Tag Archives for " Failure "

Another Loss, Another Pity Party

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

When salespeople win a sale – when they close a deal – it’s because they are good at what they do. Just ask them! They will tell you how hard they worked; how smooth they were. The will give you every detail of how they set the hook and reeled in the Big One. But if you listen to salespeople talk about a loss, you will hear something else entirely. Instead of talking about their mistakes or missteps, you’ll hear a litany of reasons that explain why they lost the sale.

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4 Amateur Mistakes Great Salespeople Avoid

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

If you’re a salesperson who has been struggling this past year, the New Year provides the opportunity to start over. However, next year will actually just be more of the same if you continue to practice some of the bad habits you’ve acquired. These amateur mistakes are never committed by top-drawer salespeople because they’ve learned (usually first-hand) how damaging they are.

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When You Cannot Take a Vacation

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

The truth is, when the troops can’t do without you — when you cannt take a vacation because the place will fall apart — both your work and personal life can get ugly. You never seem to have enough time to get to the truly important things, and team performance is necessarily going to suffer. It will suffer now because you’re the bottleneck in a system that limits the team’s output, and it will suffer later because you fail to develop the talent underneath. That failure will inevitably result in long-term employee disengagement, mediocre performance, and – no joke – health issues.

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Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

By Kelly Riggs | Sales + Leadership

This past week the OKC Thunder managed to squander a 3-1 series lead over the Golden State Warriors in the 2016 NBA Western Conference Finals. As a fan, that one was difficult to swallow, although, to be fair, it’s not unheard of. Still, I can’t help but think that the Thunder managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They took a game from the Warriors on the road, pummeled them twice at home, and had tremendous momentum to go with their 3-1 series lead. And then they went all “Wendy’s” on us…

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