Eliminate Excuses, See More Success

Are Excuses Affecting Sales Success?

By Tony Cole, Co-Founder of Anthony Cole Training Group

There continues to be an epidemic, a virus if you will, that has a negative impact on results and productivity in sales. The epidemic is Excuse Making and the symptoms are;

• 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.

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, gave me an audio book titled The Hard Thing about the Hard Things and one of the comments made early on by the author, Ben Horowitz, is “The first tragedy of failure is truth.”

I see and hear this 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.

Click here to read more about Taking Responsibility for Your Sales Results.