Success and failure are integral parts of sales. In many sales schools, like the one offered by Southwestern Company it is discussed that what you do when either one happens determines how you will react next time you are in a similar situation. For some people, when they succeed they party and when they fail they figure out what went wrong. Partying shouldn’t be part of the equation however. You should be able to party in any situation and more specifically, you should be happy to figure out when went well and what didn’t after any outcome. How can you repeat something good if you don’t know what you did well.
Figuring out what you did right and wrong is something that needs to be done carefully though. You neither want to blame yourself for things that could not be helped, nor do you want to congratulate yourself on something that went right that you could not have helped. If a couple goes into your phone store, tells you that they are price shopping and that they want a specific model, specific service and specific types of accessories, you can not really congratulate yourself on being able to talk them into those accessories, or that service plan, or even that phone, what you might have done well on the other hand was provide information that they didn’t have before and give them the option to be able to pay for it at a later time. If the service you provided was exceptional and you give them options they did not have before it would make sense that they would buy the phones then.
On the other hand, if later on a couple come in and they have no idea what they want, you show them a number of phones, and plans, and accessories, but they never really see anything that they want, it will be hard to get them to buy it. You can not blame yourself for not having product that they wanted, nor can you blame them for not knowing what they want right away. They have not had a lot of time to think about what they want. You can work instead on how you present various products and how you discuss various concepts.
Figuring out what is something you can work on, or something that you can’t change takes a lot of introspection. You may want to talk to a mentor, a fellow sales person, or you may want to take some kind of sales training to help you think about what you can and can’t do. There are a number of sales programs that are aimed at direct sellers who need to have this skill more than any other sales person. Southwestern Company does at least one of these trainings and may be able to do training for a whole company on how to introspect and learn from a bad sales experience.