If you’re in any form of sales—even the process of selling yourself as a viable candidate to a potential employer—you know the sting of failure. Perhaps the most common frustration is the phone call that is never returned.
You can’t sit around waiting for the phone to ring, but that plastic box sometimes seems to be taunting us with it’s silence. Why do others fail to call us back?
Perhaps what’s most interesting about this particular failure is that we tend to assume the worst. We don’t presume that our friends and family are just busy; we think we’ve inadvertently wronged them and that they are stewing with hatred. We don’t assume business contacts are out of town; we think they have no interest in our services and hope we will go away by avoiding them.
The truth is that every telephone call starts out looking like a failure. You dial and listen to the rings, wondering if anyone will pick up. A telephone calls is failing as long as you haven’t reached anyone. Even if you leave a voicemail message, you have failed to connect to your party.
But in this sense, every call is a sequence of failures until it leads to some meaningful result. You may eventually counsel an old family member, get an appointment or make a sale, but you will be waiting on rings, leaving messages and playing “phone tag” until you do. The telephone is a failure device.
We need more than just perseverance in sales, we need a healthy perspective on error. Learn more in Failure: The Secret to Success. Buy it today!