“Try to let what is unfair teach you.”
–David Foster Wallace
You know how you can tell someone is a sore loser? They go on and on about how unfair things are. Everything they say is litany of excuses about how others cheated, how everyone is against them, how people interfered with what they feel is rightfully theirs.
The reason everything seems unfair is that sore losers don't take responsibility for their shortcomings. It is always someone else’s fault, the mysterious forces aligned to steal their obvious victory. In reality, there is no mystery. The deep conspiracy does not exist. They lost. End of story. Game over.
Does cheating happen? Of course, the highly competitive nature of humans sometimes leads people to take shortcuts, bend the rules, or commit fraud. This is why systems have evolved to protect the integrity of institutions and professions. Take the US election system. The Brookings Institute said the following based on data from conservative leaning think tank The Heritage Foundation:
“They looked for fraud over a 36-year period and could only find 1285 cases out of nearly two billion votes cast. That amounts to a rate of .0000007%”
The US election system is both resilient and honest. This stems from the fact that despite political leanings, most people want to preserve what is a fair and judicious means of choosing the people to represent their interests. But certain politicians being who they are will continue to whine about how unfair everything is instead of following the path of honorable leaders who demonstrated losing with dignity.
Losing is tough. I have lost my share of deals and competitions. Back in my wrestling days, after a tough loss, I would beat myself up for days. My coach always reminded me though, learn today and another opportunity to win will come soon enough. Training was tough, practices were hell, but I pushed on because I knew it was the path to win.
When I was at Siebel, it was a company on a hot streak dominating the world of CRM before Salesforce was ever a threat. But in the early 2000’s, we were getting beaten by an ERP vendor that took a sleepy CRM player and turned it into a real threat. I saw this first-hand when they were making headway in a deal I was working for a global bank. I put everything into that deal to position us for the win despite overwhelming odds, an IT director that was fighting against us, and a vendor willing to give away the software for free.
How did we win? We took on the attitude of winners. We did not let defeatism or difficulties dominate our thinking. Most importantly though, we followed through on a strategy that was focused on the customer.
This is how you build the playbook for winning:
Be customer obsessed – When you start with what the customer needs, you already set yourself up for success. We didn’t go into the deal thinking we knew the right solution. We listened and took the mindset of a big global bank in understanding the challenges they face serving their customers across many siloed product lines.
Learn and be curious – We had lots of questions when given the scenarios to demonstrate for an upcoming executive demo day. Though familiar with the world of corporate banking, we asked lots of open ended questions of the customer to understand the business context, impacts, and priorities of each scenario. Then we interviewed existing customers and canvassed my network for help and advice along the way so we could build our industry acumen.
Earn trust – This was a demanding customer that had many requests, sometimes on timelines that felt unrealistic. We never objected outright however, opting to work with the customer to understand the requests more clearly and offering better recommendations. This allowed us to be seen as advisors and built trust that we had the customer’s needs first.
Take ownership – We all had our part to play in serving the customer and made sure that our objectives and the expected outcomes of our work were clear, from building the demo day scenarios to engaging with key personnel in the bank to organizing resources on the team to ensure efforts were coordinated.
Dive deep – Sometimes the work became overwhelming, so some of us took on double duty to help. Though at this stage I has moved on from my developer roots, I rolled up my sleeves to build the Analytics scenarios and populate reports with demo data, all the while still managing the overall sales cycle and leading the team on delivering the demo.
Insist on the highest standards – In practice runs of the demo, things did not always flow right or present in a way that was compelling. We could have said it was good enough, but winners get the details right, so even our demo data looked as realistic as possible. We wanted every banker in the audience watching to feel they were watching their business in the demo.
Think big – While we hewed closely to the guidance and scenarios presented by the customer, we also knew there was an opportunity to expand the vision to be a holistic bank building a view of customers across retail, wealth, and corporate banking. This struck a chord with the executive team that was struggling with strategic questions on more closely integrating the bank.
Bias for action – At every step of our engagement with the customer, we pushed ahead using the information we had on hand. Sometimes we had made mistakes, but being proactive allowed us to course correct with enough time to recover and offer a better idea or solution.
Deliver results – The demo day was nerve wracking, but we performed well enough to receive applause from the 85 senior leaders in the audience. When the votes were tallied, we had 84 votes for us, 1 for our fierce competitor, and 0 for a third vendor.
Develop the best – Knowing my colleagues would face the same tough competitor, I packaged up everything I learned as a series of demos, scripts, questionnaires, and other assets for anyone to use in their deals. I gave lunch and learns, worked with product management to guide features and roadmap, and provided advice to other reps during their deals. Winning reps share their strategies and raise the bar so their team can also win.
Stay humble – Even in the heat of competition, I never once bashed or made disparaging remarks of the competition. It is easy to get dirty and spread FUD, but the winners in the long run are winners because they win with grace. This is what I admire about working at Amazon. While we are aware of the competition, we never mention competitors. Our focus is on serving the customer above all else.
Speaking of Amazon, most of the points mentioned above are Amazon Leadership Principles, which have served as our playbook for winning over the past 25 years. Culture is a huge part of winning. It is little wonder then that when I visit sales floors, the best performing teams are ones that have a well defined and integrated culture.
Even if you do all the right things, there will be times that it may still not be enough. It sucks but it is reality. But remember, failure is an opportunity to learn. As Michael Jordan, the basketball legend says:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
If you are gracious in defeat, you also leave yourself an opening to come back. Then you can win in style.
Win the day!
Mark Birch, Founder of Enterprise Sales Forum