How many times have you said, “Oh, well. You can’t win ‘em all”? It may be true that you won’t win all the opportunities you pursue, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t win them all. In the context of the saying, “can’t” is a self-limiting belief of scarcity. It projects that you are unlikely to win… that fate somehow won’t allow it. And, that thinking provides rationalization for not being held accountable to the outcome.

If you don’t take responsibility for unsuccessful outcomes but simply chalk them up to the notion that “you can’t win ‘em all,” then it’s unlikely that you’ll learn anything from the experiences. And, if you don’t learn anything from them, you’re destined to repeat them… which will reinforce the negative notion. By allowing that way of thinking to persist, it’s a short jump from telling yourself “You can’t win ‘em all” to “You can’t win any of ‘em at all.”

So, what can you do to avoid this scarcity mentality? Approach every opportunity not only expecting to win, but prepared to win. You will win a new client, win new wisdom or win precious time you might have wasted on a non-prospect by quickly and efficiently disqualifying them. You certainly need to be knowledgeable about your product or service. But, product knowledge is not enough. You must know enough about your prospects and the likely reasons why they would need your product or service so you can ask intelligent questions that help them connect your product to those needs.

Preparation means doing the research and then asking your potential customers good questions. It means taking off the blinders and considering your prospective customer’s perspective and then mapping out your sales strategy in advance so you can manage your actions and evaluate the results. And, it means identifying potential roadblocks and making contingency plans for how you will deal with them or modify your strategy should they occur.

Michael Miller, Google’s head of sales and operations, launches and executes the company’s continuous stream of advertising innovations and doesn’t really look at any of them as a loss or failure.

“Google is a company of iteration and innovation. We constantly test our products and how our customers engage with them. For our team, it is all about innovation and continuing to use move forward, whether it’s in our ad products or new creative ways to help our customers analyze data. There isn’t necessarily one thing we would point to and say it hasn’t worked, because we’ve always learned from our successes and failures. It’s about testing things on a daily and weekly basis.”

So it’s part of Google’s nature, of their product development and execution, that they will try things that will not necessarily have the intended outcome and that’s OK, because while they are doing it they are learning enough to develop an innovation that does produce a big win.

Miller adds: “Yes, putting our ideas and innovations in the marketplace and to a great extent letting our customers define its function and value is a core part of our DNA.” It’s pretty tough not to win using Google’s model.

Planned action guarantees that you will win‘em all. It will guarantee that when you don’t close on a particular opportunity, you’ll be able to stop pursuing it, and in turn winning back time, while winning an understanding of the reasons why. So, even when you don’t close on a particular opportunity, you win wisdom and time to close the next one.

Joe Marr is a public speaker, sales and management consultant and trainer, and runs Sandler Training Ann Arbor at 501 Avis Drive. To reach him call 734-821-4830 or visit his website at www.sandlerannarbor.com.