Is Excuse Making Actually the Biggest Obstacle to Increasing Sales?

I’ve talked a lot about excuse making and the powerful difference between using your index finger, which points outward, versus your thumb, which points inward.  Today, Brandon Steiner wrote a great little article about taking responsibility.

This video provides another perspective on Excuse Making and how bad that is for sales organization.

The big thing with Excuse Making is that until the excuse making stops, nothing can change.  So if you want to see improvements in effectiveness, growth in revenue, and a jump in profit, salespeople must execute in a fundamentally different way.  When they rationalize about what happened, accepting that allows them to repeat the mistake.  When they take responsibility, you can ask what they could have done differently.  Excuse Making = Status Quo.  Responsibility = Change.

In the past two months I have been a guest on several shows and the interviews were all quite good!  You might be interested in catching:

• The Smart Sales Pro Interview where I talked about Sales DNA
• The Growth Institute Blog where I wrote about Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work
• Will Barron – The Salesman Red interviewed me about Why Salespeople Struggle
• Rapid Learning Institute featured me as the sales selection and hiring expert in this Webinar on preventing hiring mistakes.
• I wrote about the Benefits of Getting your Sales Process right on the Growth Institute Blog
• Will Barron recently interviewed me on sales weaknesses and it was a really good interview. You can watch or listen to it here.
• Lori Richardson recently interviewed me on similar topics too – another really good interview, that you can get here.