By taking the time to reflect on why you lost a customer or failed to close a sale, you’ll find ways to improve on the next one.
You close your laptop and thank your counterpart across the table for their time. Once you’re safely out of earshot, you grab your cellphone, call your colleague and pronounce: “The deal is dead. They were never interested.”
Then you rationalize about how this was just not the right organisation to work with. Time to mentally close the books and move to the next item on your long to-do list, right? Wrong.
The last thing most of us want to do is to take time away from an active customer to review what we consider a cold lead. Learning from a deal that didn’t happen means asking hard questions about yourself and your team. But facilitating an atmosphere of humility and accountability is a necessary process to make your company stronger and make you a better leader.
The most straightforward way to learn from the lost deal is to schedule non-moveable time to truly THINK about and process what went wrong. Schedule an hour of your time two to three days after the fact, when the details are still fresh in your mind but the emotion has started to approach its half-life.
…to read this article in full, visit leading US small business resource, Inc.
