Which ones should I deliver first? Or does my management only want to hear good news?

Everyone loves good news. “Just give me the good news and don’t outsource your problems to me”. If you have a problem -go and fix it!

Bad news first

When it comes to learning and continuous improvement you should start with the bad news. Bad news means something has gone wrong and either we need to accept the loss and/or perform fire fighting activities to remedy the situation. Everyone is alert. In both cases, there is a lot the team can learn.

“Bad news” in sales is typically lost sales opportunities, delays in sales cycle or lost customers.

Assembling your sales team around bad news allows learning. One should have a structured conversation around what have we done, what was the outcome, what went wrong and why. Walking through the process step by step may be a bit painful but it also is a great source for learning.

In sales profession you’ll have to make decisions quickly and with very little data and information. Every decision is made under some set of assumptions. Assumptions are by definition assumptions and not validated knowledge. Going through a discussion around which assumptions did we have through out the life-cycle of one sales opportunity can be an eye opening experience. Not only for those who were not closely involved with the sales opportunity but also for the ones the did work with the customer and who were deeply involved.

Good news, on the other hand, do not provide fertile ground for learning and improvement. There is a bias around why we won the sales opportunity and people want to celebrate instead of putting mental energy into critical analysis. And frankly, people should celebrate when ever there is a good reason for it!

You’ll need right kind of culture for organisational learning

Learning from “bad news” does require a culture where people feel safe to disclose their mistakes. A culture in which it is safe to admit something has gone wrong without being blamed. Creating an environment like this does take a lot of time and energy from the management.

Bad news trigger our defences and makes us alert and attentive. Use this energy to analyse what did we do, what was the outcome, what went wrong and why. Was there a specific point in time when we could (potentially) have fixed things?

The point is not to lay blame on anyone but to objectively review chain of activities and actions to understand where we went wrong and why.

Accumulated learning

If you have a practice of running learnings sessions from “bad news” you and your team start to understand the systemic nature of your work. Everyday is full of surprises in sales. We are often surprised with unforeseen events. Or are we? If we did perform reviews systematically we might learn that maybe there are patterns that we have missed. Maybe the once in a life time mistakes are not that uncommon as previously thought. Maybe we are repeating some mistakes over and over again?

Autopsy after bad news is a treasure trove. Use it!