What does your print business do when you lose a sale? The most valuable thing about losing is what you can learn, yet most of us fail to take advantage of what losing can teach us about how we pitch our services and what we say to our potential customers.

We lose sales for many reasons that cannot be easily mitigated. For example, your plant is simply located too far from the end delivery point making shipping prohibitively expensive or you simply don’t have the equipment in-house necessary to take on the work. Most of the time those “non-mitigatable” reasons weed you out of the mix before the serious decisions are made. We typically lose deals on aspects of the deal that are under our control. Nobody likes to lose, so nobody likes to talk about it either. Yet, talking about your losses is the only way to extract value out of the experience.

Losing is feedback. Losing is a test of your sales process. Losing is your grade. You can learn a lot from losses—they are super valuable. The hard part is to create a culture where your team feels comfortable discussing the possible reasons why they lost and figuring out how you might make changes to prevent that kind of lose moving forward.