What Got You Here Won't Get You There in Sales: How Successful Salespeople Take it to the Next Level

Habit 11—Explaining Failure

Behaving under the erroneous belief that simply being able to assign blame, fault, or guilt is enough to satisfy the customer.

Just as there is no crying in baseball, there are no excuses in sales. Over the last decades we have interviewed thousands of people. How many times do you think we’ve heard, “I was pretty upset over the fact that you screwed up my order until the salesperson gave me those awesome excuses. As soon as I got the explanation for the failure, I felt so much better.”

We don’t think we have ever heard it. Ever.

Common across both sides of the customer influence aisle (sales and service), this annoying tendency usually starts with a mechanical or, worse, condescending explanation of why the customer ...