Are Excuses Affecting Your Sales Success?

Transcript:

By Tony Cole, President, Anthony Cole Training Group

• The traffic was backed up.
• The client hasn’t gotten back to me with the information.
• My support staff hasn’t prepared the documents yet.
• I’ve been here less than a year, I inherited the current sales team.
• The leads I get from my internal partners are not very good.

Hello and welcome to this week’s Sales Brew.

Today, I’m addressing the salespeople and the sales managers who follow us in social media and listen to our weekly audio postcards.  There continues to be an epidemic, a virus if you will, that has a negative impact on results and productivity.  The symptoms are those that I stated in the beginning of this message.  The “reasons” given for lack of results are too often thrown about and accepted as reasonable explanations.  The problem is, though the conditions may exist that make it difficult to accomplish a task or reach a goal, the explanations are just excuses for failure.

A friend of mine, Whitey Kollmeier, president of the First National Insurance Agency, gave me a audio book titled, The Hard Thing about the Hard Things.  One of the comments made early on by the author is the following:

“The first tragedy of failure is truth.”

I get what Ben Horowitz is saying. I see it and hear it day in and day out when talking to my clients and prospects.  Everyone seems to want to blame someone or something when goals, ambitions or objectives are not achieved. The bottom line though is that – instead of finding a way over, under, around or through the obstacle – people just throw up their hands and say, “not my fault”.

The problem with making and accepting excuses is that the barriers to success never get broadened or broken.  The excuses become kind of like the invisible fence for pets.  The pet wears a collar that provides a slight correction when they get to the electrified underground wire.  They stop just short of the invisible fence, never willing to go through the pain of reaping the reward of what might just be on the other side of the fence.  You may want that for your pets, but do you really want that for yourself or your sales team?

You may not realize this, but that is costing you and your family or company a lot – a lot of time, money, energy and or resources.  It’s costing your freedom of choice and freedom of time.  It’s costing your dreams.  Instead of accepting the “reasons” as real, properly address them as excuses and ask yourself this:  If I didn’t use that as an excuse, what would I do differently?

As always, thank you and have a perfect day.