Sales Autopsies: What You Can Learn from Lost Sales

My mom always used to tell me that we learn more in life from our failures than we do from our successes, yet for too many of us in sales that concept doesn't seem to sink in.

I've lost plenty of sales in my life. If I want to get really down on myself, all I have to do is take a piece of paper and start writing down as many as I can remember. If I want to go into a complete state of despair, all I have to do is write down next to each loss the amount of commission I failed to receive because of the lost sale.

For that simple reason too many of us in sales choose not to dwell on what didn't happen. Instead, we merely move on.

It's much easier to move on than dwell on the past, and I'm a firm believer that dwelling on the past doesn't do anyone any good. If you want to damage your sales motivation, go right ahead and dwell all you want.

As much as we can't dwell on the past, we do need to spend a few minutes doing an autopsy on the lost sale and learning from it. If we don't learn from each sale we fail to close, then we're committing ourselves to a pattern of losing more sales.

The key I've found to the process is to do the autopsy on the failed sales call right away. The sooner you can do it, the sooner you can apply what you've learned to the next sales call.