Summary: I've seen situations like that where people are making excuses instead of sales. Somebody had planned to sell something and was talking about it for a long time, and all the dominoes had to be lined up just right before they'd flick it, you know, flick one of them and get it going. And ultimately nothing happened. Sometimes we have a great idea, but then it's like, "oh, it seems like too much work" or "I don't want to do it," or "I'm scared," or whatever the deal is. And unfortunately, you're building bridges to nowhere when you do that.<br> <br> <br> <br> David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing making excuses instead of sales. Welcome back, Jay.<br> <br> <br> <br> Jay: Thank you so much, David. Such a pleasure to be here. And I'm excited about this topic. And I'm just going to be brutally honest upfront. I'm guilty of this very thing. As I've been involved in sales and sometimes numbers would drop, and the first thing I'm saying is, "well, it's this," or, "well, it's that."<br> <br> And the truth is it, might be. And so I think it's important to always go back and reassess what you are doing and have you changed something or has something changed in your system?<br> <br> David: Yeah, it's very easy to do. It's an easy trap to fall into. Because whoever really wants to say " it's my fault?" And yet, our behavior is one of the only things that we really, truly have control over to the extent that we can get control over it, right?<br> <br> We can't control a lot of outside factors, but we can largely control what we do and what we promise to do, and then try to connect the dots between those two things.<br> <br> Jay: Yeah. I remember I was in a training and they pointed out that so often when a mistake happens or say sales have a problem, we're looking for the person to blame.<br> <br> And so often it's not a person, it's a system. It's something that needs to be tweaked. But it's so easy to just pick somebody and say, you know, "you're the problem, you solve it."<br> <br> Maybe you're the frontline salesperson, and so you need to fix it or there are going to be consequences. And oftentimes I think that's the wrong approach.<br> <br> David: Yeah, I agree. And I think the reason that this topic even came up is I had an experience, fairly recently, where I was just sort of blindsided by someone's ability to blame every single outside factor rather than just the fact that they essentially weren't selling. And this is common in a lot of different businesses.<br> <br> It's common in a lot of different sales industries. A lot of times, "well, it's the leads." And if you ever saw Glengarry Glen Ross, "it's the leads." And I remember when I was first watching that movie, I was like, oh, that's brutal. You know, it's probably not the leads. And then you find out, in that particular movie, yeah, it was the leads, because they were giving them bad leads.<br> <br> That's really the exception, rather than the rule though. It's the leads, it's the market, it's the product, it's the supply chain. There have been a lot of really, potentially very good excuses, a lot of different things that people can blame for their lack of producing, but none of that empowers the salesperson. None of it empowers the person who is making those excuses to actually address the issues that potentially need to be addressed.<br> <br> In other words, if there's a problem with the leads, what can that person do to track down better leads? If it's the market, are there other markets they can approach? Or are there segments of the market that they could and should be approaching? If it's the product, are they representing the right product?<br> <br> Is there another product they should be selling? So for every excuse, there is normally something that the salesperson can do to address some aspect of the problem th...
