As you may know by now, I tend to compare Sales to sports, where Sales Engineers are the pro athletes. As with most athletes, we prepare, we have game plans, and then we show up to the game and…

4/1/1

1- Sometimes, we just bomb.

2- And if we get too much in our heads as we are performing, it will be hard to recover. That’s why we should have a short-term memory while we are still with our customers, otherwise, it will affect the whole performance and we can never make a comeback.

3- Once the game (aka meeting) is done, we could then allow ourselves to get angry for a bit, figure out what when wrong, whether we can fix it, and how we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.

4- Finally, it’s good to have a process in place to deal with the aftermath of every customer meeting. The goal is to extract some insight as to whether we did great or we bombed. This process could be a debrief with the account manager to share what we learned,  jumping on a call with your coach, or spending a night (and one night only) of grieving. Most importantly, take the time to create your process!

If you’re having a bad day, I’d say watch this interview with Trevor Spires who jumped on a call with me and shared his bad day. Hopefully this helps you know that this happens to everyone.

#278 Even The Best Solution Engineers Bomb Sometimes