about the lessons that maybe you needed to learn and the things that you needed to correct to avoid that failure again.

Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Jeff and to subscribe to his fantastic newsletter that he’s brought back and plans to send most Sundays, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1867. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip!