“I am not judged by the number of times I fail, but by the number of times I succeed. And the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep trying!” by Tom Hopkins, Sales Trainer.
This is more important than you think. Everyone knows that to succeed you will also fail (the only thing you should make sure to succeed at first and always is sky-diving), but when it actually comes to failing, most give up with the words: ‘it does not work’.
I am a salesman, and once gave a seminar to other consultants like me. They invited me because I made more money than they did. They wanted to learn about sales.
When I asked what their closing ratio was, most of them said 20% – 35%. My ratio was 30%. Mine was not better than theirs were – I was just willing to fail (not sell) 10 times more often than they.
I was not a better salesperson, but a better marketing person.
Note: Did you know that Babe Ruth had a fairly normal batting average amongst players in his league? Why was he so much better? He swung much more often than the rest!! He was willing to fail! Did you know that to win most World Series such as car racing, football and baseball, etc. you usually only need to win not even 50% of the time?
So, why worry about failing? Why not go ahead and try to rack up as many failures as you can – the number of successes obviously goes up in proportion. The winner will be the one who failed the most often. Great, isn’t it?
Back to the example of the sales people who hired me to speak to them about increasing their closing ratio or conversion ratio as it is called, I never did help them increasing their closing ratio even though I was able to help quite a few of them to make more sales.
How did I do that?
I made sure that they would be failing more often by increasing the amount of sales presentations they gave.
This of course required a completely different set of knowledge than they were coming to class for.
By the time the seminar was over nobody was suing me for imposing a set of knowledge which they did not bargain for. They came and paid to learn sales techniques. “How do I improve my sales technique?” This is what they came for and I gave them marketing techniques.
At first they did object but soon they saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Those business owners and sales people did realize that there are many ways to go to Rome or many ways to skin a cat.
Why do you need to build a dam to save the village from being flooded when it is much easier to divert the river or to even rebuild the village on higher plateau which is more beautiful any how and which has a grander view and better ground for growing corn and raising cattle?
Why try to climb an impossible wall when you can just walk around?
It is this short-sightedness of the average entrepreneur which makes it look like there is no hope to him.
I can understand that. After all, if you have tried to get better employees, or have tried to sell a larger percentage, or if you have tried to raise your prices, or if you have tried to lower you prices to attract more clients, or if you have used a certain marketing method for years, all of the above without any change in income and free time, it is easy to see how one could believe that there is no hope.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Sure, one might need to get some extra knowledge. One might have to put in some extra time to get that knowledge and to implement the new plans.
One might even have to risk it all.
Actually usually one risks not much because what one has is only hardship and hopelessness in the first place. So what does it matter if you lose all that with your new plan?
Does not look like much of a gamble to me.
Having a tunnel vision of how things could or should be done is deadly, and it is there because of an unwillingness to explore other avenues.
When people tell me that they have tried it all, I know instantaneously that they have a shortcoming of exploring different avenues of achieving their goals. They have been rather lazy and ignorant, when it comes to learning about new methods. Their ignorance make them believe they know it all, when yet they see others, even though a small amount of others, succeed in the very same endeavor.
I am not saying that they are lazy overall. Usually they are not aware and even work themselves half to death, but they do have a blind spot in exploring the possibility that there are other techniques available which they do not know enough about it.
It is always a blind spot of examining the fact that maybe, only maybe, the things they are doing are not done correctly and could stand some improvement.
It is a little bit like a plumber with no medical experience or at least very limited medical experience trying to fix a headache on 50 people over a few years’ period and then concluding that medicine does not work.
That would be a somewhat wrong conclusion at least.
It does not matter how long one calls himself a business owner, or how long one has dabbled in business and marketing and sales etc and it does not matter how many diplomas one might have on this subject, if the business owner, entrepreneur, practitioner, lawyer has financial problems – works hard but does not get the rewards he envisions then he has some shortcomings in general business strategy, marketing, sales, finance, personnel matters such as hiring, training etc.
It would not matter what his excuse would be and/or what his current financial state might be, he must take off the blinds and do everything possible while enduring any and all pain, to acquire the needed knowledge to find a different way to go to Rome.
And let us not forget what Mr. Hopkins and hundreds of other successful entrepreneurs, philosophers, politicians say about failing.
Failing cannot be eliminated if you want to be successful. It cannot be eliminated with even the best techniques. Nobody becomes a world champion of anything, including business without having had many crashes, losses and failures. In fact as I said before, most of those world champs, in no matter what discipline including business, fail more than they succeed and they definitely fail more than their unsuccessful competition.
But there is such a thing as climbing up the wrong tree, which will give you only losses.
The winners of this world have the basic knowledge of knowing which tree has a good chance of winning and their enormous thirst for knowledge makes them looking for new trees all the time.
Helmut G. Flasch
CEO
Flasch Business Expansion
Category: Business Improvements.
