Someone once said of the tennis great known for his never-give-up attitude, Jimmy Connors, “He never lost a match – he just ran out of time.” It’s a subtle concept, so think about it for a minute. Given enough time and enough tries, almost anyone can do almost anything. Of course that doesn’t mean that everyone can do everything. But it does mean that with the right attitude, and a willingness to learn from failure, you can add incremental steps toward success until you do get it right, whatever it is you’re trying to do – like reaching that prospect who’s never in, or closing that account with 10 decision makers.

According to Jib Ellison, managing partner in the Trium Group, a leadership consulting firm in San Francisco, it’s important to keep failure in the proper perspective. “Failure is nothing more than feedback,” he says. “It’s simply information you can use to learn from.” Ellison speaks from personal experience. Once, when he and his partner began to give their sales presentation to the senior vice president of a Fortune 100 health-care company, they were confident. But by the end of the presentation they knew they had blown it. “We had discussions before the meeting and thought we had a good sense of what the customer wanted,” Ellison recalls. They didn’t.

Ellison admits that he and his partner had not listened to the customer. “We thought he just wanted to open lines of communication between senior executives, but he wanted to know how to restructure the organization.”

Sound familiar? Salespeople experience failure every day: a sale that doesn’t go through, customers canceling an order, presentations that don’t do the job. What do they do afterward? That’s the important question. Ellison looked at where he had made mistakes and then used his know-how and determination to snatch success from the hand of failure. Later that same day, after analyzing the presentation with co-workers, he called the prospect, apologized and asked for another chance. He got it and landed the sale.

Although it may be difficult to realize at first, many times failure can be a blessing in disguise. Nadir Anise, an attorney in Boca Raton, FL, who provides marketing expertise to the legal profession, notes, “Not closing a deal is not a failure. In fact, it can open up new doors. In the future they may need your services.”

To learn how to use failure as a key to open doors, Selling Power spoke with various experts who offered important lessons on dealing with those unavoidable missteps.

1. Learn from Failures
Before you can learn from failure, you must know how you view failure in the first place. Are you one of those people who won’t even acknowledge the word “failure”? Or do you accept that it’s there, but then deal with it in a positive manner? Stephan Schiffman, president of DEI Management Group Inc., a sales-training firm in New York, says failure does exist. It hurts when it happens, it’s personal, and it is OK to be angry and feel humiliated when a sale falls through.

Either way, it’s important to look back for insight to be better able to move forward. “You can’t change what’s already taken place,” says Stephanie Speisman, president of Strategies for Change, Potomac, MD, which provides personal success coaching. “You can be responsible for what takes place from this moment on.”

Rod Walsh, co-owner of Semper Fi Consulting in Sherman Oaks, CA, agrees. “If you’re turned down, find out why someone else got the order. If you question your lost sales opportunities, you’ll do better the next time.”

To learn why you failed, stand back and look objectively at what happened and why. Talk to others. “When I fail, I get information about why the failure occurred. I ask the prospect to help me,” says Jerome Colletti, president of Colletti–Fiss LLC, a sales consulting firm in Scottsdale, AZ. And don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions, Gene Bledsoe, managing partner at the Casal Group, a marketing consulting firm in Dallas, recommends: “After every sales call, it’s a great habit to analyze that call, see what worked, what didn’t work. Analyze your plan going in. What did you hope to accomplish? Did you accomplish your plan? Analyze each step.”

It’s pointless focusing on what might have been. Instead, think of ways you’ll do better next time. Dennis LaRosee, senior vice president at Praendex Inc., a training and consulting firm in Wellesley Hills, MA, offers two suggestions after a failure: First, take responsibility for what occurred at the sales call or presentation. Second, think of two or three alternative scenarios that might have worked better. Even if you don’t have the opportunity to resell to that prospect, thinking of alternate scenarios helps you deal with future difficult sales calls.

2. Have a Mentor
Selling is not a profession for hermits. Bouncing back from failure is easier when you have help. “Go outside yourself and get input from a customer, your boss or your colleagues,” recommends Colletti. The process demands the support of sales managers. “I think the number one responsibility of front-line sales managers is to help their people be successful,” Colletti says. “Ask your salespeople, ‘How can I help you do better next week?'”

Salespeople aren’t the only ones who need someone to talk to. Managers know that objectively viewing their own work is difficult. Knowing everything about sales is impossible. So both sales managers and experienced salespeople should find a coach they trust. “I think it’s important to have a good mentor to help you through the slumps, to give you a pep talk or to offer some tips or pointers,” says Michael Angier, president of Success Networks International, a motivational organization in South Burlington, VT.

