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16 Oct 2014

Why Business is Like Riding a Bike

Everyone wants to succeed. Failing is tough business and it can be emotionally and professionally straining, but failure is also an opportunity to learn from your experience and be better moving forward. When you learned to ride a bike, once you took off those training wheels, you had to fall a few times to get your balance just right, didn’t you? And even when you thought you were an expert cyclist, you still flipped over the handlebars when you hit a pothole, right? But, at least for most of us, that didn’t mean putting the bike back in the garage forever. It meant getting back on and knowing what to look for on the next ride.

Try at business and sales in the same way you looked at riding a bike. When you fall, you gain valuable experience that can help you avoid the next pothole.

First let’s look at a few common reasons we fail:

Your goals were unreachable

When we’re excited about a particular endeavor, it’s easy to set your goals astronomically high. You want to go for the gold right out of the gate and that can easily backfire. If you have unattainable goals from the get go, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. It’s more important to set milestone goals you can use to hold yourself accountable, but those goals should be physically possible and at least a bit challenging.

Your goals were too low

When you set your goals so low that you KNOW you can reach them with little effort, it’s easy to rest on your success and avoid pushing yourself to be meet your big overall goals. For example, if you want to sell $100,000 worth of services in a year and you try to reach at least $5,00 per month, you’ll never make your total goal. Your goals need to be in line with your overall target.

You weren’t prepared

It seems obvious that if you go into a sales meeting without studying the client you’re probably not going to make the sale. However, even though we know the importance of preparation, sometimes we’re still not as prepared as we needed to be. Time gets away from us and what we end up presenting just isn’t our best work or it’s not properly tailored to the client. Hopefully, if this happens to you, you can use it as a learning experience and not just write off the mistake.

So, when one of more of these of these issues cause you to fail, what do you? First of all, take responsibility. Being accountable for your actions, the issues and the failures, is the first step to correcting the problem moving forward. Don’t just forget the failure and start toward the next goal – acknowledge what went wrong and adjust your future plan accordingly. Ask yourself what went wrong and why. How could you have done better? What did you need to do to make this a success? And, perhaps most importantly, create a plan to have better success next time.

If you continue to struggle either in business or in sales, your local Growth Coach can help. Find a coach here: www.TheGrowthCoach.com/locate.

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