Yahoo Hot Jobs offers Bounce Back After A Big Mistake. The article provides 6 steps for recovering from a significant error. This topic is of great importance in hiring strong salespeople. Sales requires people who have a unique ability to handle rejection and move on without flinching. Similarly, strong salespeople take responsibility for their actions, including failures. And let’s add one more – strong sales managers hold their salespeople accountable and do not accept excuses. You can see how interrelated all of these topics are to sales success.
This article offers straight-forward advice for dealing with a big mistake. Here is the one that caught my attention:
1. Own it.
While many of us would prefer to forget our mistakes, initially you need to acknowledge to your supervisor and everyone involved that you’re accepting responsibility for what went wrong. If you do this right (that is, seriously and sincerely), you’ll only have to do it once.
There is no more important advice than that – the first step is to take responsibility. We have encountered many salespeople who simply don’t. They possess a myriad of excuses and blatantly use them to provide cover for themselves. Don’t let them do this. A strong sales manager needs to put an end to excuse making and focus the salesperson on owning up to their personal responsibilities.
Here are the 6 bulleted suggestions from the article:
1. Own it.
2. Take the heat.
3. Don’t beat yourself up.
4. Learn from the past.
5. Keep it in perspective.
6. Move on.
I’ll close with a good quote straight from the article:
Failure is not in the falling down but in the staying down.