3. Attitude Matters
Recognize that your attitude colors your view of failure as much as the truth can. “Perception will always win over reality,” says Bob Davies, president of Lake Forest, California-based High Performance Training Inc., a performance-coaching company. Salespeople start out with good intentions, Davies explains, but are rarely trained to deal with their own fears. Over time, as they experience more and more rejection, they start associating prospecting with pain, and fear takes over their selling. This just makes failure all the more likely.

Associating prospecting with failure and failure with pain means you won’t do much prospecting and won’t be good at it when you do. You must decide how you want to view failure and prospecting. Viewing them as learning experiences necessary for your improvement makes them part of your road to success, not steps toward failure.

At the same time, don’t brush failure under the carpet. Salespeople, who are an optimistic bunch, occasionally refuse to acknowledge their failures. This just encourages the behavior to occur over and over again. “We often don’t like to call things which are negative, ‘negative,'” notes Stephen Goldstein, host of the television program The Business Exchange in Miami. “People have to recognize that they failed. If you don’t admit to failure, you won’t make the changes you need to make.”

4. Don’t Try to Avoid Failure
Trying to avoid failure is a fool’s game. Fred Magee, president of Equal 5 Ltd., a consulting firm in Warwick, NY, researched failure in information technology departments and found that more than 80 percent of all new IT systems initiatives failed to meet one or more predefined goals. “Businesses define failure in such narrow terms that they throw out the successes along with the failures,” says Magee. “They say, ‘If we have not achieved this metric or this goal by this date, we’ve failed.'” This can mean lost sales. For example, management may tell a salesperson to generate x amount in dollar sales, without recognizing the value of a small sale that opens the door to a large company with big sales potential.

Failure isn’t necessarily bad. You learn from mistakes, maybe more than in any other way. Skiers say if you don’t fall, you can’t ever get better. You need to push yourself or you’ll never improve.

Don’t fear failure. After all, what is the worst thing that can happen if you fail? Will you lose the sale? Your job? Chances are, the worst scenario is that you’ve invested time that will not result in an immediate payoff, and your ego will be a bit bruised. In the end, you will still be as good a salesperson as you’ve ever been – and as good a person.

5. Don’t Give Up
In sales, the lack of persistence is perhaps the biggest cause of failure. Anise tells the story of a salesperson who tried to sell him advertising space. After a couple of meetings, Anise realized that he didn’t need what the salesperson was offering at that time. Every few months the salesperson would call and Anise would say he wasn’t interested. “This was one of the most persistent people I have ever met,” Anise recalls. Then, close to three years later, when the salesperson called again, Anise was ready to buy. In fact, he gave the salesperson considerable business. The lesson? “Don’t give up after you hear no,” Anise advises.

After hearing a no, salespeople typically return a sales lead to their manager or do nothing, Anise notes. Instead, try this strategy for turning a failure into a success: Continue to cultivate difficult prospects. Send articles you feel will benefit them. Call them. Never throw away a lost sale. Stay in touch with the prospects, because even if they never buy from you, they may provide referrals.

6. See the Big Picture
Going into a sales call with narrow perceptions of your customer’s needs is a journey likely to culminate in a dead end. If you’ve made that mistake, Magee recommends next time working as many channels of opportunity as you can, both before and after the sale. See the big picture. Consider your pitch, your offer, your product and your timing. Be creative. What might customers need from you that they haven’t considered? Would coming back at the beginning of a prospect’s budget period improve your chances of landing a sale? Very few salespeople ever have the luxury of knowing all the factors influencing a decision maker and the outcome of a sale. You need to do some exploring. And stay in touch – even if you don’t get the sale.

7. Think Positively
Write down a list of your strengths and your successes, Speisman advises. Then after a lost sale or a presentation that didn’t win the client, read these lists and remind yourself that you have not failed but are merely going through one of life’s learning experiences.

Reward yourself. Don’t forget those important incentives. Give yourself something desirable when you succeed, to help you over those times when you don’t. And do not wait until you win a big sale before giving yourself something nice. Think up incentives for each sales stage to give you a boost during each step of the journey as you move along toward your final goal.

Involve others. Davies recommends writing down a goal for your week on the back of your business card, along with a dollar figure in any amount. Give the card to a friend and make the promise that if you don’t reach the goal, you’ll give that friend the dollar amount written on the card.

Failure is part of sales – part of life. Whether it is crippling or empowering is up to you. “The only one who ever put a label of failure on you is yourself,” notes Omar Periu, CEO of Omar Periu International in Boca Raton, FL. “I find that most people who go to sleep with a negative hangover wake up with one. Avoid putting yourself down. Use positive affirmation, self talk, meditation.”