Are You Making Losing a Habit?

I hate losing more than I love winning.

This “refuse to lose” mentality has driven me at every stage of my career.

Beneath my laid-back demeanor, I’m hyper-competitive. About nearly everything.

How about you? What drives you?

I ask because I’m worried that you’re turning losing into a habit.

And you and I both know how hard it is to change a bad habit.

How is losing becoming a habit for you?

It’s really quite simple.

Let’s say your close rate is 20%.

You’re closing one out of every five on the qualified opportunities in your pipeline.

A 20% close rate means you’re losing 80% of the deals you’re working on.

If this is you, what’s the single sales behavior you're practicing the most?

Losing.

If you’re losing 80% of your deals on a consistent basis it only follows that you’re going to become pretty skilled at doing it.

After all, practice makes perfect.

(For sales leaders that insist on their sellers carrying a 5x coverage ratio in their pipelines, you’re perpetuating this bad behavior.)

Losing becomes a habit when you aren’t developing prospects that truly fit your target. When you’re not really connecting and building trust with the buyer. You’re not conducting effective discovery. You’re not precise in how you qualify (and disqualify) buyers. You lack the business acumen to add value to the buyer in their buying process.

You’re letting all this happen because you don’t hate losing enough.

In other words, if you really hated losing you’d work on perfecting the human sales skills that enable you to authentically connect and engage with buyers. If you can’t do this, you can never win.

Because if you hated losing you’d invest in learning how to conduct a discovery call that reveals the outcomes the buyer truly wants to achieve.

If you hated losing you’d stop falling in love with a buyer just because s/he will talk to you. And you’d learn how to determine if they were qualified to buy exactly what you’re selling.

- Andy Paul