Sales Warfare: Love to Win or Hate to Lose?

victory

Happy New Year, everyone.

I hope you had an opportunity to recharge, review, and look ahead. During the break, in addition to spending quality time with my family, I listened to music, read four books, watched some movies together, went to 3 shows, and saw Unbroken. The common thread among concerts, books, shows, and movies is whether or not they are memorable. For me, memorable refers to whether or not I will remember a book, show, movie, scene, passage, chapter, event, line or moment - years later.

I'm sure you have some of those memories too. I remember a Rod Stewart concert from 10 years ago when he stopped a song about 20 seconds in and said he had "f****d it up" and wanted to start over. I also remember a Michael Franks concert from 27 years ago when he thanked the audience for helping his album reach Gold, and admitted that it was probably because we all purchased both the vinyl record and then the CD, thereby doubling his sales.

There was a very memorable line in Unbroken: "If you can take it, you can make it."

As is always the case, these memorable moments got me thinking about memorable selling moments and that led to some interesting insights about motivation...

Can you remember your most memorable sales calls? Your most memorable wins? Your most memorable losses?

Last month, while training a sales team, I asked if they loved to win or hated to lose. Everyone raised their hand in response to love to win. I challenged them to reconsider. In my case, as well as most top sales performers, the many wins are nice - very nice - but the losses, especially because there are so few of them - make me angry. I remember them, learn from them, and make sure I don't repeat the mistakes that led to a loss. Yes, it is always my fault when there is a loss. A top performer will always take responsibility and learn from it.

So do you love to win or hate to lose?

I think it was Jimmy Connors, the championship tennis player, who is most famous for saying he hated to lose. On the other hand, it only takes a single tennis or golf victory to see how glorious it is to win a championship. But that's a win of a totally different type.

I remember the awards for winning, but not most of the winning moments. I think that's because I expect to get the business, so the win meets my expectations, while a loss catches me by surprise and causes an emotional reaction.

It's very important to know which outcome - winning or losing - is more motivating for you and your salespeople. If it's winning, then the strategy can be traditional - how to win the deal or account and how great you will feel upon winning. If it's losing, then the strategy should be an opposite strategy, based on how you will feel if you lose and how to prevent that outcome.

It really doesn't matter whether winning or losing motivates you more, but it is important to know and understand how you are motivated.

LeadTrigger has published its book of 2015 Sales Predictions. You can download your copy here.