Vince Lombardi, one of the most successful NFL football coaches of all time, looked at losing this way: “If you can accept losing, you can't win.”

    Recently I was talking with a friend about her business. She sighed, “I guess you just win some; lose some! Winning an assignment is more difficult now than ever.” So I asked, “How are you going to profit from losing?”  And I made a few suggestions.

    I remembered my early days in sales, accompanied by my manager, Doug Fish. After each visit Doug asked, “Jack, what have we learned?”  Later on in the advertising business I used the same technique after a client presentation. It becomes a habit.

   You learn how to win by finding out why one sales effort wins and another falls short of the mark. As one “pro” told me, “Jack, after each visit I think it through, I compare with past experience, I try to find how to improve.” Yes, it becomes a habit.

    Can hindsight really help build foresight? In marketing we call it a Win/Loss Analysis: we try to understand and evaluate an event or experience after it has occurred. Then, envision possible future problems or obstacles that can be resolved with what we’ve learned.

    Start with this: A powerful sales presentation begins with an understanding of the client’s needs, the problem to be resolved. Then, the presentation demonstrates that understanding by offering a realizable solution while seeking to establish a consensus.

    Selling skills fit comfortably within my definition: prospecting sources, qualification criteria, initial interviews, problem identification and confirmation, decision maker identification, initial presentation, consensus gathering, follow-up presentations and the closing process.

    Our armed forces look at both winning or losing as an opportunity to learn. During the Gulf war the Army developed a learning technique dubbed AAR (After Action Review).

    Peter Senge, director of the Center for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says, "The Army's After Action Review (AAR) is arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised.”

    The AAR technique is relatively straightforward. A military commander said, “AAR creates a state of mind where everybody is continuously assessing themselves, their units, and their organizations and asking how they can improve.”

    These are the same results sought from sports “Chalk Talks” where players and coaches gather around a blackboard shortly after a game to discuss their team’s performance.

    The AAR learning technique is framed as a dialogue, not a lecture or debate. It seeks to explain the context in which decisions were made – what the facts, goals and priorities were at the time. The broader and more even each individual’s participation, the better the results.

    Participants seek the underlying cause-and-effect relationships. Conversation always revolves around these four key questions: What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? What are we going to do next time?

    Effective leaders avoid dominating the conversation. They don’t criticize or fault individual behavior or performance. They watch out for those who say, “We didn't anticipate!” It’s a defensive catchall phrase to evade blame or minimize damage.

    A word of caution on using AAR from Peter Senge: “Most every corporate effort to graft this truly innovative practice into their culture has failed because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AAR's to a sterile technique.” (For more on Senge, just Google his full name.)

    My question for you: What did you learn yesterday? Enough to believe as Vince Lombardi did, “Winning isn't everything, but the will to win is everything.”

Jack G Hardy